ICANN to Start Sample Internationalized Domain Trials in 11 Languages

On Oct. 15, ICANN plans to unveil mechanisms for individuals and businesses to try out the new sample Top-Level Domains in nearly a dozen languages. The 11 domains now under review will read "test" in Arabic, Persian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. At this point, these 11 domain names are meant primarily for software developers and website designers to test the new system, but they are the first such names entered in the root servers after years of discussions and limited-access tests. more»

ICANN Board Approves Sweeping Overhaul of Top-level Domains

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has just approved the relaxation of the rules for the introduction of new Top-Level Domains -- a move that could drastically change the Internet. The new decision -- some calling it of historic importance and others predictable -- will allow companies to register their brands as generic top-level domain names (TLDs). For instance, Microsoft could apply to have a TLD such as '.msn' and Apple apply for '.mac'. more»

Release of IE7, Firefox 2.0 Will Drive Significant IDN Demand

The arrival IE 7, Firefox 2.0 and other browsers that offer built-in support for IDNs could open the floodgates to IDN sales and usage. ...VeriSign says more than 600,000 IDNs have been registered in .com and .net, and that these names are "experiencing double-digit growth in new registrations and high renewal rates," according to its Domain Name Industry Brief published in August.  more»

Attack Seriously Slows Two Internet Root Servers

Online attackers have briefly disrupted service on at least two of the 13 "root" servers that are used to direct traffic on the Internet.

The attack, which began Tuesday at about 5:30 a.m. Eastern time, was the most significant attack against the root servers since an October 2002 distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, said Ben Petro, senior vice president of services with Internet service provider Neustar Inc. more»

Internet Out of IPv4 Addresses by 2012, the Consultancy Says

The growing popularity of smartphones, IPTV and other gadgets connecting to the Internet is eating up real estate on the net, and soon techies can expect cyberspace to run out of room, according to a Frost & Sullivan analyst briefing Thursday.

Experts say today's Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) also limits services of multimedia content and data communication, including mobile IP, P2P and video calls. With new mobile IPv6, telecommunication providers can easily roll out custom services from movies to ring tones to television. more»

68,000 Open Recursive DNS Servers Behaving Maliciously; "This is a crime with few witnesses"

Reported today: "Researchers at Google Inc. and the Georgia Institute of Technology are studying a virtually undetectable form of attack that quietly controls where victims go on the Internet." The Georgia Tech and Google researchers estimate that as many as 0.4%, or 68,000, open-recursive DNS servers are behaving maliciously, returning false answers to DNS queries. Unlike other DNS servers, open-recursive systems will answer all DNS lookup requests from any computer on the Internet, a feature that makes them particularly useful for hackers. They also estimate that another 2% of them provide questionable results. more»

CERN's Grid 10,000 Times Faster than Broadband

CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research, has been working on an Internet replacement called The Grid that's 10,000 times faster than broadband. At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, "the grid" will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds... more»

ICANN Asked to Adopt Specific TLD for Banks

Security watchers are calling on net governance body ICANN to adopt a new top level domain name to be used exclusively by registered banks and financial organisations.

If ICANN introduced a .safe domain (or .sure or .bank), which could only be used by registered financial institutions, it would allow security providers to create better software to protect the public. more»

Vint Cerf on the Diminishing Novelty of Internet

Has the novelty of the Internet worn off? Vinton Cerf, chief Internet evangelist for Google and one of the Internet's founding fathers, suspects that after 30-some years, it may well have. For this reason and others, Cerf recorded a video that you can see on YouTube in which he tries to drum up enthusiasm for applying for one of the nine open positions at ICANN, the Internet addressing agency of which he is chairman... more»

Google Blocking 1 Billion Messages a Day; Calls 2007 Spam and Virus Attacks Worst in History

With Google's recent Postini addition, it now reports to be processing email for more than 35,000 businesses and 12 million end users, and blocking around 1 billion messages per day... "We saw a peak of activity in October 2007 where volume was a 263 percent increase from September 2006 and Postini blocked 47 billion spam messages, more than 320 Terabytes of spam (now that's a lot of spam). The average unprotected email user would have received 32,000 spam messages in their in-boxes so far this year. Talk about lost productivity. In fact, Nucleus research estimates unchecked spam can cost a company up to $742 per user." more»

Report on Best and Worst Anti-Phishing Domain Registrars

The performance of registrars in decommissioning domain names connected to fraud scams is all over the map. A "brandjacking" report released last month by MarkMonitor is the first to include a list of the top 10 best and worst lists of registrar performance in revoking domain names connected to phishing scams. more»

Federal Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Network Solutions and ICANN

A Los Angeles firm today announced a federal class action lawsuit against Network Solutions (NSI) and ICANN over the NSI's practice of locking up domain names as soon as they are searched for on its website, which means the party searching can buy the name only from Network Solutions. more»

Getting Rid of Whois

The Whois database may disappear... An ICANN committee is considering a sunset proposal at its meeting this week in Los Angeles that would effectively scrap the directory system on privacy grounds. Among those arguments is that a public-by-default Whois listing may run afoul of Canadian and European Union privacy laws. more»

Taking Down Spammers via Legalization, Regulation and Economics

Gadi Evron at ZDNet discussing spam fighting via legalization, regulation and economics. He provides with case studies on where this worked, analyzing the underline causes. "Next door to our offices was a spam operation with roughly 30 employees. One day they weren't there anymore... It seems that whenever a certain wide-audience requirement is very costly, or illegal, snake-oil fraudsters will pick it up and create an underground economy for it. It is possible our next step in fighting spam should be to research and list these underground economies taking advantage of people by the use of spam, and fight the underline cause, the clients who traffic and sell the illegal goods, playing the economic game..." more»

Google Testing Option to Block Domain Parking Sites

Google AdWords is running limited testing of a feature which lets its advertisers block domain parking sites which their AdWords ads will be served on; specifically 'Domain Ads' and 'Error Page Ads. more»