It’s been fascinating this week to read coverage of congressional hearings around the SOPA bill, or Stop Online Privacy Act. The bill has strong support from the Motion Picture Association of America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and big pharmaceutical companies. It’s opposed by most technology and telecom companies, plus consumer advocate groups like the […]
There’s a debate going on right now in governmental and technical circles on how best to combat copyright and patent infringement online. A bill called the PROTECT IP Act would allow the government to secure a court order and then force an ISP to stop resolving the offending domain name to its corresponding I.P. address. […]
I consult on communication issues for Neustar, an Internet infrastructure company. Neustar works behind the scenes to ensure the smooth operation of many critical systems like DNS, the .us and .biz domain extensions, local number portability and digital rights management. One of the cool things about working for them is the chance to attend the […]
While vacationing this past summer I finally got around to reading The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman. It’s a fascinating read, and Friedman’s take on the changes wrought by technology and globalization has stood up extremely well since the book was first published in 1999. In the book Friedman talks about […]
Last July I wrote about a serious security flaw in the domain name system (DNS). It was discovered by researcher Dan Kaminsky and got a lot of coverage: It’s Tuesday — Must be Time to Fix DNS There was two parts to the DNS vulnerability that quickly became known as the Kaminsky flaw. One was […]
Dan Kaminsky has had quite a month. Early in July, it was announced that months earlier he had discovered a major security problem with DNS, the addressing system of the Internet. But he didn’t make the news public. Instead he worked for months behind the scenes with major technology providers so patches could be programmed […]
Lots of good reporting lately on the $13.9B purchase of EDS by HP. Many are saying its the clearest sign yet that cloud computing has fully arrived. Others say the purchase is more about buying market share and becoming the world’s #2 IT outsourcing company, behind IBM. Rob Hof of BusinessWeek has a really good […]