Featured Blogs

The Real Problem with dot-XXX

Shakespeare has Marcellus say in Act 1 of Hamlet, "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark." ...Milton Mueller, in his recent post to this site, would have us believe that since ICANN's Board long ago agreed that ICM's application for dot-xxx registry satisfied its own criteria for a sponsored TLD, then the only explanation for all the delay is, "I'm beginning to think that ICANN's approach to TLD approval was cooked up by a demented sergeant from Abu Ghraib." Milton goes on to assert that ICM's claim on dot-xxx is protected by the 1st Amendment. If this is so, then why after more than six years of discussion, is dot-xxx still raising such a fuss? more

Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet?

I have long been intrigued by the question of how do we turn the internet into a lifeline grade infrastructure... My hope that this will occur soon or even within decades is diminishing. Most of us observe, almost daily, how even well established infrastructures tend to crumble when stressed, even slightly... I was at the O'Reilly Etel conference last week. The content was impressive and the people there were frequently the primary actors in the creation and deployment of VOIP. However, not once during the three days did I hear a serious discussion by a speaker or in the hallways about how this evolving system would be managed, monitored, diagnosed, or repaired. more

XXX Comes to a Head

Just when you thought the .xxx affair couldn't get any worse, it does. I'm beginning to think that ICANN's approach to TLD approval was cooked up by a demented sergeant from Abu Ghraib... Now, after the triple x people negotiated with ICANN's staff a contract that met all prior objections, and heads into what should be its final approval, word is that a few ICANN Board members are leaning in a negative direction. What is the reason? A group of pornographers has organized a campaign against .xxx, flooding ICANN's comment box with overwhelmingly negative remarks. more

Who is ICANN and Where Does it Fit With Internet Governance?

You'd be surprised how many people are asking that question at the moment, but you won't be surprised to know that the only thing they agree on is that they either don't know, or that they disagree with the people that believe they do. I am not going to attempt to provide my own answer, but I will point to a paper just released by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST). POST, among other things, produces regular, concise briefings for the UK Parliament on whatever are the important topics of the time. And they have now done one on Internet Governance. more

Social Networking and Web 2.0 Creating DNS Performance Issues for Carriers

A revolution is taking place on the Internet, with new sites redefining how we interact online. The next-generation Internet is emerging in collaborative and interactive applications and sites with rich, varied media (images, video, music). As with many revolutions, this one is driven by the younger generation, which is adopting social networking sites like MySpace and video sharing sites like Google's YouTube. But the general shift is not restricted to the young, as more mature consumers and businesses alike are exploring the possibilities of collaborative, media-rich applications. This major shift in Internet applications has its unintended victims. One of them turns out to be the Domain Name System (DNS). more

Why I left the ICANN At Large Advisory Committee

For about the last two years, I was a member of ICANN's At Large Advisory Commitee (ALAC), the group charged with representing the interests of ordinary Internet users within ICANN. In case anyone is wondering, here's why I'm not on the ALAC any more. ICANN has a very narrow mission. They maintain the root zone, the list of top-level domain names in the Internet's domain name system. They coordinate numeric IP addresses, with the real work delegated to five Regional Internet Registries. And they keep track of some simple and uncontroversial technical parameters for Internet routing applications... more

Domain Aftermarket Overdue for an “Asset Repricing”

For the last couple years the domain aftermarket has been hot again, we're seeing valuations not seen since bubble1.0, which saw valuations like 7 million dollars for business.com and 4 million for drugs.com. The TechWreck was induced by the NASDAQ crash of 2000 and the fun was over for awhile. What differentiates this bubble in the domain aftermarket from Bubble 1.0 is domain parking and monetization... The interesting thing is since then, the multiples on domain names have outstripped the multiples on developed websites. To me, this is the equivalent of the "inverted yield curve" that portends economic recessions. more

Cybersquatting and Geopolitics Heats Up

Cybersquatting is so 2000, or so we thought. The Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) at WIPO has been chugging along for several years now, methodically determining if complainants IP rights have been violated and reassigning "ownership" of domain names. Typically, the cases are fairly boring. But some recent developments in the world of 800 lb search gorillas, Google and Baidu, suggests that the regime could be faced with substantial pressure in the near future. more

ICANN Threatens RegisterFly Termination

ICANN sent a 10-page letter to RegisterFly on February 21st threatening to terminate its accreditation. The letter is available here. ICANN's not exactly advertising this -- no conspicuous notice appears on its home page and, more curiously, no update has been posted by the Ombudsman despite two prior postings about RegisterFly in the past week. A member of the general public would be hard pressed to find out that any action has been threatened. more

When is a Typo Not a Typo?

I was reading about the Nieman Marcus lawsuit and on a phone call related to the "Working Group on Mechanisms to Protect Rights of Others", when suddenly it occurred to me that this whole rush to rid the world of typos could eventually head in a messy direction... How far can this go? Let me take you back to that phone call I was on where representatives of Yahoo indicated they would try to secure Flicker.XXX as a TYPO of Flickr.com (their made up brand name) during a potential new TLD sunrise period. How backward is that? A Typo that became a brand, trying to call the generic name a variant of their trademark! more

ICA Questions ICANN on RegisterFly

The Internet Commerce Association sent this letter to ICANN yesterday in regard to the RegisterFly situation: "I am writing to you in my capacity as Counsel to the Internet Commerce Association (ICA), a non-profit trade association dedicated to promoting and protecting the rights of domain name (DN) owners... It has come to our attention that an ICANN-accredited registrar is in the midst of what appears to be a near-complete operational breakdown, and that its ongoing failure to carry out its responsibilities is causing substantial economic loss to tens of thousands of DN registrants in both the United States and multiple foreign jurisdictions." more

Commercial DNSSEC?

Seems that DNSSEC is being subjected to what an old boss of mine used to call the "fatal flaw seeking missiles" which try to explain the technical reasons that DNSSEC is not being implemented. First it was zone walking, then the complexity of Proof of Non-Existence (PNE), next week ... one shudders to think. While there is still some modest technical work outstanding on DNSSEC, NSEC3 and the mechanics of key rollover being examples, that work, of itself, does not explain the stunning lack of implementation or aggressive planning being undertaken within the DNS community. more

How Many Bots? How Many Botnets?

We touched on this subject in the past, but recently Rich Kulawiek wrote a very interesting email to NANOG to which I replied, and decided to share my answer here as well: I stopped really counting bots a while back. I insisted, along with many friends, that counting botnets was what matters. When we reached thousands we gave that up. We often quoted anti-nuclear weapons proliferation sentiments from the Cold War, such as: "why be able to destroy the world a thousand times over if once is more than enough?" we often also changed it to say "3 times" as redundancy could be important... more

Picking Domain Names by Search Results

There is a definite advantage to knowing what users look for when typing in domain names that they think should work. This article from Government Computer News shows an excellent example in .gov. "600,000 visitors a year to FirstGov try to find the federal government's Web site by typing USA.gov into their browser", so they switched from firstgov.gov to usa.gov. It wasn't mentioned in the article, but firstgov.gov redirects automatically; this is more intelligence than I normally expect from US government web sites. more

Web Server Botnets and Server Farms as Attack Platforms

Are file inclusion vulnerabilitiess equivalent to remote code execution? Are servers (both Linux and Windows) now the lower hanging fruit rather than desktop systems? In the February edition of the Virus Bulletin magazine, we (Kfir Damari, Noam Rathaus and Gadi Evron (me) of Beyond Security) wrote an article on cross platform web server malware and their massive use as botnets, spam bots and generally as attack platforms. Web security papers deal mostly with secure coding and application security. In this paper we describe how these are taken to the next level with live attacks and operational problems service providers deal with daily. more