News Briefs

Lack of ccTLD Growth in Africa Only Partially Due to Internet Penetration

ICANN says that, "the lack of ccTLD growth in africa is due to Internet penetration". However, Gideon Rop of DotConnectAfrica and an Internet Governance expert in the African landscape, expressed a different opinion during the Africa DNS forum in Nairobi. more

GSA Looking Into .gov Outages

"The General Services Administration is analyzing what caused an outage of .gov websites for a few hours Wednesday morning," reports Federal Times. Officials said the problem involved so-called DNSSEC cybersecurity measures that affected access to certain .gov sites, according to GSA spokeswoman Mafara Hobson. more

ISOC Joins Opposition to Stop Online Piracy Act

In a letter released on Monday, the Internet Society Board of Trustees has expressed concern with a number of U.S. legislative proposals that would mandate DNS blocking and filtering by ISPs to protect the interests of copyright holders. "Policies mandating DNS filtering undermine the open architecture of the Internet and raise human rights and freedom of expression concerns," says Internet Society (ISOC). more

UK Government Planning on New Laws for IoT Devices Including a Mandatory Security Labelling Scheme

The UK government on Wednesday announced plans to introduce new laws for internet connected devices to better enforce the inclusion of basic cybersecurity features into IoT devices. more

FTC Announces Internet of Things Challenge, Offers $25,000 for Best Technical Solution

The Federal Trade Commission is challenging the public to create an innovative tool to help protect consumers from security vulnerabilities in the software of home devices connected to the Internet of Things. more

China Accuses Washington of Damaging Global Trade With Huawei Sanctions

Today, China accused Washington of damaging global trade with sanctions against the tech giant Huawei and says it will protect Chinese companies. more

Data Growth, IoT Will Lead to Unlimited Energy Consumption If Not Controlled, Scientists Warn

Researchers from Lancaster University's School of Computing and Communications have warned that the rapid growth of remote digital sensors and devices connected to the internet -- Internet of Things -- has the potential to bring unprecedented and, in principle, almost unlimited rises in energy consumed by smart technologies. more

ISOC’s DNSSEC Deployment Map Available In Global Internet Maps (Interactive)

Internet Society's DNSSEC Deployment Maps are now available as part of a larger set of Global Internet Maps from its annual Global Internet Report. The map is based off of the 5 stages of DNSSEC deployment that the organization tracks as part of the weekly DNSSEC deployment maps generated. more

Microsoft Deploys Underwater Prototype Data Center With 864 Servers off the Scottish Coast

Microsoft has placed an experimental data center the size of a shipping container on the seafloor near Scotland's Orkney Islands to test the feasibility of saving energy by naturally cooling it in the sea. more

Russian Hackers Have Penetrated U.S. Electric Utilities

U.S. federal government officials have revealed Russian hackers have been able to gain access to the networks of electric utilities in the country, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. more

Researches Demonstrate How IPv6 Attacks Can Bypass Network Intrusion Detection Systems

With the increasing popularity of IoT devices and the added interest of transition to IPv6, a whole new range of threat vectors are evolving that allow attackers to set up undetectable communications channels across networks. more

‘Spam King’ Sanford Wallace Sentenced to 2.5 Years In Prison

The 47 year old Las Vegas man known as the "Spam King" has been sentenced to 2.5 years in federal prison for sending over half-million spam messages to Facebook users resulting in over 27 million spam messages sent through social networking company's servers. He pleaded guilty last year to one count of fraud. more

New Zealand’s Domain Name Commission Wins Appeal in Lawsuit Against US DomainTools

New Zealand's Domain Name Commission (DNC) wins in court against the US company DomainTools for "illegally scrapping personal information" of .nz domain name owners. more

Google Notifying Half a Million Users Affected By DNSChanger

Google has announced that it has started undertaking an effort to notify roughly half a million people whose computers or home routers are infected with a well-publicized form of malware known as DNSChanger. "After successfully alerting a million users last summer to a different type of malware, we've replicated this method and have started showing warnings via a special message that will appear at the top of the Google search results page for users with affected devices." more

Google Building a Third Data Center in Singapore to Keep up With Rapid Growth in the Region

Google built its first Southeast Asia data center in Singapore back in 2011 and quickly expanded to a second building in 2015. more