Continuing on the series on Internet centrality, an important element of the argument that the web is greatly centralised rests on the fact that the Web’s architecture is becoming less distributed with time. The push towards the cloud has been translated into fewer name servers, and fewer hosting choices. Pingdom, Read more…
Earlier today, the caching and security service provider CloudFlare went down, taking with it more than 700 thousand websites for over an hour (including our very own SCRIPTed journal). While downtime is to be expected even in the ever-connected world, what piqued my interest about this event is the nature Read more…
Anyone familiar with my recent rants on the subject of Internet regulation may have noticed that I have been slightly obsessed with the subject of network centrality. The Internet is supposed to be a distributed architecture, designed to withstand large-scale attacks. The decentralised nature of the Web allows for systems Read more…
When the history of the Internet is written, June 30 2012 may be remembered as The Day The Cloud Failed. An important Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) data centre in Virginia was affected by a powerful storm which knocked out its power (prompting variations of the headline “Real clouds brought Read more…
The United States Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has passed in the US House of Representatives despite vocal online opposition, and the surprising threat of veto from the White House. H.R. 3523 drew criticism because it is purported to be a threat to privacy as it encourages Internet Read more…
The media frenzy over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act (SOPA and PIPA respectively) appears to be finally dying down after last week’s Internet blackout, mostly due to the shocking news regarding the shutting down of Megaupload. While I publicly expressed some misgivings about the focus of Read more…
If you follow Yours Truly in any sort of social media available you will know by now that my book entitled Networks, Complexity and Internet Regulation: Scale-Free Law has been published by Edward Elgar. The book has its own page on this blog, and is now available for purchase at Read more…
Some readers may remember that some time ago I wrote a post about Bitcoin, an interesting online payment experiment in the shape of a cryptographic currency. My conclusion was that the currency was probably illegal in the U.S. and Europe, and left it at that. At the time Bitcoin’s star Read more…
After the spectacular hacking of The Sun newspaper and News International websites that took place earlier this week, hacking collectives like Anonymous, LulzSec and AntiSec seem unstoppable. This air of invulnerability was part of LulzSec’s gloating the night the attack on The Sun’s web services took place. [blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/LulzSec/status/93093868379193344″] However, Read more…
Could the next revolution in payment systems be already here? Bitcoin is a non-fiat cryptographic electronic payment system that purports to be the world’s first cryptocurrency. In other words, it is a peer-to-peer, client-based, completely distributed currency that does not depend on centralised issuing bodies to operate, the value is Read more…