I’ve written about network neutrality before. It’s a difficult topic because of its different aspects, and because there are vehement opinions on all sides of it. Before I left the Internet Architecture Board, I started the process of setting up a network neutrality talk as the technical topic of the plenary session at the upcoming Stockholm IETF meeting — my IAB colleague Marcelo Bagnulo has taken over the planning for that, and is getting a great program lined up.

Some UCSB researchers managed to infiltrate the command-and-control system of a botnet, and got lots of information out of it, which they wrote up in a paper.

Finishing my series of comments on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet”, we have question 8, “Could we shut the net down?”, by Michael Brooks.

It’s not clear to me what the question really means, and why it’s being “asked”. Mr Brooks answers it as though the real question is, “Could one party (to a first approximation of ‘one party’) unilaterally shut the Internet down?”, whether that might be done officially, maliciously, or otherwise. To that question, the answer is certainly “No.”

Part 7 of my series of comments on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet” goes into the “carbon footprint” of the Internet: “Is the net hurting the environment?”, by Duncan Graham-Rowe.

It’s easy to think that the Internet can only be helpful to the environment. If you’re shopping online, you’re not driving to the store in your car. If you’re reading things online, you’re not printing the material, using paper and having trees cut down for it.