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»

UPDATEDThe Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress Announces Keynote, Speakers, Initial Partnerships

The Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress has made the following announcement for the keynote, speakers, initial sponsors, partners and dates for the inaugural event taking place March 11 & 12, 2013 in New York City. 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»

Turkish Hacker Group Strikes Again, This Time Victims are ICANN and IANA

The same Turkish Hacking Group, NetDevilz, responsible for the hacking and defacement of the popular photo sharing site, Photobucket, has been reported to have briefly succeeded in accessing ICANN and IANA domain names yesterday, June 26, 2008, and redirecting them to a page containing the message: "You think that you control the domains but you don't! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don't you believe us?"... more»

UPDATEDIran Blocks HTTPS, 30 Million Reported Losing Email Access

Iran is reported to have started blocking access to websites that use HTTPS and as a result making popular and secure online services as well as online banking sites inaccessible. An Iranian news agency reports that over 30 million people in the country have lost access to foreign email services such as Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail. Anything based outside the country that uses a secure connection via HTTPS is blocked, according to news reports and a thread on Hacker News. Secure sites based within Iran are reportedly still accessible. The shutdown is said to be timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and is believed to be temporary. 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»

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»

Microsoft Offers $7.5 Million to Buy 666,624 IPv4 Addresses

Jaikumar Vijayan reporting in InfoWorld: "Microsoft has agreed to pay $7.5 million to purchase a block of 666,624 IPv4 addresses from bankrupt Canadian telecom equipment maker Nortel in a move that some see as a signal of the increasing value of IPv4 addresses. Last week, Nortel filed a motion seeking approval for the sale from the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. If the deal is approved, Microsoft would assume control of the IPv4 addresses, currently owned by Nortel, for about $11.25 a piece." more»

Google Cloud Storage Coming Within Weeks

During a presentation at the Interop Conference currently ongoing in Los Vegas, Mike Repass, Product Manager at Google, informed the audience that a new cloud storage service will be rolled out by Google within weeks. The role out is part of Google's expansion of its AppEngine platform which is said to offer similar security infrastructure as Gmail and Google Apps. "[T]he app partitioning and isolation are the same best of breed technology approaches that Google is developing for the rest of its customer base," Repass said. more»

UPDATEDRumor: Rod Beckstrom Next ICANN CEO

Sources indicate former director of the US Homeland Security Department's National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC), Rod Beckstrom, will be replacing the current ICANN CEO, Paul Twomey, who announced his resignation earlier this year. Milton Mueller in a blog post on the IGP website writes: "This is still unconfirmed by ICANN but comes from well-informed sources. We also hear that David Eisner, the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service under G.W. Bush and former VP at AOL, was also in the running." Beckstrom recently made headlines for his sudden resignation from his post at NCSC, criticizing the lack of funding from the NSA and its move to try to "rule over" the NCSC. more»

Misconfiguration Brings Down Entire .SE Domain in Sweden

A incorrect configuration within Swedens .SE zone caused temporary shutdown of all websites under the country code top-level domain. Web monitoring company, Royal Pingdom, also located in Sweden reports: "Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden's top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) websites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still..." 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»

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»

Iran's Internet Censorship Most Sophisticated in the World

Iran's political filtering during the recent 2009 presidential campaign and the role of the Internet in the post-election turmoil has brought a heightened level of attention to the country's Internet filtering system. According to a status report just updated by the OpenNet Initiative, the Internet censorship system in Iran has become one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated in the world. Iran and China are the only countries that aggressively filter the Internet using their own technology. Iran's aggressive filtering measures "have contributed to the implementation of a centralized filtering strategy and a reduced reliance on Western technologies," says OpenNet. more»

Dot Name Domain Registry Charging for Whois Access, Security Researchers Not Happy

The company that manages the .name top-level domain registry is charging for access to domain registration information (Whois data), a step that security researchers say frustrates their ability to police the Internet and creates a haven for hackers who run internet scams. more»