news
/ May 16, 2008 10:12 AM PST
DNS server problems at the U.S. National Security Agency have knocked the secretive intelligence agency site offline for several hours. Reports suggest various possible reasons including an internal routing problem of some sort on their side or errors in firewall or ACL [access control list] policy. Other possibilities are speculated to be a technical glitch or a hacking incident. The NSA is responsible for analysis of foreign communications, but it is also charged with helping protect the U.S. government against cyber attacks -- the outage is an embarrassment for the agency. ›››
news
/ May 14, 2008 12:22 PM PST
At the request of ICANN, Paul E. Black, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed an algorithm that may guide applicants in proposing new Top-Level Domains (TLDs). As new TLDs are added to the familiar .com, .info, and .net, the algorithm checks whether the newly proposed name is confusingly similar to existing ones by looking for visual likenesses in its appearance. ›››
news
/ May 11, 2008 10:27 AM PST
Public Interest Registry, the organization in charge of ".org" top-level domains, disclosed a planned fee increase in a May 1 letter to ICANN [PDF]. The fee increase does not require the ICANN's approval. PIR did not cite a reason in its letter. Earlier this year, VeriSign Inc., the company in charge of managing ".com" and ".net," also announced price increases. ›››
news
/ Apr 25, 2008 10:02 AM PST
The Internet is slowly inching closer to ratcheting up the security of its Domain Name System (DNS) server architecture: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) plans to go operational with DNSSEC later this year in one of its domains. ›››
news
/ Apr 21, 2008 8:58 AM PST
Google, in partnership with DomainTools, is now offering a Whois search capability which allows users to find registration and expiration dates of domain names when followed by the word 'whois' in Google's search box. A similar short-lived service was offered by Google a few years ago. ›››
news
/ Apr 21, 2008 7:39 AM PST
Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has posted its Change of Privacy Status... "As of June 10, 2008 the dot-ca (.ca) WHOIS will no longer release information about individual Registrants and their Adminstrative and Technical contacts, providing more thorough privacy protection for many of our Registrants." ›››
news
/ Apr 21, 2008 7:18 AM PST
Seeking to make money from mistyped domains, some of the United States' largest ISPs instead created a massive security hole that allowed hackers to use domain names of eBay, PayPal, Google and Yahoo, and virtually any other large site. The vulnerability was a dream scenario for phishers and cyber attackers looking for convincing platforms to distribute fake websites or malicious code. The hole was quickly and quietly patched last Friday after IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky reported the issue to Earthlink and its technology partner, a British ad company called Barefruit. Earthlink users, and some Comcast subscribers, were at risk. ›››
news
/ Apr 18, 2008 10:03 AM PST
The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there's one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace. Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising -- registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. ›››
news
/ Apr 15, 2008 12:32 PM PST
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has announced that Canadian Internet users have registered one million dot-ca (.ca) domains. Dot-ca ranks as the seventeenth largest Internet domain name registry when compared to generic domain names like dot-com and country specific domain names like dot-uk (United Kingdom). ›››
news
/ Apr 15, 2008 12:18 PM PST
A Parti Quebecois member of the national assembly is trying to drum up support to create a top-level domain for the Canadian province, Quebec -- predominantly a French-speaking population. Daniel Turp has started a petition to convince ICANN pointing out that Catalonia, an autonomous region in Spain, has its own national extension -- .cat, while the same goes for Greenland, a self-governing province in Denmark which uses .gl. Quebecers now use the extension .qc.ca, which indicates a website is a Canadian website. ›››
news
/ Mar 30, 2008 1:48 PM PST
The Scottish Nationalist Government is reportedly considering a formal request with ICANN seeking a ".sco" top-level domain to replace the distinctly "Unionist" .co.uk. Proposals which could see the endings of websites based in Scotland changed from '.co.uk' to '.sco' are currently being looked at by the finance secretary. The campaign for the '.sco' suffix has been led by Nationalist backbencher Christine Grahame and it will see to it that most Scottish Governments and agencies change their website suffixes immediately. ›››
news
/ Mar 28, 2008 1:54 PM PST
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has received 2,156 complaints alleging "abusive registration of trademarks on the Internet" in 2007, up 18 percent from 2006 and 48 percent more than the filings lodged in 2005. Most complaints came from the pharmaceutical, banking, telecommunications, retail and entertainment sectors. ›››
news
/ Mar 26, 2008 7:05 PM PST
It appears that many Japanese advertisers are no longer resorting to URL's as their primary means of promoting websites. While recently visiting Japan, blogger Cabel Sasser has made an interesting observation about this trend: "Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL's. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms! ...getting people to a specific page in a big site is difficult (who's going to write down anything after the first slash?)... But, I ask you: could this be done in the USA?" ›››
news
/ Mar 18, 2008 1:32 PM PST
The company behind the proposed .xxx top-level domain, which was rejected after the Bush administration intervened, has been trying to dig up embarrassing government documents through a federal lawsuit. Make that "was trying." Last week a federal judge granted summary judgment to the Bush administration in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the ICM Registry. ›››
news
/ Mar 12, 2008 6:05 PM PST
While generally lauding ICANN's effort, experts say that more is needed to address the use of fast-flux hosting by bot herders to rapidly shift their malicious web servers and domain-name servers from machine to machine to evade detection. "People are being impacted because they are trying to shoehorn a solution that doesn't fit the problem. Where fast-flux causes a problem is when you are trying to police the internet through some outdated mode like honeypotting or blacklisting. That just doesn't work in this environment," says one security researcher. ›››
news
/ Mar 07, 2008 4:17 PM PST
ICANN has suggested it should become independent of U.S. Department of Commerce oversight when the current Joint Project Agreement (JPA) with the agency expires in September 2009. However, some people have suggested the JPA should remain in place to provide accountability. Those include, Thomas Lenard, president and senior fellow at the conservative think tank iGrowGlobal, who has filed a comment with NTIA saying: "The fact that ICANN may be making progress toward meeting its responsibilities does not imply that the JPA is no longer needed..."
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news
/ Mar 06, 2008 9:07 AM PST
The March 2008 Domain Name Industry Brief released by VeriSign reports that "the Domain Name Industry closed 2007 with more than 153 million domain name registrations worldwide across all of the Top-Level Domain Names (TLDs), an increase of nearly 33 million domain name registrations since the close of 2006." A summary of the report follows... ›››