a notebook on digital identity, telecom trust, and internet standards.
I'm Chris Wendt — I came up through real-time communications, from audio DSP, media streaming and codecs, and telecom protocols to the cryptographic trust frameworks for digital identity I work on now.§
Recent entries
Long-form entries — the opinionated half of appliedbits.
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toward a multimedia telephone network
Argued on the consumer-protection panel at the FCC's IP Transition Workshop, then written up at length: real-time text, video relay and NG911 as native capabilities of the telephone network, not bolt-ons on a voice path.
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notes from the fcc ip transition workshop
Notes from the FCC's two-day IP Transition Workshop, July 15-16, 2026 — the four panels of day one, what was argued about all-IP interconnection and bill-and-keep, and a longer account of the panel I sat on.
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DNO+: making DNO additive
Do Not Originate is default-deny on calling-number provenance, and it stops at numbers that cannot or will not originate. The case for an additive tier: let the right-to-use holder declare who may originate its calls.
Recent dispatches
Recurring series on what's moving across telecom, identity, trust, and fraud.
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Regulatory Watch — Week ending October 16, 2026
The rest of the October 9 comments on the Robocall Mitigation Database FNPRM posted this week. CTIA, T-Mobile, NCTA, and INCOMPAS with the Cloud Communications Alliance all back Bureau review of a filing before it appears in the database. C…
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Sector Watch — Week ending October 16, 2026
The IESG sent the IETF STIR working group’s proposed charter to external review on October 16, with an approval decision scheduled for the November 5 telechat. The new scope is entity identification. The charter states the gap: STIR a…
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Regulatory Watch — Week ending October 9, 2026
Comments on the Robocall Mitigation Database FNPRM were due October 9, and USTelecom, Numeracle and Ridgeway want the database to check who a filer is before it publishes anything. The Club for Growth comment round on AI-voice political cal…
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Sector Watch — Week ending October 9, 2026
The OpenID Foundation approved OpenID Connect Ephemeral Subject Identifier 1.0 as a Final Specification on October 8. It adds a third subject type to OpenID Connect, next to public and pairwise: the provider issues a new sub value for every…
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Regulatory Watch — Week ending October 2, 2026
USTelecom filed its answer to the critics of agreement-less IP interconnection on September 30, with declarations from AT&T’s Hany Fahmy and Martin Dolly and Verizon’s Lance Lockhart, while INCOMPAS and Inteliquent took the …
Recent field notes
Short pieces flagging what's notable across the same beats.
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ICANN terminates Trustname, the first registrar de-accredited over DNS abuse
ICANN Compliance terminated the accreditation of Fewmoretaps OU, which does business as Trustname.com (IANA #4318), on August 27, effective September 11. The NetBeacon Institute calls it the first registrar termination over DNS abuse. The n…
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Cloudflare serves most of 88 deepfake abuse sites, study finds
Sarah Morgan, Hany Farid and Sophie Nightingale identified 88 public sites hosting AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery over six weeks, 38 of them dedicated to it, and traced nine infrastructure services behind each. The paper is in…
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Hiya: 45% of French consumers lost money to a phone scam this year
Hiya reports from its State of the Call 2026 survey, of more than 12,000 consumers and 3,600 business professionals in six countries, that 45% of French respondents lost money to a phone scam in the past year. The other five: Germany 12%, C…
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Ofcom reads its numbering conditions as an anti-fraud duty, and opens two cases
Ofcom opened enforcement investigations on 24 September into whether numbers allocated to Voxbone SA and Vonage Business Limited are being misused, including to perpetrate scams. Both are own-initiative — the complainant on each case page i…
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The case for watching DNSSEC between outages instead of after them
Muhammad Shahzaib argues in CircleID that DNSSEC failures get diagnosed from point-in-time snapshots, and that the same handful of failure modes keep recurring because nothing records how the signed namespace changes between incidents. &ldq…
Library
The factual half — how things work and what the standards say, with references to the authoritative documents.
SIP · STIR/SHAKEN · Telephone numbers · ENUM · DNS and domain trust · vCon · VESPER · Trust governance · Telecom regulation · Digital identity · IETF · Glossary