Featured Blogs

WIPO Responds to Significant Cybersquatting Activity In 2005

In a report released today, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has announced a 20% increase in the number of cybersquatting (abusive registration of trademarks as domain names) cases filed in 2005 as compared to 2004. The report further indicates that "in 2005, a total of 1,456 cybersquatting cases were filed with WIPO's Arbitration and Mediation Center. This increase represents the highest number of cybersquatting cases handled by the WIPO Center since 2001." more

Let’s Not Forget About Solar Flares

As the world becomes more and more reliant on electronics, it's worth a periodic reminder that a large solar flare could knock out much of the electronics on earth. Such an event would be devastating to the Internet, satellite broadband, and the many electronics we use in daily life. A solar flare is the result of periodic ejections of matter from the sun into space. Scientists still aren't entirely sure what causes solar flares, but they know that it's somehow related to shifts in the sun's magnetic field. more

Who is Blocking WHOIS?

On April 16 ICANN issued a breach notice to Turkish Registrar Alantron for not consistently providing access to its WHOIS database via Port 43, a command-line query location that all Registrars are required to supply under conditions of their contract with ICANN under section 3.3.1. Four days later they issued a breach to Internet Group do Brazil for the same problem. ... The WHOIS record, as we all know, is a massive fraud with illicit parties filling records with bogus information and hiding behind anonymity. more

IPv6 Considered a Problem by Some Users

I have a Google Blog Search Alert looking for posts over IPv6 in my RSS reader. What strikes me is the number of posts explaining how to disable IPv6 in Windows Vista, MacOSX, Ubuntu and other flavours of Linux. It looks like disabling IPv6 makes web browsing faster for a lot of people, independently of which operating system is being used. more

Phone Always Busy? Must be DDoS on VoIP Network

Amidst the fascinating news from the SCO saga, preparing for SANS London and contributing to the Unix timeline project at Grokline my eyes caught a piece of rather distressing news on the BBC. It appears that BT (British Telecom) intends to move its current phone network to an IP-based network by 2009 thereby sending the circuit-switched technology off to the attic. The real question is: can we guarantee the same level of reliability on VoIP as we had on circuit-switched telephony when the stated aim is to carry both voice and data traffic down the same cables (or fibres more likely)? more

Why Digital Sovereignty Cannot Escape Its Own Contradictions? Reflections for Moving Forward

The debate surrounding digital sovereignty has gained momentum in recent years, particularly within BRICS nations, where governments seek to assert greater control over their digital ecosystems. Proponents of digital sovereignty often frame it as a necessary countermeasure against foreign technological dominance, positioning it as either a "positive" force- fostering local innovation and self-reliance- or a "negative" one- fueling authoritarian control and economic isolation. more

ICANN Responsible for Domain Name Trademark Mess

It is ICANN's responsibility to make sure domain names do not infringe on trademarks. To determine infringement, ICANN should rely in the short term on predictive models. Thus, domain name and trademark owners must start putting pressure on ICANN to assume its trademark responsibility. more

Providing Persistent Domain Names Under .ARPA

Some domains are too big to fail. Quite apart from the obvious ones like google.com and facebook.com, upon whose availability our everyday lives depends, there are many others upon which the infrastructure of the Internet (and much of the modern world itself) depends. These are domains like w3.org and ietf.org, which host the technical specifications which describe the World Wide Web and the Internet themselves. more

The Design of the Domain Name System, Part VIII - Names Outside the DNS

In previous installments we've been looking at aspects of the design of the DNS. In today's grand finale we look at the the subtle but very knotty issue of names inside and outside the DNS. In the early years of the DNS, domain names were typically resolved to A records which were used to identify a host running a service. With the notable exception of e-mail, once the host was identified, the name no longer mattered. more

Latest Turn of Events on .XXX, from ICANN Wellington

As the ICANN's week-long meeting in Wellington, New Zealand is now fully underway, the approval of the proposed .XXX top-level domain (TLD) continues to remain a key topic of discussion and its eventual approval yet uncertain. The .XXX TLD was widely expected to receive its final approval at the ICANN's last meeting held in Vancouver about 4 months earlier but the discussion was unexpectedly delayed as the organization and governments requested more time to review the merits of setting up such a domain. Stuart Lawley, president of the would-be .XXX operator ICM Registry LLC offers his comments from Wellington. more

DNS Policy is Hop by Hop; DNS Security is End to End

The debate continues as to whether ISP's can effectively filter DNS results in order to protect brand and copyright holders from online infringement. It's noteworthy that there is no argument as to whether these rights holders and their properties deserve protection - nobody is saying "content wants to be free" and there is general agreement that it is harder to protect rights in the Internet era where perfect copies of can be made and distributed instantaneously. What we're debating now is just whether controlling DNS at the ISP level would work at all and whether the attempt to insert such controls would damage Secure DNS (sometimes called DNSSEC). more

VeriSign’s Anti-Trust Claim Against ICANN Dismissed

ICANN confirmed today that Judge A. Howard Matz of the U.S. District Court, Central District of California has issued an order dismissing VeriSign, Inc.'s anti-trust claims against ICANN, with prejudice. In dismissing VeriSign's anti-trust claims, Judge Matz noted that VeriSign had failed in its first amended complaint to sufficiently allege an anti-trust claim. more

Communicate.com to Receive $1 Million for Four Domain Names

An e-commerce company, Communicate.com Inc., that develops, owns, and operates a network of websites specializing in travel, consumer goods, sports/lifestyle and B-to-B (business to business) has announced that it has entered into an agreement to sell Automobile.com, Exercise.com, Body.com and Makeup.com for $1 million to Manhattan Assets, Inc., a private U.S. corporation. A non-refundable initial payment of $200,000 has been received. more

The IETF Evolution

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a collaborative body that has developed internetworking specifications for more than five decades, successfully shaping the global marketplace of digital network equipment and services. Beginning as a kind of distributed think tank among network researchers in 1969, it evolved to become one of the world's most influential standards bodies. more

The Rumors of Sender ID’s Demise Are Exaggerated

While several news stories are reporting that Sender-ID has been killed, that is not entirely true. While Sender-ID in its current form is dead because of Purported Responsible Address (PRA), the compromise version with MAILFROM and PRA scopes is not. Also, the co-chairs want to stay away from any other alternative algorithms that do RFC2822 checking because of possible Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) claims by Microsoft on that as well. Andrew Newton, one of two co-chairs of the working group, wrote in an email today to the group's discussion forum... more