Featured Blogs

Brad Templeton in Response to Site Finder Controversy

A harmful, highly unilateral and capricious action. Tons of software out there depended on the ability to tell the difference between a domain name which exists and does not. They use that to give a meaningful, locally defined error to the user, or to identify if an E-mail address will work or not before sending the mail. Many used it as a way to tag spam (which came from domains that did not exist). It is the local software that best knows how to deal with the error. more

Comcast’s Impressive System for Notifying Infected Users

Pretty much as long as there've been computers, one of the biggest challenges has been user education. How do you create software smart enough to inform a user when they're about to do something potentially disastrous - or, worse, when something disastrous has been done to them? As one of the world's largest access providers, Comcast has put a ton of thought into developing a notification system for their users. The solution Comcast developed involves, in effect, hijacking HTTP requests... more

New Zealand Releases Revamped Three Strikes Proposal

The New Zealand government has released a revamped three strikes proposal that incorporates full court hearings and the possibility of financial penalties. A prior proposal, which would have resulted in subscriber access being terminated without court oversight, was dropped earlier this year following public protest. more

TLD Domain Abuse: Threat Report - First Half 2011

When it comes to building a robust globe-spanning network of crimeware and making the victims dance to a tune of the cyber-criminals' choosing, you're guaranteed to find domain name abuse at the heart of the operation. DNS provides the critical flexibility and underlying scalability of modern command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure. Cyber-criminals that master DNS (and manage to maintain the stream of new domain registrations that keep it fed) tend to find themselves in command of the largest and most profitable crimeware networks. more

EFF’s Emerging Alignment With Offshore Internet Pharmacies

The last few years have been challenging ones for members of the Canadian International Pharmacy Association. First, in 2010, they lost their ability to advertise in the US search space after the US Department of Justice noted that many seemingly "Canadian" pharmacy websites "sell drugs obtained from countries other than Canada" when shipping medicines into the US, and major search advertising programs tightened their policies, effectively excluding CIPA's members from advertising in the US. more

China Tightens Internet Control in the Name of Fighting Porn, Piracy, and Cybercrime

As the year draws to a close, China's blocking of overseas websites - including Facebook, Twitter, and thousands of other websites including my blog - is more extensive and technically more sophisticated than ever. Controls over domestic content have also been tightening. People who work for Chinese Internet companies continue to complain that they remain under heavy pressure... more

Less is More – The Sales Boom in Short Character Domain Names

Much of the domain industry has seen a huge surge in sales of 2, 3 & 4 character sales. More specifically numeric domain sales are ever increasing mostly driven by Chinese buyers. As such domain marketplaces are utilizing and developing stronger connections in China to foster this growth even further while creating awareness for why this is occurring. When talk turns to economic and trade growth, China is never left out of the conversation. This talk extends to the domain market as well. more

Internet Zombies

Today on Dave Farber's IP list, someone revived the ancient argument that ICANN imposes limits on the number of top level domains (TLDs) because to have more than a few will cause DNS to wobble and cause the internet to collapse. Although long discredited, that argument hangs around like a zombie. ICANN has never been able to adduce a shred of proof that there is anything to support that assertion... more

Only Structural Change Can Save the Mobile Industry

I regularly bring this issue forward, similar to the discussion in relation to the structural separation of the fixed networks, which I began just over a decade ago. What we are seeing in the mobile industry is an infrastructure and a spectrum crunch. The amount of spectrum needed to satisfy people's demand from mobile phones, tablets and soon a range of other smart devices is limitless. Mobile carriers are scrambling for spectrum... more

NeuStar Experiences Partial Outage as DynDNS Tries to Turn up the Heat

NeuStar's UltraDNS faced attack on two fronts on Tuesday, March 31. One of the attacks was technical -- a massive denial-of-service attack. The second was a rather surprising opening strike from competitor Dynamic Network Services (DynDNS), which launched a full-scale (and in T1R's opinion, misguided) public relations broadside. First, to the actual denial of service attack. Contrary to many early reports, UltraDNS was not 'down' on Tuesday... more

Where Has the Domain Name Growth Gone?

It is pretty common knowledge now that domain name growth started to drop around two years ago and is falling still. At this rate there is every chance that TLDs that have only ever seen growth will start to see a decline sometime in the next few years. What follows is a theory on where that growth has gone. It is widely stated that the greater choice provided by hundreds of new gTLDs means that demand is dissipating across them and that's where the growth has gone. more

The JavaScript Ecosystem

JavaScript started out as a simple extension for the browser but has become so much more. In part, this is true in building on rich concepts going back to Lisp. Along the way, it has challenged the givens of programming and given us a high-performance flexible language along with rich libraries and rich tools. We're just beginning to discover the possibilities. more

More than 85% of Top 500 Most Highly-Trafficked Websites Vulnerable

Over the last 5 years, hacktivists have continued the practice of redirecting well-known domain names to politically motivated websites utilizing tactics such as SQL injection attacks and social engineering schemes to gain access to domain management accounts -- and that, in and of itself, is not surprising. But what IS surprising is the fact that less than 15% of the 500 most highly trafficked domains in the world are utilizing Registry Locking. more

Bashbleed - A Nasty Reminder Never to Forget Security 101

After the botched burglary at the Watergate Apartments, every scam and scandal that hit the headlines became a 'gate' -- Irangate, Contragate, you name it. The Heartbleed bug is possibly the closest thing to Watergate that this generation of computer security had seen till the past few days -- an exploit in a component that is "just there" -- something you utterly rely on to be there and perform its duties, and give very little thought to how secure (or rather, insecure) it might be. So, fittingly, every such catastrophic bug in an ubiquitous component is now a 'bleed'. more

Two More Crypto Holes

If you work in computer security, your Twitter feed and/or Inbox has just exploded with stories about not just one but two new holes in cryptographic protcols. One affects WiFi; the other affects RSA key pair generation by certain chips. How serious are these? I'm not going to go through the technical details. For KRACK, Matthew Green did an excellent blog post; for the other, full details are not yet available. There are also good articles on each of them. What's more interesting are the implications. more