The Federal Communications Commission today issued rules codifying a voluntary 2016 agreement between cellular networks that they cover for their competitors knocked offline during a natural or cyber disaster.

The Mandatory Disaster Response Initiative ( MDRI ) requires all facilities-based mobile network operators, defined as those that own and operate their own network infrastructure, to enter into mutual aid agreements with other facilities-based operators, and also extends some provisions of the 2016 Wireless Resiliency Cooperative Framework ( WRCF ) so that the MDRI can be activated more easily than its voluntary predecessor.

The WRCF included provisions that were incorporated into

Computer scientists at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have found the interplay between the internet and local networks can be analyzed to reveal private data and facilitate tracking.

In a study titled, "Saving Brian’s Privacy: the Perils of Privacy Exposure through Reverse DNS," Olivier van der Toorn, Raffaele Sommese, Anna Sperotto, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, and Mattijs Jonker look at how DNS interacts with DHCP and find that some of the data exchanged can be exposed by Reverse DNS (rDNS) queries.

DHCP is a network management protocol that allows IP addresses to be dynamically assigned to devices on a

Google is planning to offer much faster broadband speeds in the US areas where it operates its fiber networks, all the way to 100Gbps.

Google Fiber , part of the Access division of the search giant's parent company, Alphabet, currently provides a 1Gbps service, and began upgrading its speed in 2021 with the introduction of a 2Gbps product offering downstream bandwidth of 2Gbps and upstream bandwidth of 1Gbps for $100 a month.

That comes up against AT&T Fiber's similar tier at $110, Verizon Fios and Ziply Fiber's 120 plans, and Frontier's Fiber 2-gig is $150, although, of course, Google's $100

Updated Every four years, the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union (ITU) stages a Plenipotentiary Conference at which member states decide how the organization will steer the development of communications technologies.

The event is usually only of interest to telco and policy wonks.

But this year's event has become a geopolitical football – and possibly a turning point for internet governance – thanks to the two candidates running in an election for the position of ITU secretary-general.

The US has put forward Doreen Bogdan-Martin for the gig. She's an ITU veteran with years of experience working with global telecoms regulators. She

Cisco has urged its shareholders to vote against a proposal asking for the company to publish a tax transparency report that breaks down where it pays its taxes on a country-by-country basis.

The resolution was proposed by three investors – including the Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF), which has $41 billion (£38 billion) under management [PDF] – on 24 June, and asks that Cisco adopt the Global Reporting Initiative's (GRI) tax standard and publish a tax transparency report for shareholders.

According to shareholder advisory group Pensions & Investment Research Consultants (Pirc) today, Cisco's letter recommending stockholders vote against it said