DHS requests funding to continue far-reaching secure Internet protocol work

DHS will present its 2010 budget request before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs today, including a reported $400 million to protect critical infrastructure and cyber networks from attack. $11 million of this was requested to fund DHS's Information Infrastructure Security (IIS) Program and Secure Protocol Project, including work on securing the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) and routing infrastructure. Despite the relatively small amount of funding, SPP work is intended to, and if successful could, have far reaching impact on the Internet.

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The EU High-Level Internet Governance Group Hearing

Nearly 80 participants attended the EU-sponsored hearing on internet governance Wednesday. The hearing was held the day before a private meeting of the EC’s High Level Internet Governance Group (HLIGG), as a way of gathering opinions and ideas. Participants who came eager to discuss and explore Commissioner Viviane Reding’s call for new forms of accountability and oversight of ICANN quickly learned that her proposal was off-limits. Reding’s paper, we learned, was her own personal initiative, not an official or vetted product of the EC. Members of the HLIGG were as surprised by it as the rest of us and did not want discussion of it to dominate the hearing.

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Hey Washington! A leaderless Internet finds its way, again

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Distance Is Not Dead or Cost Free

In 1997, Frances Cairncross wrote a book entitled The Death of Distance (Harvard Business School Press) that heralded the Internet’s ability to transcend and mitigate much of the financial and logistical challenges posed by geography. Certainly the Internet enhances productivity and opportunities, particularly for people in remote places. But what make distance less significant is the product of

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Transcripts for NPR and WHYY's Fresh Air

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EU to Obama: Privatize ICANN, Internationalize Oversight

Saying that "A moment of truth will come on 30 September this year," European Commissioner Viviane Reding proposed a reformed model of global Internet governance. Release of the proposal was timed to enable discussion of it at the May 6th 2009 consultations in Brussels. In the statement, she expressed support for the basic model of a privatized, independent ICANN and pressed President Obama to complete the job. She also made two interesting proposals, one for an independent international tribunal to which ICANN decisions could be appealed, and the other for a forum of 12 governments that would meet twice a year to make recommendations to ICANN on public policy matters.

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ethical phishing experiments have to lie?

Stefan pointed me at a paper titled “Designing and Conducting Phishing Experiment” (in IEEE Technology and Society Special Issue on Usability and Security, 2007) that makes an amazing claim: it might be more ethical to not debrief the subjects of your phishing experiments after the experiments are over, in particular you might ‘do less harm’ [...]

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Republican Bill To Reform FCC Not A Bad Place To Start Discussions.

There's an old saying that goes “when it rains, can't fix the roof; when it don't rain, the roof don't need fixin.'” That rather sums up most efforts at government reform. When you're out of power, you can't really do anything about it...

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FCC Announces 2.5 GHz Broadband Radio Service Auction. Who Will Show Up to Fight Over Rules? Or Bid?

One might think from the press coverage that all spectrum auctions are multi-billion dollar affairs like the AWS-1 Auction in '06 or the 700 MHz Auction in '08. But these auctions are the exception rather than the rule. More typical are the stead...

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If US government contractors had designed the iPhone

It’s an unseasonably beautiful day here in Western Massachusetts, roughly 30 degrees farenheight higher than it has any right to be, and I was sitting on my front stoop reading when my local census enumerator showed up. We made pleasant small talk about the weather, the remoteness of my house, the challenges of locating houses [...]

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Marc Lynch asks us to be realistic about digital activism in the Middle East

(Notes from a talk by my friend Marc Lynch, in dialog with Mohammed Bazzi from NYU’s journalism school at Open Society Institute, Tuesday night. Not only am I late to posting these notes, I had to duck out early. But I found Marc’s ideas fascinating and provocative, so wanted to post a quick write-up.) Marc Lynch [...]

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Flu infects Twitter

Two weekends ago, I wrote a couple of scripts designed to let me (and anyone else who was interested) study the emergence of memes on Twitter over the course of days or weeks. I built the tools to study use of the #pman tag during the Chisinau protests in Moldova, but colleagues immediately pointed towards [...]

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Good Article in WASHPO by Cecilia Kang on Rural Broadband

While I was sorry to see the Business Section drop out of the Washington Post, I am glad if that contributed to this piece by Cecilia Kang getting on the front page.

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An elegy (of sorts) for Geocities

Yesterday, Yahoo announced that it would be shutting down its free webhosting service, Geocities, later this year. The Geocities website sports a banner announcing that new accounts are no longer available, and urging potential customers to try their paid hosting services instead. As it happened, I was sipping coffee from my Geocities mug while reading tweets [...]

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Saberi and Derakshan, and support from an unlikely quarter?

I’m glad that American and international media have been paying close attention to reporter Roxana Saberi’s detention. NPR, in particular, has been producing a steady drumbeat of updates, reminding listeners that Saberi has worked for the network and pointing towards the unfairness of the legal procedures she’s faced without explicitly demanding her release. I’ve spoken [...]

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Congratulations to Gene Kimmelman, and to the American People.

I haven't been posting much and will continue to be busy for the next while, owing to Passover and bunch of other things. But I had to give a brief post of congratulations to Gene Kimmelman on his appointment to the Department of Justice as Chief ...

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LinkedIn briefly blocks Syria, more confusion over trade/commerce regulations

If you’re old enough to remember downloading most of your software from FTP and gopher sites, you probably remember clicking on agreements where you promised not to export software to a wide range of nations the US maintained trade sanctions against. For much of the 1990s, strong encryption - including the sort of encryption used [...]

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The simple solution to the .SU problem

Discussions within ICANN are underway about what to do with the .SU top level domain. The .SU TLD was a country code when the Soviet Union existed. Obviously, that political entity no longer exists. There is now a debate about whether to close down the TLD or not. In the meantime, the people who run it (in some place called "Russia," which already has its own TLD, .ru) are registering new domains like mad. ICANN is in a conundrum.

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Deliver us from Twitter…

Sick of Twitter yet? Can’t say I blame you. In a week where Oprah took to the medium (and promptly got smacked down by Shaquille O’Neal, an old hand at the 140-character medium), where Aston Kutcher promised bednets for Africans if the Twitterverse would just show their love for him (and picked a fight with [...]

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Upcoming Event: Congressional Seminar on "ICANN & Internet Governance: How Did We Get Here & Where Are We Heading?"

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