News Briefs

Rightside, Donuts Merger Gets the Green Light from ICANN

New top-level domain registry operators, Rightside Group, Ltd. (NASDAQ:NAME) and Donuts Inc. have received ICANN's express consent on their merger plans announced last month. more

CENTR Announces Public Release of the Code for Its Domain Crawler Project

This open-source initiative is designed to systematically gather and analyze data on new domain registrations, with the goal of enhancing transparency and fostering innovation across the European domain landscape. more

Latest Makadocs Malware Uses Google Drive Viewer As Proxy to Command and Control Server

Security researchers have found a new variant of the Macadocs malware to be using Google docs as a proxy server and not connecting to a command and control server directly. In a blog post on Friday, Symantec researcher Takashi Katsuki, wrote... more

Comcast Begins Pilot Market Deployment of IPv6

Comcast is now the first large ISP in North America to start deploying IPv6. According to the company, this initial phase will support certain types of directly connected customer premises equipment (CPE), where a single computer is connected directly to a cable modem. "Subsequent phases in 2011 and 2012 will support home gateway devices and variable length prefixes." more

California Attorney General Asks ICANN for Detailed Information On the .ORG Sale

A notice released by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has disclosed that the Office of the Attorney General of the State of California has requested extensive information from the agency regarding the proposed sale and transfer of Public Interest Registry (PIR) from the Internet Society (ISOC) to Ethos Capital. more

Vint Cerf: Internet Freedom Under Threat from Governments Around the World

Internet freedom is under threat from governments around the world, including the United States, warned Vint Cerf on Monday. Andrew Feinberg reporting in the Hill: "Cerf, a computer scientist who was instrumental in the Internet's creation, now employed by Google as its 'Internet evangelist,' said officials in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe are using intellectual property and cybersecurity issues 'as an excuse for constraining what we can and can't do on the 'net.' 'Political structures ... are often scared by the possibility that the general public might figure out that they don't want them in power,' he said." more

Ten Countries Face Significant Internet Disruption After African Coast to Europe Submarine Cable Cut

The ACE (African Coast to Europe) submarine cable that runs along the west coast of Africa between France and South Africa (connecting 22 countries), was damaged on March 30. more

Berners-Lee Talks Net Neutrality in Washington, “ISPs Should be Treated More Like Utilities”

Tim Berners-Lee is in Washington urging lawmakers to reconsider the rollback of net neutrality laws. more

Hospitals Advised to Prepare for a Month of Downtime Following Cyberattacks

The Joint Commission, a healthcare accreditation agency, has advised hospitals and health systems to brace for at least a month of downtime following a cyberattack, according to The Wall Street Journal. This recommendation is part of new guidelines released by the agency for handling IT security events. more

EURid Compensates Carbon Emissions With Wind Turbines

European TLD registry, EURid has announced that it is the first TLD Registry in Europe to be registered by the EU Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS). "EURid has taken an environmentally responsible approach to operating .eu for many years. Our environmental policy is based on the principle of 'reduce, reuse and recycle' and provides a framework for making sustainable choices." more

Thousands of UK Businesses, Individuals to Lose Their .EU Web Address in a No-Deal Brexit

The British government is urging close to 340,000 registered holders of .EU domain in Britain to make contingency plans as their web addresses will disappear if the UK does not agree on a deal with Brussels. more

A Quick Look at Today’s Amazon Outage

Craig Labovitz writes to report: At 18:40 UTC Amazon Web Services suffered performance issues for their North Virginia datacenter. The performance issues impacted services such as EC2, S3, SES, RDS, and Mechanical Turk among others. more

White House on SOPA: Protecting Intellectual Property Must Not Threaten Open, Innovative Internet

The White House today released a response to SOPA and PIPA petitions and the legislative approaches to combat online piracy. The response is prepared by Victoria Espinel, Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at Office of Management and Budget, Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, and Howard Schmidt, Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator for National Security Staff. more

FCC Chief Criticizes Russia for Passing Internet Censorship Bill

Brendan Sasso reporting in the Hill: "Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), issued a statement late Wednesday slamming Russia for passing a bill that would allow the government to blacklist certain websites. He said the country had moved in a 'troubling and dangerous direction.' ... 'The world’s experience with the Internet provides a clear lesson: a free and open Internet promotes economic growth and freedom; restricting the free flow of information is bad for consumers, businesses, and societies,' he said. more

Google Reported to Be Pushing Trump Administration for Exemption on Huawei Ban, Citing Security Risk

Reports on Friday said Google has indicated that the Huawei ban poses security risks for US consumers and is asking the Trump administration for an exception. According to a report by the Financial Times, Google executives are warning the ban will force China to develop its own Android software independent from Google and thus leading to security flaws and bugs. more