Collisions Ahead: Look Both Ways before Crossing
Many years ago on my first trip to London, I encountered for the first time signs that warned pedestrians that vehicles might be approaching in a different direction than they were accustomed to in their home countries, given the left-versus-right-side driving patterns around the world. (I wrote a while back about one notable change from left-to-right, the Swedish “H Day,” as a comment on the IPv6 transition.)
If you’re not sure on which side to expect the vehicles, it’s better to look both ways — and look again — if you want to reduce the risk of a collision.
Interest in Bitcoin Reflected by Domain Registrations
Bitcoin, the crypto-currency that has captured the imaginations of technologists and economists around the world, has received a considerable amount of attention over the past couple of weeks.
Recently we have seen how domain name registrations tend to surge in the immediate aftermath of global phenomena. The rise of Bitcoin also presents an opportunity to track global interest and investment by way of .com and.net domain name registrations.
More Brands Are Turning to .com for International Appeal
One of the greatest strengths of the internet is seen when a customer in one country engages with a brand in another. The internet has enabled companies to grow in influence and reach customers far beyond national boundaries in ways that could not have been foreseen even a decade ago.
One of the few places where national boundaries are still apparent online though is in a brand’s domain name. By using a domain name tied to a country, such as one ending in .uk, .ru, or another country code top-level domain (ccTLD), a brand can signal to the world its country of origin.
This is great for a company that only wants to engage with customers in their home country. However, for a person attempting to access content from abroad, a domain name ending in a ccTLD may be difficult to remember due to its unfamiliar syntax. Companies seeking to connect with a global audience can’t afford to have the address for their digital storefronts be limiting in any way. For this reason, it is usually best to select a domain name extension that people are globally familiar with, like .com and .net.
Rewarding Research: A Better Connected World, Name Collisions and Beyond
It’s a privilege for Verisign to welcome this week the recipients of our 2012 Internet Infrastructure Grant program, who will be presenting the results of research their teams have conducted over the past year and a half. The results will be the focus of our fourth and final Verisign Labs Distinguished Speaker Series event for the year.
The event will open with a keynote talk by Prof. Ellen Zegura of Georgia Tech (United States), who will give an overview of the field these two projects explore, “Intermittent and Low-Resource Networks: Theory and Practice.” It’s an honor to have Prof. Zegura with us to describe both the academic and hands-on work she’s conducted in this important area.
4 Reasons Your Small Business Needs an Online Presence
Guest Post from Ramon Ray – Smallbiztechnology
For any company doing business today, a website is far more than a way to promote products and services. With a consumer market that heavily relies on the internet for everything from directions to reviews, any small business that has not yet set up an online presence could be missing out on a gold mine of potential customers. In fact, Shop.org projects online holiday sales to increase between 13 and 15 percent to as much as $82 billion during the months of November and December this year, and the U.S. Commerce Department reported that final Q4 (October – December) e-commerce sales in 2012 increased 15.7 percent.
Pioneering Technologies for the Long Term
We recently hosted Dr. Ralph Merkle as a guest speaker for the Verisign Labs Distinguished Speaker Series. His talk, “Quantum Computers and Public-Key Cryptosystems,” was a great presentation on how molecular nanotechnology — the ability to economically manufacture most arrangements of atoms permitted by physical law — could fundamentally alter the world as we know it. Ralph’s and many others’ research on this topic has been groundbreaking and we are grateful he took the time to come and share his knowledge.
Part 4 of 4 – Conclusion: SLD Blocking Is Too Risky without TLD Rollback
ICANN’s second-level domain (SLD) blocking proposal includes a provision that a party may demonstrate that an SLD not in the initial sample set could cause “severe harm,” and that SLD can potentially be blocked for a certain period of time. The extent to which that provision would need to be exercised remains to be determined. However, given the concerns outlined in Part 2 and Part 3 of this series, it seems likely that there could be many additions (and deletions!) from the blocked list given the lack of correlation between the DITL data and actual at-risk queries.
vBSDcon: Builders and Archaeologists
Fascinating tour of C compiler evolution by David Chisnall http://vrsn.cc/1dUb5rY @Verisign‘s #vBSDcon. Compatible with DOS or VAX?
— Burt Kaliski Jr. (@modulomathy) October 26, 2013
I began my journey into computer science as a high school freshman coding on a TI-59 calculator. Later in my high school years, I wrote computer chess games on a PDP-11/34 minicomputer in BASIC and, for speed, in assembly language. I might have contributed inadvertently to the Y2K problem with some FORTRAN and COBOL programs I wrote in the early 1980s. In college, I learned LISP and CLU on a MULTICS operating system, and had a part-time job where I programmed on a VAX-11/750. But eventually I did get around to coding in C on a Unix box.
So this is a little more information than 140 characters would allow, which may explain why I found David Chisnall’s opening talk at the recent vBSDcon so fascinating. DOS and VAX are to computer professionals what the classics are to the liberal arts: our Iliad and Odyssey. And C and Unix, in their various forms, are the living languages that preserve the connection to the early days – the contemporary variants of Koine Greek. The art of building C compilers as well as operating systems continues to advance skillfully.
Part 1 of 4 – Introduction: ICANN’s Alternative Path to Delegation
As widely discussed recently, observed within the ICANN community several years ago, and anticipated in the broader technical community even earlier, the introduction of a new generic top-level domain (gTLD) at the global DNS root could result in name collisions with previously installed systems. Such systems sometimes send queries to the global DNS with domain name suffixes that, under reasonable assumptions at the time the systems were designed, may not have been expected to be delegated as gTLDs. The introduction of a new gTLD may conflict with those assumptions, such that the newly delegated gTLD collides with a domain name suffix in use within an internal name space, or one that is appended to a domain name as a result of search-list processing.
Verisign to Issue New Domain Name Industry Brief Beginning in 2014
Today, Verisign announced that we are updating the Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) and a new version of the DNIB is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2014.
With the internet continuing to evolve in new ways, we have been evaluating how best to align the DNIB with that evolution so it better addresses the interests of our readers and expands the scope of the trends we’re tracking. We remain committed to continuing to provide informative content on the latest industry trends that are most relevant to our readers.