CircleID

The Trump administration is opening a new front against cybercrime, allowing private companies to hack back, albeit with Washington firmly holding the leash. A presidential memorandum signed on August 12 directs the National Coordination Center (NCC) to establish a program allowing vetted American firms to conduct cyber operations against foreign transnational criminal organizations.

Earlier this year, two ranking members of the U.S. House Science Committee sent a letter to the FCC that reminded the agency that it didn’t have any clear authority from Congress to regulate space safety, space traffic management, or other non-communication space issues. This letter was sent when it became clear that the FCC was considering sweeping changes to the regulation of satellite constellations.

New rules for new Starlink customers took effect on 14 July 2026. Existing customers move to them on 17 August1. The update puts more than thirty European states into a single travel region so that account holders can cross borders inside it without extra registration or the standard thirty-day limit on international use. The region includes Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Lithuania, France, Spain, Italy, Romania, and Norway, among others2. Poland is not on the list.

Quarterly domain activity reflects both stable patterns and changes across the namespace. In Q1 2026, this was visible in the rankings of leading TLDs, registrars, and MX and NS domains. In Q2 2026, while many of the topnotchers across NRD registrations, including those likely registered with malicious intent and confirmed malicious, remained the same, we witnessed several ranking changes.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will close its 2026 New gTLD Program tomorrow, ending a nearly four-month application period that opened April 30. Prospective registry operators have until 23:59 UTC on August 12 to file, with the required evaluation fee due a week later, by August 19. This marks only the second such expansion window in the program’s history, following the original 2012 round that introduced hundreds of new domain endings.

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about data sovereignty. Indian Tribes want data sovereignty. Countries around the world and state and local governments in the U.S. are talking about data sovereignty. Corporations are talking about data sovereignty, even though they use different terms to describe it. The concept behind data sovereignty is simple.

As MTN Nigeria celebrates 25 years, I find myself reflecting not only on the scale of the company’s journey, but also on a significant chapter of my own professional journey within its ecosystem. I have been privileged to spend more than seven years learning, building, managing and contributing to projects within the MTN network. My journey with the MTN project began in April 2019, when I joined Huawei as an Access Network Engineer working on MTN’s FTTH deployment.

Ghana has made significant progress in expanding digital connectivity. Mobile networks cover much of the country, fibre infrastructure continues to expand, and Internet access has become central to education, healthcare, commerce, agriculture and public services. Yet connectivity is not the same as meaningful connectivity. Across rural and underserved communities, the barriers are often more complicated than simply building another telecommunications tower.

I’m the solo developer behind MarinaDNS, a free DNS and network diagnostics toolkit, and NODA, a DNS scoring framework I built on top of it.

Domains Under Management is the default health metric for the domain industry. It is simple, comparable, and universally understood. It gives boards a growth number, analysts a ranking, and registries a headline they can defend in a quarterly review. DUMs earned that position for good reason. It measures something real: the installed base of a namespace. How many domains exist in the zone right now. Whether that number is growing, shrinking, or holding steady.