DNS

WIPO Panel Splits on Descriptiveness of bocaresorts.com

An arbitration panel of the World Intellectual Property Organization has decided 2-1 in favor of Complainant Boca Raton Resort & Club in an action under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy over the domain name bocaresorts.com. ...The Presiding Panelist, Dennis Foster, disagreed with the majority's conclusion, and issued a dissent that addressed the issue of bad faith. Foster asserted that the Respondent was "entitled to believe that the phrase 'Boca Resorts' is geographically descriptive and means resorts in the city of Boca Raton, Florida... more

What is ‘Pharming’ and Should You Be Worried?

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! ...or is it? What is this thing called "pharming"? Put simply, it's redirection of web traffic, so that the server you think you're talking to actually belongs to a criminal. For example: you think you're talking to www.examplebank.com because it says so in the browser's address bar, but actually you're connected to www.mafia-R-us.ru. This can happen in three main ways: 1. DNS Hijack: a social engineering attack on the Internet infrastructure... more

What’s in a Name?

What's the difference between .local and .here? Or between .onion and .apple? All four of these labels are capable of being represented in the Internet's Domain Name System as a generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), but only two of these are in fact delegated names. The other two, .local and .onion not only don't exist in the delegated name space, but by virtue of a registration in the IANA's Special Use Domain Name registry, these names cannot exist in the conventional delegated domain name space. more

The Dark Internet

I consult on communication issues for Neustar, an Internet infrastructure company. As most CircleIDers know, Neustar works behind the scenes to ensure the smooth operation of many critical systems like DNS, .us and .biz, local number portability and digital rights management. One of the cool things about working for them is the chance to attend the events they sponsor. Last week Neustar held a security briefing for senior federal IT personnel focused on Cybersecurity and Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC)... more

Breaking the Internet HOWTO: The Unintended Consequences of Governmental Actions

"Breaking the Internet" is really hard to do. The network of networks is decentralized, resilient and has no Single Point Of Failure. That was the paradigm of the first few decades of Internet history, and most people involved in Internet Governance still carry that model around in their heads. Unfortunately, that is changing and changing rapidly due to misguided government intervention. more

Something’s Cooking at IETF with Email Authentication

A few months ago, Ted Hardie (AD of Applications for the IETF) informed the MARID WG in the closure announcement as follows: "Given the importance of the world-wide email and DNS systems, it is critical that IETF-sponsored experimental proposals likely to see broad deployment contain no mechanisms that would have deleterious effects on the overall system. The Area Directors intend, therefore, to request that the experimental proposals be reviewed by a focused technology directorate..." more

ICANN at the Inflection Point: Implications and Effects Of the GAC Beijing Communique

Although this article was first published just a few days ago, on May 8th, there have been several important intervening developments. First, on May 10th ICANN released a News Alert on "NGPC Progress on GAC Advice" that provides a timetable for how the New gTLD program Committee will deal with the GAC Communique. Of particular note is that, as the last action in an initial phase consisting of "actions for soliciting input from Applicants and from the Community', the NGPC will begin to "Review and consider Applicant responses to GAC Advice and Public Comments on how Board should respond to GAC Advice... more

ALAC Statement on Site Finder

The ICANN At-Large Advisory Committee would like to bring to ICANN's attention concerns about VeriSign's surprising roll-out of the "SiteFinder" service for .com and .net. This practice raises grave technical concerns, as it de facto removes error diagnostics from the DNS protocol, and replaces them by an error handling method that is tailored for HTTP, which is just one of the many Internet protocols that make use of the DNS.
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Industry Insights: RDAP Becomes Internet Standard

Earlier this year, the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF’s) Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced that several Proposed Standards related to the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), including three that I co-authored, were being promoted to the prestigious designation of Internet Standard. Initially accepted as proposed standards six years ago, RFC 7480, RFC 7481, RFC 9082 and RFC 9083 now comprise the new Standard 95. RDAP allows users to access domain registration data and could one day replace its predecessor the WHOIS protocol. more

The WSIS Deal

There is considerable coverage this morning (or this evening in Tunis) on the last minute WSIS deal struck yesterday. The gist of the coverage rightly reports that the U.S. emerged with the compromise they were looking for as the delegates agreed to retain ICANN and the ultimate U.S. control that comes with it (note that there is a lot in the WSIS statement that may ultimately prove important but that is outside the Internet governance issue including the attention paid to cybercrime, spam, data protection, and e-commerce). This outcome begs the questions -- what happened? And, given the obvious global split leading up to Tunis, what changed to facilitate this deal? more

A Tangled Web

A recent ICANNfocus article discussed the magnitude of ICANN's legal fees. Specifically, ICANNfocus questioned whether the extent of ICANN's legal fees, about 20% of their total revenues, was related to the organization functioning as a regulator instead of simply as a technical manager of the internet.  more

Geographic Implications of DNS Infrastructure Distribution

The past several years have seen significant efforts to keep local Internet communications local in places far from the well-connected core of the Internet. Although considerable work remains to be done, Internet traffic now stays local in many places where it once would have traveled to other continents, lowering costs while improving performance and reliability. Data sent directly between users in those areas no longer leaves the region. Applications and services have become more localized as well, not only lowering costs but keeping those services available at times when the region's connectivity to the outside world has been disrupted... The recently published paper, "Geographic Implications of DNS Infrastructure Distribution" focuses on the distribution of DNS infrastructure. more

WHOIS Review and Beyond 3.7.8

We have posted our support of the WHOIS Policy Review Team Report with two important comments. First, on page 79 of the report it is confirmed that the RAA is unenforceable on WHOIS inaccuracy (we wrote about this while at the last ICANN meeting) because the language of RAA 3.7.8 has no enforcement provision. It is now time for ICANN to confirm this problem officially.  more

Users Don’t Like Forwarded Spam

A message on Dave Farber's Interesting People list complained that Comcast was blocking mail forwarded by DynDNS, a popular provider of DNS and related services for small-scale users... Actually, they're blocking it because a lot of it is spam. This is a problem that every mail forwarder and every mail system encounters; the only unusual thing here is that DynDNS is whining about it. It's yet another way that spammers have broken the mail for the rest of us. more

Discussion at the Internet Governance Forum in Geneva

While travelling home from Geneva, I was thinking quite a lot on the relationship between a ccTLD (registry) and a Country. This is because many countries are starting to talk louder and louder about the responsibilities Countries have on critical infrastructure, or (possibly more important) the management of the critical infrastructure. Will for example any (none?) of ccTLD operators (servers) sustain a denial of service attack of a scale similar to the attack on the root servers? What can ccTLD operators do to resist the malicious attacks? Should this be discussed? more