borders on the web on This is important

Domain ownership of ccTLDs and sovereignty

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 00:05:43 +0000

Tianyu Fang researched a long and detailed essay called Whose Domain Is It?, detailing the politics of the Internet’s domain names, especially the country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) that you might not realize are actually associated with countries.

The unexpectedly popular ccTLDs can operate like a tourism effort, at least in terms of generating unexpected revenue for small countries:

Domain sales are generating revenue for Anguilla’s government. Per Cate’s estimate, the domain registry is currently generating $3 million in revenue every month for the government, which is somewhere around a third of its monthly budget.

Anguilla isn’t the only microstate with significant government revenue from domain sales, though its relative scale is unmatched. Tuvalu, an island nation in the South Pacific, famously paid for its entry to the United Nations by selling the license for .tv to a US firm at the height of the dot-com bubble; its government made close to $5 million from ccTLD sales in 2022, or 8% of its total revenue that year. Montenegro’s revenue from the .me domain amounted to 2% of total exports in 2015, with the vast majority of the registrant coming from abroad.

These top-level domains are sold, traded, and auctioned as commodities—to be exported by small governments to foreign startups, registrars, and investors in exchange for revenue. But it hasn’t always been that way: in fact, the internet’s early pioneers had intended these digital resources to be community-run infrastructure that served a public function.

Of course, the registrars managing the ccTLDs might not actually have any ties to the government. When ccTLDs were introduced, the registrars weren’t necessary allocated or assigned in an exceptionally precise way. It was essentially first-come first serve:

In 1994, the California native and Berkeley libertarian Vince Cate dropped out from his PhD program at Carnegie Mellon, where he was designing the Alex filesystem. He wanted to relocate to a tax haven but couldn’t afford living in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. He moved instead to Anguilla, where he paid $470 a month on rent to kickstart an email business. In Anguilla, he was the first to email Postel, who told him that there wasn’t anyone managing Anguilla’s TLD yet and suggested he be the first volunteer manager of .ai.

In this case, the registrar managing the .ai ccTLD is at least a resident, but that’s not always the case:

Many registries, such as .us and .fr, introduced regulations to limit domain registrations to individuals or organizations with actual ties to the country, though they’re enforced to varying degrees. This process of formalization—the transfer of administrative power from volunteers to governments—was complete in most major countries by the early 2000s. In Anguilla, too, Cate changed the administrative contact of .ai to the government of Anguilla, which gladly kept him as the technical manager.

A ccTLD might not be as stable as a generic TLD (gTLD) or as you might think something based on a country might be. Country borders and sovereignty can evolve, especially for territories subject to decades of imperial rule. For example, the .io ccTLD might end if and when British occupation of the Chagos Islands ends:

It’s possible that the British Indian Ocean Territory won’t exist one day—international courts have ruled against British occupation of the Chagos Islands, and the UN General Assembly called for the archipelago’s decolonization in 2019. If these names are struck off the ISO list of countries, we might be left with a world of dead links. The loss of domain names will be trivial compared to the real-world implications of lost lands and lives, yet the cultural heritage that comes with it will, too, be consequential.

The entire essay is fantastic and I recommend reading the entire thing. For more on the current state of the .io ccTLD, see When imperialism ends, so too might the popular .io ccTLD.

WHOIS vulnerabilities and TLDs

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 23:43:30 +0000

Most of the Internet is held together by best practices and good intentions, and WHOIS servers are one of those. One security company was investigating vulnerabilities in WHOIS and got a whole lot more than they bargained for:

Each TLD (the bit at the end of the domain), you see, has a separate WHOIS server, and there’s no real standard to locating them - the only ‘real’ method being examining a textual list published by IANA. This list denotes the hostname of a server for each TLD, which is where WHOIS queries should be directed.

As you can imagine, maintainers of WHOIS tooling are reluctant to scrape such a textual list at runtime, and so it has become the norm to simply hardcode server addresses, populating them at development time by referring to IANA’s list manually. Since the WHOIS server addresses change so infrequently, this is usually an acceptable solution.

However, it falls down in an ungraceful manner when server addresses change.

IANA is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority responsible for managing the DNS root zone, including top-level domain names like .mobi.

When imperialism ends, so too might the popular .io ccTLD

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 23:42:07 +0000

The UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius:

Half a century or more after the UK relinquished control over almost all its global empire, it has finally agreed to hand over one of the very last pieces. It has done so reluctantly, perhaps, but also peacefully and legally.

The Chagos Islands are also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, to which the .io ccTLD is assigned. Given that the UK is relinquishing control of the islands to Mauritius, there will no longer be a British Indian Ocean Territory, raising questions about the popular .io ccTLD.

Simon Willison summarizes the Hacker News discussion on his weblog:

It sounds like there’s a very real possibility that .io could be deleted after a few years notice - it’s happened before, for ccTLDs such as .zr for Zaire (which renamed to Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997, with .zr withdrawn in 2001) and .cs for Czechoslovakia, withdrawn in 1995.

The Wikipedia article for the ccTLD is also informative.

Music streaming and sovereignty

Wed, 29 May 2019 19:25:15 +0000

As the music industry moves away from downloads and toward building streaming platforms, international sovereignty becomes more of a barrier to people listening to music and discussing it with others, because they don’t have access to the same music on the same platforms. As Sean Michaels points out in The Morning News several years ago:

one of the undocumented glitches in the current internet is all its asymmetrical licensing rules. I can’t use Spotify in Canada (yet). Whenever I’m able to, there’s no guarantee that Spotify Canada’s music library will match Spotify America’s. Just as Netflix Canada is different than Netflix US, and YouTube won’t let me see Jon Stewart. As we move away from downloads and toward streaming, international sovereignty is going to become more and more of a barrier to common discussions of music.

Location has always been a challenge to music access, but it’s important to keep in mind that the internet and music streaming has not been an equitable boon to music access—it is still controlled.

Unexpectedly ccTLDs

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 19:44:18 +0000

Some countries have trendy ccTLDs, and startups buy in to their domain space. Vox Media has more details:

Even very small countries get ccTLDs. Here’s a close-up of the area around Australia and the many small island nations that have their own domain names. Some of these countries realized that they could make a lot of money if they opened their domains to foreigners. The result: popular websites like last.fm (.fm is the domain of the Federated States of Micronesia) and twitch.tv (.tv is the domain for the island nation of Tuvalu). The .io domain, assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory, has become popular among programmers. They associate the domain with the technical term input/output and use it to create “artisinal websites.”

Country-specific search results

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 17:36:52 +0000

It isn’t really possible to search the “global web” today. You can, however, try to use Google to search the web of another country by manually manipulating the ccTLD in the URL to divert your search to a different country service than the country you are located in.

But starting recently, that’s no longer possible. Betanews points out that Google makes it harder to search for results from other countries:

Google has announced that it will now always serve up results that are relevant to the country that you’re in, regardless of the country code top level domain names (ccTLD) you use.

What can you do instead? The official Google blog explains in Making search results more local and relevant:

If for some reason you don’t see the right country when you’re browsing, you can still go into settings and select the correct country service you want to receive. Typing the relevant ccTLD in your browser will no longer bring you to the various country services—this preference should be managed directly in settings.

This codifies your country preference, making it harder to switch across different experiences. In the past I’ve both searched in different languages and modified the ccTLD to attempt to locate different search results. Now my searches are limited to the information stored in the US-specific country service maintained by Google, unless I make a settings-level change to affect that.

Searching the global web for information gets a little bit harder. Perhaps market research is showing Google that our hunt for information is more valuable when it’s local (or more “relevant” at least). It’s another way that the web is mediated for our consumption.

Who gives you the Internet?

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 21:22:36 +0000

Iran and Russia are becoming Internet provider nexuses to other countries. Dyn Research wrote about shifts in 2013 that led states in the Persian Gulf to seek out additional Internet providers.

Sometimes, it takes a real disaster to create something genuinely new. March 2013 was a month of disasters in the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East African Internet, with major submarine cable cuts affecting SMW3, SMW4, IMEWE, EIG, SEACOM, and TE-North.

One of the “genuinely new” Internet traffic paths that emerged in response is a counterintuitive terrestrial route, linking the ancient Indian Ocean trade empire of Oman with the Internet markets of Western Europe, by way of Iran, Azerbaijan, and the Russian Caucasus. As we’ll see, its effects are now being felt across the region, from Pakistan, to Gulf states like Bahrain and Oman, to Kenya.

More recently, Russia started providing a new Internet link to North Korea. As reported by 38North, Russia Provides New Internet Connection to North Korea:

The connection, from TransTeleCom, began appearing in Internet routing databases at 09:08 UTC on Sunday, or around 17:38 Pyongyang time on Sunday evening.

Before this additional route became available, China was the only provider of Internet access to the country’s sole ISP.

Until now, Internet users in North Korea and those outside accessing North Korean websites were all funneled along the same route connecting North Korean ISP Star JV and the global Internet: A China Unicom link that has been in operation since 2010.

This additional link makes the country’s access to the Internet less precarious and vulnerable to disconnection by attackers.

More than once the link has been the target of denial of service attacks. Most were claimed by the “Anonymous” hacking collective, but on at least one previous occasion, many wondered if US intelligence services had carried out the action.

IPv4 trafficking in Romania

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 18:09:44 +0000

Romania is selling IPv4 addresses to make money, but how did they get so many in the first place? ComputerWorld explores How Romania’s patchwork Internet helped spawn an IP address industry.

The roots of the Romanian IP address trade lie in the country’s peculiar Internet history. When commercial Internet service began in Romania around 2000, it was totally unplanned and unregulated. People started ISPs by pulling cables from one house to the next.

As the IPv6 transition and adoption is still ongoing, people are still seeking out IPv4 addresses where they can find them.

Where is the Internet decentralized?

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 18:06:51 +0000

Dyn Research interrogates the notion that the Internet is decentralized by looking at the actual state of infrastructure and routing resilience around the world. What did they find?

The key to the Internet’s survival is the Internet’s decentralization — and it’s not uniform across the world. In some countries, international access to data and telecommunications services is heavily regulated. There may be only one or two companies who hold official licenses to carry voice and Internet traffic to and from the outside world, and they are required by law to mediate access for everyone else.

Countries might not be ensuring maximum redundancy through decentralization for political reasons, a desire to control access to the Internet more easily, but also due to monetary reasons:

Increased diversity at the international frontier often spells less money for the national incumbent provider (typically the old telephone company, often owned by the government itself). Without some strong legal prodding and guidance from the telecoms regulator, significant diversification in smaller markets with a strong incumbent can take a long, long time.

Unrepresented languages on the web

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 18:00:22 +0000

Per Al Jazeera, 95% of the world’s languages continue to be unrepresented online.

The real problem is a digital architecture that forces people to operate on the terms of another culture, unable to continue the development of their own.

The architecture of the web influences the languages and cultures interacting with it:

He rightly homes in on the invisible underpinnings that enable us to use a language online, such as input methods, OS support (on a range of devices, in countless applications), transliteration and translation and spell-checking tools. Just developing a Yiddish spell-checker, for instance, has required a stable input method for the modified Hebrew alphabet that Yiddish uses, the prior standardization of that alphabet (still contested), standardized spellings of most words (sometimes contested), technical ease in handling the Yiddish alphabet and a loaded dictionary.

It’s complex to reflect the world views and cultures of the world on the web.

Each language reflects a unique world-view and culture complex, mirroring the manner in which a speech community has resolved its problems in dealing with the world, and has formulated its thinking, its system of philosophy and understanding of the world around it. In this, each language is the means of expression of the intangible cultural heritage of people, and it remains a reflection of this culture for some time even after the culture which underlies it decays and crumbles, often under the impact of an intrusive, powerful, usually metropolitan, different culture.

What makes it such a challenge to both incorporate multiple languages on the web, and also to build out fleshed-out versions of those languages?

Language homogenization on the web

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 17:59:47 +0000

Motherboard says The Internet Is Killing Most Languages:

The great flat, globalized world of the internet operates pretty much as a monoculture, Kornai says. Only about 250 languages can be called well-established online, and another 140 are borderline. Of the 7,000 languages still alive, perhaps 2,500 will survive, in the classical sense, for another century, and many fewer will make it on to the internet.

Globalization of the world and the web could lead to homogenization of the languages in both places.

The adage “If it’s not on the web, it does not exist,” neatly encapsulates the loss of prestige. And as a generation of digital natives comes up, their online tongue is likely not to be their mother tongue—a loss of competence.

Languages on the web matter for self identity

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 17:58:48 +0000

Is homogenization of language on the web an instantiation of totalitarianism? Boston Review on Herta Müller’s Language of Resistance:

Since language plays such an important part in the construction of the self, when the state subjects you to constant acts of linguistic aggression, whether you realize it or not, your sense of who you are and of your place in the world are seriously affected. Your language is not just something you use, but an essential part of what you are. For this reason any political disruption of the way language is normally used can in the long run cripple you mentally, socially, and existentially. When you are unable to think clearly you cannot act coherently. Such an outcome is precisely what a totalitarian system wants: a population perpetually caught in a state of civic paralysis.

What if the web is the state, in this context? What does it mean for self-identity, power, and a neutral web?

Top-level domains and nationalism

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 22:50:24 +0000

In 2010, Irina Shklovski and David M. Struthers wrote an excellent article on Kazakh national identity and its reflection through top-level domain name choices. The article is titled: Of States and Borders on the Internet: The Role of Domain Name Extensions in Expressions of Nationalism Online in Kazakhstan and the Oxford Internet Institute makes a PDF available.

The space on the internet is easily traversable and state boundaries in the form of domain extensions can be crossed with no more effort than a click of a mouse. Yet, what might such traversals of imagined state boundaries on the internet mean to the people doing the traversing? This question is especially relevant when considering people from Kazakhstan, a country where notions of statehood and nationalism are contested and are in the process of being renegotiated. Results presented here suggest that residents of Kazakhstan are acutely aware of national boundary traversals as they navigate the internet. The naming of a state-controlled space on the internet, through the use of ccTLDs, does in fact matter to the average user. Citizens of Kazakhstan often identified their activity on the internet as happening within or outside the space of the state to which they felt allegiance and attachment. We argue that naming matters for the creation of not only imagined communities online but also for individual expressions of nationalism on the internet.

Kazakhstan was previously part of the USSR.

There are several ways online spaces such as websites or other internet resources might signal their national affiliation. One such was is through the use of “country-code top-level domain names” (ccTLDs) that are in fact managed by an organization affiliated with the country in question that is the “designated manager” of second-level domain names (DNS) with the defined ccTLD (Postel 1994). The presence of a ccTLD often does not imply that the server that houses the page is in fact physically located on the territory of the country that the ccTLD denotes. However, symbolically, the webpage or an internet resource would display its national affiliation regardless of its actual physical location. We argue that the majority of internet users do not know and likely do not care where the resources they use online are physically located, but pay attention to the symbolic information embedded in the URLs as well as in the content they consume. In fact, prior research demonstrates that barring the physical locations of online resources, a direct analysis of links between sites based exclusively on their URLs indicated that most sites tend to link within a given ccTLD rather than across ccTLDs (Halavais 2000).

ccTLDs can operate as a national identity signifier, a way to entrench political borders on the web.

Although ccTLDs are the most common marker of national affiliation, they are rarely used in the US, suggesting a largely US-centric structure of generic TLD use such as .com, .net or .org (Leiner et al 2002). The lack of a country-identification for US businesses and personal sites may have been one of the drivers for the idea that the internet can be a borderless space. The use of ccTLDs is far more common in countries other than the US. We suggest that one of the reasons for this could be an attempt to carve out a national space on the internet where borders are deliniated, to clearly mark non-US territories and to provide symbolic markers for internet users.

The United States is an exception to this sort of identification. We’re the white people of the web in this way—the rarely-acknowledged default that doesn’t experience a national identification with our ccTLD because so much of the web (and our web) is US-built and US-centric.

Although much rhetoric in western countries still speaks of the one single internet that spans the world, the experience of talking about the internet in Kazakhstan begins to question this notion of a global undifferentiated online space.

Is there really a global single internet, or is there a series of differentiable internets that happen to use similar architecture and integrated infrastructure?

In Kazakhstan, many commented on the importance of both Russian and English for simply navigating online. For many young Kazakh-speaking respondents, however, use of Kazakh was an important marker of ethnic identity and a deliniation [sic] of national space online. Initially, young ethnic Kazakh activists translated interfaces of existing Western resources such as Facebook and Wordpress into Kazakh by contacting the companies and offering translation services for free.

Language matters too, as a way of communicating but also self-expression.

I recommend reading the whole thing.

Politics and server locations

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 17:49:36 +0000

Theorizing the Web 2014 included a panel on World Wide Web(s): Theorizing the Non-Western Web. The participants, from the program, follow:

Presider / Jillet Sarah Sam @JilletSarahSam
Hashmod / Alice Samson @theclubinternet
Panelists:
- David Peter Simon | @davidpetersimon | The Do-Gooder Industrial Complex?
- Jason Q. Ng | @jasonqng | Fit for Public Display: Rethinking censorship via a comparison of Chinese Wikipedia with Hudong and Baidu Baike
- Tolu Odumosu | @todumosu | Phoning the Web: A critical examination of Web infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Dalia Othman |@daliaothman | Social Media, Activism and the Middle East

The live tweets from the session included some interesting tidbits.

Interesting to think about how the physical locations of Web servers fit into discussions of international politics. #TtW14 #b1

— Grace AfsariMamagani (@gafsari) April 25, 2014

These 7 popular Nigerian sites are all hosted in the US or Europe, causing latency. @TOdumosu in #Ttw14 #b1

— Cat Goodfellow (@catgoodfellow) April 25, 2014

“A truly indigenous web is of paramount importance” - Tolu Odumosu #TtW14 #b1

— Kira Simon-Kennedy (@sk_kira) April 25, 2014

Tolu Odumosu on the Nigerian web: it’s mostly mobile and even local sites are hosted in the US, slowing down connections #TtW14 #b1

— Kira Simon-Kennedy (@sk_kira) April 25, 2014

The borderless internet is a myth

Tue, 17 Oct 2017 17:48:55 +0000

The Atlantic, The Myth of a Borderless Internet. Political borders are re-enshrined on the web in a literal and metaphorical sense.

Just like the cartographers of yore, multinational corporations—particularly Internet companies—play a role in defining and shaping political boundaries for the public’s consumption. This rise of huge, international corporations online has torn away at the Emerald Curtain that once obscured the variety of geopolitical boundaries that exist in the world, making clearer to the average person just how unsettled the planet’s borders really are.

Given the global nature of the Internet, corporate giants like Google and Microsoft are forced to define borders, often contending with demands from governments. The result? One’s view of certain countries’ borders is often dependent on the physical location from which one accesses Google or Bing maps. In other cases—such as that of the Western Sahara—jurisdiction is a determining factor. Microsoft, which has offices in Morocco, takes its cue from Rabat in determining the territory’s borders, while Google—which does not—draws a dotted line between Morocco and the Western Sahara, demarcating the disputed border.

Political borders are enshrined in mapping tools, but reflected differently based on the nation-state that you occupy. The web has clear political borders, and the map you see on the web does too.

Rather than remove content entirely as other companies do, Twitter created a system whereby content would be “withheld” from users in a given country. Users are notified that the content in question has been withheld due to a legal request from a government. In addition to Pakistan, the tool has been used in numerous countries, including France, Brazil, and Russia.

The tool’s usage means that one “view” of the platform from a given country is different from the view from another. In other words, a Pakistani Twitter user is provided a sanitized version of Twitter, while an American one has access to—as far as we know—whatever content they desire. Corporate decisions around controversial speech, such as this one, all too often result in the creation of an “iron curtain” of sorts, dividing the seemingly borderless Internet.

The web you see in one country might not be the same web you see in another country. Political borders matter.

Who owns the ccTLDs?

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 17:47:09 +0000

Lawfare blog covers an interesting case that attempts to answer the question Are Top-level Domains Property?

On December 28 [2015], the Justice Department filed an amicus brief in Weinstein v. Islamic Republic of Iran, a case pending before the D.C. Circuit. At issue is whether country-code top-level domains are the property of those countries’ foreign governments.

Does a country’s government own the country-code top level domain that represents that country?

DOJ argues first that ccTLDs are not attachable “property” or “assets” under the FSIA or TRIA. Rather, ccTLDs “merely [] designat[e] . . . the national affiliation of a subset of the global Internet community,” including “millions of private businesses and individuals.

Although the right to designate its territory “Iran” is presumably valuable to the Iranian government, no one would suggest that the name “Iran” in an atlas or a newspaper—or even official publications—is itself the “property” of the Iranian government subject to attachment by creditors.

The Justice Department focuses primarily on the practical mechanisms of Internet governance. To support its position, DOJ points to a 1994 Internet governance document describing the Internet naming authority as a responsibility, not a property right, as well as “the actual practice under which country-code top-level domains have been established and managed.” In practice, ICANN “delegat[es]” TLD management to regional managers on the basis of whether the manager will be a “technically competent trustee of the domain on behalf of the national and global Internet communities.” In this sense, TLDs differ from second-level domains, which private parties purchase from the TLD-managers. Importantly, DOJ does treat second-level domains as property.

Internet domain stewardship is complex. Per the court:

any court order treating TLDs as property would threaten “the multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance” because other countries would react by “turn[ing] their backs on ICANN for good.” This risk of root zone anarchy not only eliminates any potential value for plaintiffs—who had hoped to profit from licensing Iran’s ccTLD—but also would “be devastating for ICANN.”

ICANN > a national government, in this case.

Searching without words

Fri, 13 Oct 2017 17:46:08 +0000

Search could be moving to images, in which case the languages may not play such a large part if images dominate web searches.

Fast Company goes Inside Baidu’s Plan To Beat Google By Taking Search Out Of The Text Era

In many cases, text-based search is not ideal for finding information. For instance, if you’re out shopping and spot a handbag you might like, it is far better to take a picture than to try and describe it in words. The same is often true if you see a flower or animal species that you would like to identify.

The Balkanization of the Internet

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 17:43:51 +0000

Political and legal borders interact to create a potentially balkanized future internet. Time Magazine says The Future of the Internet is Balkanization and Borders.

Rousseff’s plan to create walled-off, national Intranets followed reports that the United States has been surveilling Rousseff’s email, intercepting internal government communications, and spying on the country’s national oil company, so it was somewhat understandable. But her move could lead to a powerful backlash against an open Internet – one that would transform it from a global commons to a fractured patchwork severely limited by the political boundaries on a map.

The former Brazilian president wanted to protect her privacy by reinforcing political borders on the web.

The NSA has also opened a Pandora’s box by treating “citizens” and “foreigners” differently (even defining both groups in myriad different ways). U.S. rules also impose geo-locational-based jurisdictional mandates (based upon the route of your Internet traffic or the location of the data services and databases you use). Already, a German citizen accessing a New York City data center via a Chinese fiber line may find their data covered by an array of conflicting legal requirements requiring privacy and active surveillance at the same time.

What does it mean to be a citizen vs a foreigner when browsing the web and using the internet?

Chance thanks Obama for us with a ccTLD

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 22:42:18 +0000

Chance the Rapper has a new fashion line full of clothing that celebrates Barack Obama’s presidency: https://www.thankuobama.us/

With obvious references to Obama (the king Obama t-shirt) and some more oblique ones (a jersey with 44, because he was the 44th president), it’s only appropriate that the URL contains some symbolism.

He put the site up on thankuobama.us, indicating twofold:

Us as is “us” as in, we the people thank him for being our president.
But also Us as in US, as in USA, as in the ccTLD for the USA. The USA thanks him, but also like how much more patriotic of a URL can you get in this context.

Thank a former president with a URL that refers to the USA in multiple ways. Good work.

The tech media isn't flat

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 17:41:33 +0000

Model View Culture confronts “The App You’ve Never Heard Of”: Exploring Western Bias in Tech Media.

It is flabbergasting that LINE–an app that beats out Messenger and WhatsApp in Thailand and Indonesia–or WeChat or even Alibaba would ever be so baldly described as “little-known.” Little known to Americans or Europeans? Perhaps, since they were not part of the original target market. But “little known” to millions of people in Asia? Certainly not.

This pattern reflects the arrogance and shortsightedness of tech publications which, although often having primarily Western staff, are consumed globally: English speakers around the world — both within and outside of the tech industry — consume Western tech news; after all, Silicon Valley is home to international giants like Facebook, Apple, and Google. Such headlines erase huge populations of users, not only internationally but even in the West itself. Take, for example, the large population of immigrants to the West: just as WeChat remains significant to Chinese Australian immigrants and their families, many immigrants from non-Western cultural backgrounds remain connected to the technology of their (or their extended family’s) homeland. For example, South Korea’s most popular chat app, KakaoTalk, is installed on 93% of smartphones in the country; in America, the majority of KakaoTalk’s downloads are by Korean immigrants and Korean Americans. Not acknowledging just how significant KakaoTalk is to the Korean tech industry and to Korean Americans is exclusionary and, frankly, ignorant.

Just because some tech comes from Silicon Valley doesn’t mean that tech popular in non-Western markets is inherently “unknown.”

Yet a biased, narrow focus in tech journalism contradicts and subverts these outcomes. It’s time tech writers and bloggers educate themselves about what’s dominating the markets in parts of the non-Western globe, and move towards journalism that truly reflects a commitment to technology that is changing the world… not just Silicon Valley.

Less infrastructure, more control over the Internet

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 17:40:06 +0000

The less infrastructure investments and diversity of connections that a country has to the Internet, the more control they can exert over the country’s overall connectivity.

Most countries have gradually moved towards increased diversity in their Internet infrastructure over the last decade, especially as it concerns international connectivity to the global Internet. However, some countries remain at severe risk of Internet disconnection, with only one or two providers at their “international frontier”. This minimal diversity is often maintained for political purposes, making it easier to disable international Internet connectivity if deemed necessary

via Breaking the Internet: Swapping Backhoes for BGP | Dyn Blog

Catalonia's Referendum and the Internet

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 18:38:32 +0000

Catalonia has its own top level domain, .cat. Not a vanity domain, this TLD provides an element of national identity in a region of Spain that has sought independence for many years. In the wake of the referendum, the office of the TLD registry was raided and computers seized. As reported by Internet News:

The Guardia Civil officers entered the .cat registry’s offices around 9am local time this morning and have seized all computers in the domain registry’s offices in downtown Barcelona.

The move comes a couple of days after a Spanish court ordered the domain registry to take down all .cat domain names being used by the upcoming Catalan referendum.

The .cat domain registry currently has over 100 thousand active domain names and in light of the actions taken by the Spanish government it’s unclear how the registry will continue to operate if their offices are effectively shutdown by the Spanish authorities. The seizure won’t impact live domain names or general day to day operations by registrars, as the registry backend is run by CORE and leverages global DNS infrastructure. However it is deeply worrying that the Spanish government’s actions would spill over onto an entire namespace.

A TLD is a symbol of national and political independence that the Spanish government is likely seeking to remove by taking this action. The Internet Society issued two statements about the raid, one initial statement and a second clarifying statement.

The initial statement made it clear that the Internet Society sees TLD operators as neutral parties:

We are concerned by reports that this court order would require a top-level domain (TLD) operator such as .CAT to begin to block “all domains that may contain any kind of information about the referendum”. We do not see it as the expertise and mandate of TLD operators within the Internet’s ecosystem to engage in monitoring and blocking of content outside of receiving judicial requests related to specific domains.

The second statement underscores this:

We firmly believe that intermediaries (in this case the top-level domain (TLD) operator, but it could be any other intermediary such as an Internet Service Provider (ISP)) should not be put in the position of having to decide what content is legal and what is not. Simply put, this is not the role of TLD registries.

Regardless of the fact that the Catalan region is not an independent nation from Spain (although they voted to become one in the referendum), the TLD helps the community identify as a distinct group with a distinct identity and community that deserves to be represented as such on the Internet. Wikipedia provides additional context about the granting and ideals behind the .cat TLD.

Universal language translation: thx, Google

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 17:57:37 +0000

Google is working on improving translation to the point where we have a universal language translator. In the Smithsonian Magazine, Kissing Language Barriers Goodbye:

“One thing that surprises people when we talk about Translate is our team doesn’t have any linguists on it,” Estelle says. “We’ve launched 71 languages, and I would say our team doesn’t know how to speak the vast majority of them. A human translator is not going to be able to learn all these terms and things as fast as our [data] can learn from the web.”

And with the recent release of their Pixel Buds, Google is trying to produce the sci-fi level real-time language translator. From Engadget’s article Google’s Pixel Buds translation will change the world:

Google packed its headphones with the power to translate between 40 languages, literally in real-time. The company has finally done what science fiction and countless Kickstarters have been promising us, but failing to deliver on, for years. This technology could fundamentally change how we communicate across the global community.

Real-time translation can do a lot for breaking down barriers. Engadget continues with the praise:

You’ll be able to walk up to nearly anybody in another country and be able to hold a fluid, natural language conversation without the need for pantomime and large hand gestures, or worry of offending with a mispronunciation. International commerce and communication could become as mundane as making a local phone call.

Universal translation might not be universally good, however. The Smithsonian Magazine article continues:

She thinks the device could be somewhat useful with travel, business and international relations but not groundbreaking. At a certain level, we already have translators (people) in place, and most who work in foreign relations know the appropriate languages. A device, Murphy believes, could have negative consequences.

“I think it can make people lazy,” Murphy says. Translating languages can be mentally challenging by forcing the brain—especially one that knows more than two languages—to work in a different way, but the exercise is rewarding, nonetheless. The brain pulls from a place of linguistic empathy that even the finest voice translator could never reach.

While this universal communication could be a positive, Murphy acknowledges, “it might lead to people thinking they’re communicating when they’re not.” Culture is not always completely embodied in language (take sarcasm, for example), and communication is not always about the information being passed.

Translation is the “key” to unlocking a “truly global” web, but this sort of translation could also lead people to think they’re communicating when they’re not (to paraphrase the article). If you think you’re communicating with someone, but you’re talking past each other in a series of miscommunications, the UX of your world is off, so to speak. This happens in same-language communication as well. With the additional layer of auto-translation interference, it might be easier or harder to detect when such miscommunications happen.

Borders on the Web Series

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 22:34:34 +0000

The web is sometimes spoken of as a borderless place. Through the ~magic~ of technology, the internet, the “decentralized” web, borders would be eliminated and the world would become truly flat.

I’ll share links as part of this series that reinforce and challenge that notion.

Linguistic borders, reinforced by lack of multilingualism yet challenged by machine translation successes.
Geographic borders, reinforced by internet infrastructure yet challenged by novel methods of providing internet access.
Legal borders, reinforced by censorship and international agreements yet challenged by citizens and corporations.
National/political borders, reinforced by internet service providers, top level domain names, and governments yet challenged again by citizens and corporations.

Where Scanning the Internet Gets You

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 19:25:45 +0000

From awhile back, Brian Krebs talks to three researchers at U-M about their ZMap tool. An efficient and comprehensive way to scan the Internet, they’ve recently built a search engine called Censys that searches across their daily data collections from the ZMap scans. From Krebs’ interview with the researchers (Zakir Durumeric, Eric Wustrow, and J. Alex Halderman):

“What we were able to find was by taking the data from these scans and actually doing vulnerability notifications to everybody, we were able to increase patching for the Heartbleed bug by 50 percent. So there was an interesting kind of surprise there, not what you learn from looking at the data, but in terms of what actions do you take from that analysis? And that’s something we’re incredibly interested in: Which is how can we spur progress within the community to improve security, whether that be through vulnerability notification, or helping with configurations.”

Using ZMap allows them to quickly collect this data (compared to other network scanners), but the researchers aren’t just scanning the Internet because they feel like it. They’re taking action based on the scan results—notifying people when their machines are vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug.

Beyond notification, they can take other steps:

“So, that’s the other thing that’s really exciting about this data. Notification is one thing, but the other is we’ve been building models that are predictive of organizational behavior. So, if you can watch, for example, how an organization runs their Web server, how they respond to certificate revocation, or how fast they patch — that actually tells you something about the security posture of the organization, and you can start to build models of risk profiles of those organizations. It moves away from this sort of patch-and-break or patch-and-pray game we’ve been playing. So, that’s the other thing we’ve been starting to see, which is the potential for being more proactive about security.”

Internet scan data can help us better understand organizational security posture and develop different models of risk profiles in organizations. With those risk profiles, improving an organization’s security posture could be a matter of identifying the inefficient elements and focusing on them. Security posture is culture as much as machines. While SIEMs can identify risk factors in your machines, models of organizational security posture can identify the risk factors in your culture.