News Briefs

PIR Invites Bids for .Org Back-End Operations

In a post today, Public Interest Registry (PIR), the not-for-profit operator of the .org, .ngo and .ong domains, has announced a Request for Information for the management of its back-end registry services. Afilias which has been the technical provider for PIR since it was established by ISOC following the successful ISOC/Afilias strategic partnership in the bid for .ORG in 2002, says it has been expecting an RFP since the last contract was signed and that it remains committed to its continued work with the organization. more

US Senate Gives Final OK to Ban Internet Taxes

The U.S. Senate today passed legislation placing a permanent ban on states' taxing Internet access, sending the measure to President Obama for signing into law. more

TLD Operators Should Not Police Content, Says EFF

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a letter today stating "companies and organizations that run the Internet's domain name system shouldn't be in the business of policing the contents of websites, or enforcing laws that can impinge on free speech. more

Obama Proposes $19 Billion for Cybersecurity in Final Budget Plan

President Obama is seeking a 35 percent increase in cybersecurity funding in his final budget to boost the capability of the federal government to defend itself against cyberattacks, reports Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post. more

ICANN Names Göran Marby as New President and CEO

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today released the much anticipated news regarding its new President and CEO. Göran Marby, currently Director-General of the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority (PTS), has been named ICANN's next President and CEO. Marby will succeed current President and CEO Fadi Chehadé whose term finishes on March 15, 2016. more

Cisco’s Big Bet on IoT, Acquires Jasper for $1.4 Billion

Cisco has announced its intent to acquire Jasper Technologies, Inc., a privately held company based in Santa Clara, which provides a cloud-based IoT service platform helping enterprises and service providers launch, manage and monetize IoT services on a global scale. more

Mozilla Announces End of Firefox OS, Will Put Focus on IoT

Development of Firefox OS will soon cease completely and by the end of May, company has announced, it will pull all staff and resources completely away from Firefox OS. "The circumstances of multiple established operating systems and app ecosystems meant that we were playing catch-up, and the conditions were not there for Mozilla to win on commercial smartphones," according to a statement from Mozilla developer George Roter. more

ICANN Denies .GAY’s Request for Reconsideration

ICANN's Board Governance Committee (BGC) today released its comments on recent reconsideration request of dotgay LLC's new top-level domain .GAY application. Kevin Murphy from Domain Incite reports: "ICANN has refused dotgay LLC's latest appeal against adverse .gay decisions, and has taken the unusual step of preemptively defending itself against probably inevitable accusations from gay right groups." more

Cuba to Launch Residential Broadband

Cuba has announced it is launching country's first broadband home Internet servicea, a potentially major step forward in bringing the island online. more

New gTLD ‘.shop’ Sells for 41.5 Million at Auction, Highest Sale to Date

GMO Registry, Inc, a Japanese domain name registry business, has won the rights to a single new top-level domain, .shop, for $41.5 million. more

U.S. Officials Asking Cuba to Speed Up Its Internet Infrastructure Build Out

A number of Senior U.S. officials and business leaders visited Cuba last week and urged the government to speed up its build out of Internet infrastructure and to make it more widely available, Mario Trujillo reports in The Hill. more

Facebook Building Its Next Datacenter in Ireland, Most Advanced in the World Company Says

Facebook has announced the construction of a new $220 million (€200 million) data centre in Clonee, County Meath, Ireland. This will be Facebook's sixth data center worldwide and the company's second in Europe, after Luleå in Sweden. more

Reported Cyberattack Against Israel Only Ransomware to Regulatory Body, Electric Grid Not In Danger

Ransomware via a phishing attack was sent to Israel Electric Authority, not the power grid, as was heavily reported in mainstream media today. According to a cyber analyst in Israel (Eyal Sela) the media reporting so far is misleading with regards to the context around the incident, reports Robert M. Lee of SANS Institute. more

Israel Becoming a Go-To Place for Cybersecurity

A report released by IVC Research Center in advance of this year's annual Cybertech 2016, highlights how a tight interplay between industry, investors, and the government has turned Israel into a center of cybersecurity technology. more

91.3% of Malware Use DNS as a Key Capability

Nearly 92 percent of malware use DNS to gain command and control, exfiltrate data or redirect traffic, according to Cisco's 2016 Annual Security Report. It warns that DNS is often a security "blind spot" as security teams and DNS experts typically work in different IT groups within a company and don't interact frequently. more