Web Infrastructure

Avid Youtube fans and BBC addicts will be upset to learn that Britain’s largest ISP, BT Broadband, has started throttling online video. The cuts are pretty substantial. One customer with a 8mbps connection says he can only stream BBC’s HD iPlayer at 500kbps, a service that requires at least 3mbps: …

The Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit organization responsible for managing .org top-level domains (TLD), will announce today that it is adopting DNS security extensions called DNSSEC. Domain Name System Security Extensions is a set of extensions that helps domain name systems (DNS) verify the integrity and security of data. …

Today has been a busy day for news stateside. According to celebrity news website Thirty Mile Zone, Mel Gibson’s Russian girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, is suing her web host for cybersquatting. She claims that her host registered the domain OksanaGrigorieva.com and is using the site to spread lies about her. The …

Friday, President Obama confirmed our earlier report and announced the creation of a new cyber security coordinator post that will oversee the securing of “America’s digital infrastructure.” The person who takes this new post will report directly to the President and have his full support and consultation. “Our technological advantage …

President Barack Obama’s choice for U.S. Supreme Court justice is apparently well versed in cyberlaw. Tuesday, President Obama named Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter. Her experience with technology issues, particularly those related to the Internet, is most likely not a coincidence. According …

Last week, I discussed how Google PageRank is essentially a useless figure. Another popular metric used for comparing website and expired domain traffic, Alexa ranking, is also of dubious value. Alexa rank is easy to understand. It is a simple number that pits your website against the rest of the …

America’s large size and utility monopolies have always caused it to lag behind the rest of the developed world in terms of broadband speed and adoption, but for those living in rural areas, the situation is even worse. A report released yesterday by the FCC, entitled “Bringing Broadband to Rural …

IT has been one of the most hard-hit industries in the recession, but web hosting seems to have been spared. As demand for application and web hosting rises, more and more datacenters are being built to keep up. According to Linda Leong, a director at research group Gartner, the web …

For years, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has been pushing for a switch to IPv6, stressing that the IPv4 system still used by most providers will run out of addresses very soon. In an effort to promote the switch, the non-profit has created Team ARIN: Team ARIN is …

Computer security giant Symantec announced the release of its May 2009 MessageLabs Intelligence Report. Covering a wide variety of Internet threats, the report details some disturbing new trends. Most notably, spam has increased by 5.1% since April. It now accounts for 90.4% of email. Where you live depends on what …