An invitation arrived yesterday to attend a Nominet briefing on dispute resolution for domain name registrars. It’s a breakfast job in London so I probably won’t go. With the invite came an interesting stat – one in every 3,000 .uk domains is subject to a dispute of some sort!

Considering that Nominet manages knocking on 10 million domains that’s a lorra (my wife’s from Liverpool) disputes. I imagine quite a number of these disputes relate to cybersquatters¹ . I recently had occasion to look at some domains names to buy. There are a lot of domains out there that are owned but not used or simply point to sites that make money out of click through advertising.

These days the problem of finding a suitable domain is exacerbated by the fact that you also need to secure the corresponding Twitter name. I think it’s about time we started from scratch and changed the whole system. Bags I trefor.net

¹ if you don’t know look it up.

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2012 is expected to be a big year for growth in Internet use in the UK. We have the Olympics, para Olympics, the Queens Diamond Jubilee, Wimbledon and the West Indies, Aussies and South Africa over on cricket tour (if I was them I’d be avoiding this country next summer but hey…). Oh and let’s not forget the European football championships from 8th June til 1st July. England qualified I believe?!

There is more sport but by far the biggest Internet traffic news item for 2012 is that Netflix is coming to the UK. For the uninitiated, Netflix is a movie screening service in the USA that accounts for something like a quarter of all Internet traffic in that country.

At LINX75 today the launch was a particular subject of discussion – these things are often all network operators talk about. It affects capacity planning. Word has it the expected UK launch date is 9th January 2012 with a press event planned at the Cavendish Hotel in London. The launch in Ireland should follow one day later on the 10th.

Netflix is likely to have more of an effect on consumer ISPs than those serving the business market although no ISP will remain untouched. Considering that one of the biggest influencers on broadband costs is bandwidth it will be interesting to see what happens to average broadband pricing.

If Netflix is successful then the early January launch should have a significant impact on Internet usage habits in the UK. It will represent a step function rather than the series of spikes normally associated with one off events (though these one off events seem to be merging into one continuous one off event!) My guess is that all this online streaming is also going to act as an accelerator for FTTC signups.

Life in this industry continues to be full of interest and excitement.

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We, the world, are still finding our feet on the internet, or more accurately the world wide web. The www is a great place to be and at the same time full of pitfalls and nasties. Much like real, physical life really. I taught my kids not to take sweeties from strangers – that applies on or offline.  In recent years I’ve added “don’t click on links you aren’t sure of” and probably a few other words of advice specific to tinterweb.

That’s a piece of wisdom relating to the www that had he but known it shows Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in action. Survival of the fittest and all that.

It isn’t just the consumer that is still trying to understand the landscape of the www. Government is, business is, as I said we all are.

The good folks at .uk registry Nominet are also trying to understand where they fit into all this. Nominet has come under scrutiny in recent years over its corporate governance. Nominet is after all responsible for a key part of the strategic infrastructure of UK plc. Looking after .uk is a very important job. This post is not all about Nominet’s corporate governance. I’m sure with all the eyes that have been gazing its way this is squeaky clean.

The one issue that we do have to consider though is that positioned as it is in the heart of the UK’s internet/www infrastructure Nominet is an easy target when it comes to people wanting to influence or affect that infrastructure.

The current case in point is a working group that “has brought together a cross-spectrum of interested stakeholders who have worked through a consensus driven approach to develop a set of principle-based recommendations to the Board on the matter of dealing with domain names used in connection with criminal activity. “

Nominet wants to work with law enforcement agencies to take down domains that appear to be involved in criminal activity where

1. The nature of the alleged criminal activity creates a clear risk of “imminent serious harm” to an individual or individuals. “Imminent serious harm” is defined as urgent or on-going harm. This would include, but is not limited to, the following examples: phishing, fraud, the unlicensed sale of medicines or other regulated goods and services, and botnets; or,
2. The domain is directly involved in the criminal distribution of counterfeit goods.

Now it is difficult for anyone to object to this. Nominet wants to do this is a fast and efficient manner – not in itself a problem either.

The problem lies in the fact that Nominet wants to do this without being in receipt of a court order – the process of obtaining which can be laborious. The proposal is that an authorised senior officer of a relevant Law Enforcement Agency will contact the registrar as a “trusted party” and declare that the suspension of a specific domain name is proportionate, necessary, and urgent, and that the agency is seeking suspension under the principle of last resort.

The issue is that here in the UK we have independent judges in place to decide on whether something is illegal or not and we don’t leave this decision to others. It is the same argument I have against the implementation of the Digital Economy Act notification system although I’m sure that no one is intending to compare “infringers” as defined by the DEAct with the “criminals” Nominet is seeking to thwart.

The Nominet draft proposals do provide for an appeals process but again this is highly redolent of the DEAct also with no defined structure or timescale.

Although this has surfaced before I’ve stayed relatively quiet on this one up until now but Nominet is looking to finalise its proposals on Friday so this does need mentioning.  I think the right answer here is along the lines I have previously discussed on this blog and that is to provide a judiciary that is agile and knowledgeable of the ways of new technology. If the judge can move quickly the all Nominet has to do is to provide a rapid response to that judge’s pronouncement and not to seek to do part of his job.

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“The internet is broken”. Uh? This is a common complaint a) from my wife who isn’t particularly technology savvy and b) from people whose broadband connection has gone down for whatever reason.

Yesterday this complaint, slightly tongue in cheek, came from our development engineering team. US network operator Level3 had a problem with a bug in it’s Juniper routers. This affected access to quite a few websites worldwide and is certainly likely to have hit more than a few ISPs. Word is that this was BGP related and leads to the need to reboot the Juniper kit. In fact a number of ISPs issued emergency maintenance window alerts last night so that they could upgrade to newer versions of their Junos operating system.

Most of the time you can live with a bug – design around it perhaps.I’m sure the problem will get sorted. My observations here though relate to the

security of the internet itself. The network was designed to be resilient but is dependent on the equipment of a handful of large manufacturers to operate.

If you drill into any of these large scale routers there are many bugs (features) identified with each one at any given point in time. These are complicated bits of kit running many interdependent software protocols. It isn’t possible to design one that is bug free especially as technology is advancing at such a rapid pace and networks grow ever more complex. Sometimes you only find out about a bug under certain conditions – eg when traffic through a router reaches certain levels. Most of the time you can live with the bug – design around it perhaps. At other times a bug develops into a critical problem and this usually results in an emergency patch by the vendor of the particular router. To avoid this dependency some networks are designed as two totally different networks based on different vendor kit – LINX (London Internet Exchange) for example which carries so much traffic that a total outage would have a huge knock on effect. This is an expensive option.

Where am I getting to here? The Level3 outages today show just how vulnerable the world could be if an unfriendly entity wanted to cripple the global economy. It’s a racing certainty that many engineers out there know how to go about it, just by exploiting known weaknesses in routers.

We are dependent on these engineers remaining good guys – the ISP industry is by and large staffed by folk who pride themselves on their professionalism and integrity.

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Flicking, as one does, through the Akamai State of the Internet Report for Q2 2011 I note that the average internet connection speed for the UK in the second quarter was 5Mbps¹.

The good news is that this is up 9% from the previous quarter and 28% year on year.

Unfortunately the bad news is that the UK is not keeping pace with its competitors. I last looked at these stats in January 2011. In Q3 2010 the UK was placed 17^th globally for average internet connection speed with 11 European countries ahead of us.

In Q2’11 we are down to 25^th globally with 15 other European countries ahead of us. 14 European countries had a higher year on year growth than the UK.

Now I’m sure someone from DCMS² will come out of the woodwork with some other indicators that show how the UK is going  to have the best  superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015. I don’t think we really need to spend time arguing this one. Perhaps someone could just explain to me how we are going to do it. The Akamai stats suggest that we are going backwards not forwards.

¹ I know I’m a couple of weeks late with this one but I was all at sea when the report came out and I’ve only just read it. Also I’m not sure how many commentators have really looked at the relative progress within Europe – from what I can see they have mainly chosen to comment on the gap between advertised speeds and reality.

² Department of Culture Media and Sports – responsible for “the internet” within government.

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Jonathan Radford our CFO is one of the least techy guys you could hope to meet.  He is often also the source of ideas for this “technical” blog because technology now reaches absolutely everyone on this planet one way or another.

Today he came up for a chat about Internet 2 and Project Phoenix and left me with a newspaper clipping from the FT (I said he wasn’t a techy – anyone else would have sent me a link). The point is though that the technology related article interested him because he could understand its implications for him personally.

The article concerned internet pioneer Vint Cerf’s comments re the need to start again with internet security. The internet is an open network currently running on the basis of trust. Starting again Cerf says he “would have put a much stronger focus on authenticity or authentication” and quoted Ori Eisen’s Project Phoenix as an example of the way forward (see original FT article for more on this).

You only have to note the recent spate of Twitter spam attacks to understand why a rethink on network security is necessary. People’s Twitter accounts have been compromised and have been sending Direct Messages to their followers with the text “Bad blog going around about you, heard or seen it yet?” and a link to a website that will rip your own Twitter credentials.

You might think having your Twitter account compromised is more of an embarrassment rather than a big security issue but do you by any chance use your Twitter password for other online logins? You might be opening up the door to a Pandoras Box of information about yourself that could be very interesting to someone trying to steal from you.

None of the recent scams have caught me out but it must just be a question of time. One weak moment when I’m tired …

Note the subject of security was high on everyone’s agenda at last week’s IT Directors Forum. It mostly related to the issue of Consumerisation of IT and people bringing in their own devices for use in the office.  The extent to which this was a problem depended on whether you were in a regulated industry or not but it was still a general concern.

It seems likely to me that were we to live in a properly authenticated internet world then CoIT and BYOD would be less of an issue as everyone would be using appropriate measures to secure their personal data. It is something we do need to sort because I am getting to the point where I often don’t click on a link just in case it is malicious, and that ain’t good.

PS Ori Eisen works for 41st Parameter website  Twitter.

PPS my 11 year old’s school homework over the weekend concerned online safety. Was a good opportunity for me to chat to him about it.

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I assume everyone has already read The Office for National Statistics published data on internet access in the UK issued last week . The survey found that there have been significant changes in the way people connect to and use the Internet in recent years. No surprise there then.

There are a few “no surprises” such as the fact that the younger you are the more likely you are to use social networking and that LinkedIn is used more by men than women (with the associated equality in business issues I’m sure, like it or not).

Also over half of us (66 per cent of all adults) purchased goods or services over the Internet. Even my aged parents buy stuff online. Interestingly 31 per cent of us 2010 sold goods or services online (up from 21 per cent in a year).

The biggest wow factor was the number of people using their mobile phone to connect to the Internet. This rose by 6 million between 2010 and 2011  (fastest among those aged 16 to 24) and now amounts to 45 per cent of total Internet users. The time will come when there are more mobile internet users than fixed – my input.

What is slightly disappointing is the fact that the most recent data for business internet use is based on 2009 data in a report published on 26^th November 2010 (actually entitled E-commerce and ICT activity 2009).

Perhaps the business community does work a little more slowly than consumers these days but this is such a fast moving world that data that is almost 2 years old seems positively stone aged.

On a side note my son is about to enter his second year at University and his first year in private accommodation. The communications needs of the five lads in his house are 1) fast broadband with unlimited data package and 2) an iPhone. No fixed line telephony thank you very much.

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It seems a long time ago since I actually set off on my offline holiday. That is partly because it somewhat reaffirmed the third law of the internet. This is one where time goes far more quickly when you are using the internet.

Without the internet the pace of life is far more relaxing – proof is this video of Highland Cattle. They look pretty chilled to me and I bet not one of them has ever been online.

So what does a person do when not online? In no particular order reads a history of the UK after the Romans had left, plays scrabble with son, keeps a diary, goes walking in the hills, swimming in the loch, visits the Abbey at Iona and Fingal’s cave, picnics at Calgary Bay, camping in the hills around Loch Ba and at the shores of Fidden, has coffee on the terrace looking out over the bay at Tobermory, visits Duart Castle, sees red deer, roe deer, sea eagles, mountain hares, dolphins, minke whales, goes to bed when he feels like it and wakes up early, hears nothing but the sound of running water, the wind off the sea and the lapping of the waves on the beach, visits a distillery, sees cheese being made, visits the local agricultural show, sees sheepdogs in action, cattle and sheep being judged, talks to walking stick makers and traditional tartan cloth weavers, visits the Boathouse on Ulva, pitches the tent in the rain, takes the tent down in the rain, catches the sun and watches it set over the islands in the West, fights off midges, washes the dishes in the stream, hears the eagle chick cry out across the loch for food, eats well, drinks only water and tea made from the water taken from the stream, drives 6 miles off the road to the campsite, gets rides off a friendly farmer and an estate owner and dries walking boots in front of a log fire.

I’m back now but the time did not seem to race by and I feel as if I have had a long and great holiday. Whilst I have been away there have been global stockmarket crashes, riots in London, tanks rolling in in the Middle East. They should have all gone offline.

If you are going on holiday leave the internet behind. Nothing will really have changed when you get back.

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It’s Friday, five thirty and the beginning of my summer holiday. This year it is split into two. A week camping at the beginning of August and a week surfing in the Gower at the end of August.

This first week is going to be an interesting one because the camping trip is going to involve absolutley no technology other than wheels to get us there and a map and compass to get us around. I’m off with son2 (kid3) to the Isle of Mull and there will in any case for the most part be very little connectivity even if we wanted it. It’s going to be social networking the old fashioned way.

I am going to be recording the trip using a pen and notebook with the once concession to technology being the digital camera. It almost feels as if I am about to parachute onto a different planet. Watch this space for the report on this sociological experiment, but not until I get back.

If you are taking some time off this summer then have a good holiday wherever you are whoever you are.

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An international study into how we interact with technology, led by the University of Cambridge, has found that a third of parents feel modern communications technology is disruptive to family life, and that one in three people have felt overwhelmed to the point of needing to escape from modern communications technologies.

Coincidentally this is a subject I have been giving some thought to myself, partly because when you have your head buried in a computer/phone/iPad life seems to whizz by (see original research output on the 3rd Law of the Internet).

The pace of life need slowing down so that we can enjoy our environment and our families before the axeman cometh!!

I have already been culling social networking platforms – my 4sq, Scoville & Empire Avenue accounts are being left to wither and die. Facebook is retained for the moment for contact with the family. Google+ is emerging but as you may know though, Twitter is king.

Part of the problem is that I want to minimise the time my kids spend zombie like in front of screens – if I am one of those zombies – or at least a deaf mute – I don’t have a strong argument. Screens do not equal balanced family life with kids happily out playing sports, doing their homework or practising musical instruments in other rooms whilst we grown-ups get on with useful and fulfilling adult tasks, basking in our success as parents¹.

We, the world, have not yet worked out the optimum technology/life balance – probably because the right technology is not there yet. The organisations that provide the platforms to do this (I use the plural because we need this to be a competitive arena) will be big winners. We may already know their names but I am not sure we can say for certain who they are.

If you are a Twitter follower and wonder why there are henceforth gaps in my tweets of an evening it is almost certainly because I have started to read Britain after Rome by Robin Fleming.

I have hundreds of books in my house and part of the life balance process is to read real books again. Of course my wife can’t really differentiate between books and computers – I still don’t hear her when I am reading! Hmm

¹ Look I know this isn’t what happens in real life but you all know what I do for a living – I have my head right up there in the clouds.  In the meantime look out for my next post on Google+

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