DNS

Mitigating Spoofed Attacks Using IPv6 Address Space

Timothy D. Morgan's recent paper titled, "IPv6 Address Cookies", seeks to apply the fundamental shift in resource availability brought about by the vastly increased Internet address space in IPv6 to develop a novel, lower cost solution to mitigating spoofed attacks. "Spoofed denial of service attacks have plagued the Internet for a number of years, and show no signs of abating. Research into mitigation techniques has apparently not led to a financially viable solution, and new attacks have been discovered in the wild without being widely anticipated". The following provides an introduction to this paper. more

Send a Message to NTIA

The Internet Governance Project is is urging Internet users everywhere, but especially those outside the United States, to respond to the NTIA Notice of Inquiry with the following statement: "The Internet's value is created by the participation and cooperation of people all over the world. The Internet is global, not national. Therefore no single Government should have a pre-eminent role in Internet governance. As the US reviews its contract with ICANN, it should work cooperatively with all stakeholders to complete the transition to a Domain Name System independent of US governmental control." more

Another Day in Court for CFIT vs. VeriSign and ICANN

The CFIT vs. VeriSign et. al. lawsuit had another day in court today. ...The key point coming out of a hearing today (Friday, June 09, 2006) in front of U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Whyte in San Jose, California is that the arguments made by CFIT against the .com deal between ICANN and VeriSign will continue. ...There was one moment of some drama. After lawyers for VeriSign and ICANN both argued that the 7 percent price increases without the need for justification would not be a violation of anti-trust law, Judge Whyte asked the lawyer for ICANN if it would be an anti-trust violation if VeriSign had been granted an annual 100 percent increase. The lawyer said, "no." Other lawyers for other matters sitting in the audience seemed to shift uneasily... more

Domain Tasting Target of US Federal Cybersquatting Lawsuit

So Domain Tasting, where registrants (who may also be registrars) taste names and keep only those that have economic value, is now the target of a federal cybersquatting lawsuit, brought about by lawyers for major brand name retailers Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman against major domain name registrar Dotster. This Dotster lawsuit involves allegations of cybersquatting by registrars who use the Create Grace Period, which is mandated by ICANN for global registries... more

Royal Cat Loses ICANN UDRP Action

This is serious. I'm not joking. You can look it up. Morgan Stanley brought a UDRP action involving the domain name 'mymorganstaleyplatinum.com' against a registrant identified as "Meow ("Respondent"), Baroness Penelope Cat of Nash DCB, Ashbed Barn, Boraston Track, Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire WR15 8LQ, GB." The decision summarizes the response... more

ITU Launches IDN Survey and ccTLD Outreach

Today, the ITU launched a new survey asking member states, ccTLDs and other ITU member organizations to provide answers to a specialized questionnaire asking for their experiences on the use of IDNs. The ITU states that it is reaching out to ccTLDs to "collect information and experiences on Internationalized Domain Names under ccTLD (country code Top Level Domain) around the globe." One of the goals of this survey is to collate information on the "needs and practices" of each ccTLD that is surveyed -- so as to compile a report from the ITU that speaks to the implementation of IDNs around the world... more

GG, IM, and JE: Welcome (officially) to ISO3166, Good Bye GB

I am often asked how to get a ccTLD by folks just coming in to the domain industry. There is RFC1591 as a start for reading material on the subject matter, and then there is ICP-1. I defer them to IANA, who defers to ICANN, who in turn defers to ISO and the ISO3166-1 list being the definitive list, and then you have to factor in some of the "reserved code elements" from their decoding table to normalize 3166 against the list of IANA Country Codes for ccTLD delegations like .EU. How does one get their ccTLD into the ISO list? The ISO in turn (likely due to the masses that contact them hoping to list their country) defer the criteria for what it is to be a 'country' for being on the 3166-1 list, and partially defer to the United Nations. more

Questioning Parked Domains and Google AdNonSense

Is contextual advertising helping or hurting the web? It basically started with Google Adsense even though the concept wasn't new. It had never been done on the scale that Google did it. Now we have Yahoo Publisher. MSN is building their version. We have Konterra and a whole lot of other companies scrambling to cash in on the contextual ad craze. Initially contextual advertising seems like a good idea. Ads based on the content of your website that might benefit your readers or visitors. Ads that are related to the content you produce that will also help you make a little money for your efforts. However greed ruins all good things. Now there are probably millions of webpages online that are built for the sole purpose of cashing in on contextual advertising. ...To make money with contextual advertising you want your content to be bad. Yes, you want it to be bad. more

New York Passing New Domain Name Law

In a move that flies in the face of established international guidelines, the New York Senate is pushing through a bill that would forbid registering the name of a living person with the purpose of selling the domain to that person. The New York Senate's bill is called "domain names cyber piracy protections act" and is championed by State Senator Betty Little (S2306). Generally speaking, registering a person's name solely to sell the domain to that person is a losing cause in UDRP arbitrations. But the New York bill is scary for a few reasons... more

DNSSEC Deployment at the Root

The DNSSEC is a security protocol for providing cryptographic assurance (i.e. using the public key cryptography digital signature technology) to the data retrieved from the DNS distributed database (RFC4033). DNSSEC deployment at the root is said to be subject to politics, but there is seldom detailed discussion about this "DNS root signing" politics. Actually, DNSSEC deployment requires more than signing the DNS root zone data; it also involves secure delegations from the root to the TLDs, and DNSSEC deployment by TLD administrations (I omit other participants involvement as my focus is policy around the DNS root). There is a dose of naivety in the idea of detailing the political aspects of the DNS root, but I volunteer! My perspective is an interested observer. more