Featured Blogs

Reputation and “The Cloud”

As Reddit recently learned it's not a great idea to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host mailservers. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them related to the reputation of mail coming from EC2 servers. When you're using machines in the cloud, changing IP addresses is as simple as initializing a new server. Spammers discovered this almost as soon as the EC2 cloud became public. more

Trademark Holder Not Entitled to Domain Name Registered Years Before

Startups in the process of selecting a company or product name are often frustrated to see that someone else, years ago, registered the .com version of their newly thought-of name. Similarly, companies that have acquired a trademark registration wonder whether they can use their crisp new registration certificate to stomp out someone else who has been using a domain name similar to the company's new mark. A recent case arising under the UDRP shows us that the earlier domain name registration is usually going to be on solid ground against a later-arriving trademark owner. more

IPv6: Circling the IPv4 Wagons for a Last Stand

The last remaining stocks disappear from the shelves more quickly than ever before . . . IPv4 addresses that is. As the ARIN met in Toronto in April, an inordinate amount of time was spent yet again debating proposals on how to handle the dwindling stock of IPv4 addresses. I get the distinct impression that some people will still be tabling proposals and discuss the issue long after the last IPv4 block has been allocated by IANA and even the RIR's themselves. more

UTOPIA, Perfection or Fantasy: Partnering Public-Private Sectors With Broadband

Utopia: the definition brings about visions of an "ideal place or state", or "a system of political and social perfection." Thus became the name chosen for a consortium of sixteen Utah cities building their own broadband infrastructure with a fiber-to-the-premise architecture, while offering residents a clear and alternative choice to incumbent operators, including Quest and Comcast. Is it perfection or fantasy? more

Buying Open Source… It’s a Different Ecosystem

A lot of organizations are interested in open source software, but fail to give it a fair chance compared to proprietary solutions. One reason for this is that the typical invitation to tender process puts open source at a disadvantage. Open source, as it happens, is made in a different ecosystem. more

The Real Issue About ICANN and .XXX

Way back in 2004, ICANN invited applications for a round of new TLDs. They got quite a few. Some were uncontroversial, such as .JOBS for the HR industry. Some were uncontroversial but took a long time, such as .POST which took five years of negotiation, entirely due to the legal peculiarities of the registry being part of the UN. But one was really controversial, .XXX. By 2005, the applicant, ICM registry, had satisfied all the criteria that ICANN set out in the 2004 round to get .XXX approved, and ICANN has been stalling them ever since... more

First .emarat Arabic Script Domain Name is Live!

The .emarat Arabic script Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) ccTLD for the United Arab Emirates has been entered into the DNS Root Zone and is therefore now resolving. This is a truly historic moment in the development of the Internet in the United Arab Emirates and the wider Arabic-speaking world as it removes the last hurdle preventing people without English-language skills from enjoying the full benefits that the Internet has to offer. more

By the way… Your IDN is Live.

Just when you think ICANN has got it right, it shoots itself in the foot as only ICANN can. Unfortunately it seems this is yet another case of one step forward and two steps back. While we should be celebrating the fact that Internationalised Domain Names (IDN's) have finally been entered into the Root Zone, we are instead left shaking our heads at the seemingly nonexistent process lines nor communication lines between ICANN and its technical off-shoot IANA. more

How to Place Top-Level Domain Trust Anchors in the Root

The project to sign the DNS root zone with DNSSEC took an additional step toward completion yesterday with the last of the "root server" hosts switching to serving signed DNSSEC data. Now every DNS query to a root server can return DNSSEC-signed data, albeit the "deliberately unvalidatable" data prior to the final launch. Another key piece for a working signed root is the acceptance of trust anchors in the form of DS records from top-level domain operators. These trust anchors are used to form the chain of trust from the root zone to the TLD. more

The Exponential S-Curve Hastens Decline of Asset Values

At the moment we are facing the end stage of a relatively large range of traditional products and services. The reason for this is that for a long time traditional industries have been able to delay the arrival of the decline phase of many of their products, basically because of the monopolistic, or at least dominant, structures of many of the industry sectors -- and in particular telecoms, media, energy and banking. more

Network Neutrality and the FCC’s Inability to Calibrate Regulation of Convergent Operators

For administrative convenience and not as required by law, the FCC likes to apply an either/or single regulatory classification to convergent operators. Having classified ISPs as information service providers, the Commission unsuccessfully sought to sanction Comcast's meddling with subscribers' peer-to-peer traffic. Now Chairman Genachowski wants to further narrow and nuance regulatory oversight without changing the organic information service classification. more

Why Aren’t There More Spam Lawsuits?

The CAN SPAM act has been in place for five and a half years. Compatible state laws have been in place nearly as long. Anti-spam laws in the EU, Australia, and New Zealand were enacted years ago. But the number of significant anti-spam lawsuits is so small that individual bloggers can easily keep track of them. Considering that several billion spams a day are sent to people's inboxes, where are all the anti-spam lawsuits? more

Say No to WIPO’s Proposal to Amend the PDDRP to Create New Law

A number of comments to ICANN's proposed Post Delegation Dispute Resolution Process for new gTLD Registry Operators support a proposal by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to hold a registry operator accountable for trademark infringement that occurs within a TLD if it "knowingly permitted, or could not have reasonably been unaware of" infringing domain names within the TLD. more

When Registrars Look the Other Way, Drug-Dealers Get Paid

Since November of last year we have been discussing the problem of illicit and illegal online pharmacy support by ICANN-accredited Registrars. In several articles and direct contact with the Registrars we have tirelessly tried to convey the seriousness of this problem, many listened, some did not... With the background information already known, the case presented here is much more specific and concerns EvaPharmacy, which was until recently, the world's largest online criminal pharmacy network. more

DNSSEC Root Signature, Almost There!

IT security specialists have known for years that the plain DNS is not to be trusted. Any hope for improvement rests on the DNSSEC protocol deployment. In this post, I will review the current status in one critical aspect, namely the DNS root signature key management. The other two foremost are the application usage of DNSSEC protocol functionality and the operational front, or the extent of deployment in the DNS infrastructure. The operational front includes the support by the DNS root nameservers, but my focus on signature key management leaves this issue aside. more