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CENTR Statement on IDN Homograph Attacks

Recently a proof of concept attack was announced on the Internet that demonstrated how a web address could be constructed that looked in some web browsers identical to that of a well known website. This technique could be used to trick a user into going to a website that they did not plan on visiting, and possibly provide sensitive information to a third party. As a result of this demonstration, there has been a number of voices calling for web browsers to disable or remove support for IDNs by default. ...CENTR, a group of many of the world's domain registries - representing over 98% of domain registrations worldwide - believes such strong reactions are heavily detrimental... more

Stopping SOPA’s Anti-Circumvention

The House's Stop Online Piracy Act is in Judiciary Committee Markup today. As numerous protests, open letters, and advocacy campaigns across the Web, this is a seriously flawed bill. Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Darrell Issa's proposed OPEN Act points out, by contrast, some of the procedural problems. Here, I analyze just one of the problematic provisions of SOPA: a new"anticircumvention" provision more

Over 75% of All Top-Level Domains (TLDs) Now Signed With DNSSEC

As I was entering in data for the weekly DNSSEC Deployment Maps, I was struck by the fact that we are now at the point where 617 of the 795 top-level domains (TLDs) are now signed with DNSSEC. You can see this easily at Rick Lamb's DNSSEC statistics site...Now, granted, most of that amazing growth in the chart is because all of the "new generic TLDs" (newgTLDs) are required to be signed with DNSSEC, but we are still seeing solid growth around the world. more

ICANN and the Data Quality Act: Part V

This is the fifth part of a multi-part series reported by ICANNfocus. This part focuses on Securing the Quality of WHOIS Data. "Information for which ICANN has responsibility includes the WHOIS databases. ICANN has been given specific responsibilities for these databases under: 1) their contract with the U.S. government's Department of Commerce to perform the technical management of the Internet; and 2) their Memorandum of Understanding with the Department of Commerce." more

Google Announces DNSSEC Support for Public DNS Service

Google today announced that its "Public DNS" service is now performing DNSSEC validation. Yunhong Gu, Team Lead for Google Public DNS, in post today wrote: "We launched Google Public DNS three years ago to help make the Internet faster and more secure.Today, we are taking a major step towards this security goal: we now fully support DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) validation on our Google Public DNS resolvers." more

Anticompetitive and Predatory Misconduct by ICANN and Contracted Parties Must End

On May 26, 2021, I submitted a complaint to ICANN's Complaints Officer, Krista Papac. In a nutshell, my complaint centers on ICANN's blatant violation of its Bylaws, specifically Section 2.2, named Restrictions, which expressly prohibits ICANN from acting as a registrar. However, despite the absence of any exceptions to this unambiguous prohibition, ICANN is acting improperly as a registrar for the purposes of warehousing and cybersquatting on certain domain names in the .com and .net registries. more

Black Helicopters for the DNS: What Happens In 2025?

When Steve delBianco from NetChoice testified (April 2, 2014) in the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology of the US House of Representatives on "Ensuring the Security, Stability, Resilience, and Freedom of the Global Internet", he proposed a stresstest for new mechanisms which could substitute the role of the NTIA in overseeing the IANA contract with ICANN. Stresstests are good. It is good for cars, it is good for banks and it is good for new mechanisms... more

UK’s DNS Open to Prying Eyes

Network Penetration conducted a survey at the start of 2003 to check the status of the UK's DNS infrastructure. The second scan of the year has just been completed and the results are much more positive. There are however still some serious holes in major areas...Here is a look at what was tested, the results, some sample zone transfers and recommendations.  more

Can ICANN Meet The Needs Of “Less Developed” Countries?

On World Telecommunications Day last Saturday, the question of the digital divide?the difference between the so-called "developed" and "less developed" countries in terms of the availability and use of new information and communications technologies, particularly regarding access and use of the Internet?was one of the main topics of debate. However, less is understood about the growing knowledge and participation divide between "developed" and "undeveloped" countries on decisions regarding the global structure of the Internet that is currently under the mandate of the Internet Corporation for the Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)... more

A Voting System for Internet by Domain Name Owners - Part I

This is the first part of a 2-part series article describing a method for voting among owners of domain names.

The primary intended use for this is to allow identifiable participants in the domain name system to vote on matters that affect the whole domain name system in an easy (and easily-verifiable) fashion. The method for voting is specifying a string in the whois data for a domain name. more

The Internet Running Out of Everything?

We know that the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses and that some in our community check twice a day Mat Ford's doomsday clock or spend an hour once a week reading the tea leaves based on Geoff Huston's exhaustive data compiled at Potaroo. Like with global warming, there is still a school of thought out there arguing that this running out of IP addresses is just fear mongering and that we are not really running out of IPv4 addresses as a NATted world is more than adequate to run the Internet for the foreseeable future. We know that the Internet is running out of AS... more

When Domain Names Aren’t Enough

A recent trend in the Japanese web advertising market may presage changes that could come to the Western world. ...some advertising in Japan now includes a picture of a filled-in browser search box instead of a domain name. The idea is that an advertiser can buy top-of-page advertising at the main search engines for various terms and then suggest to people reading their print ads to use those terms to search. more

Wow! BIND9 9.10 Is out, and What a List of Features!

Today the e-mail faerie brought news of the release of BIND9 9.10.0 which can be downloaded from here. BIND9 is the most popular name server on the Internet and has been ever since taking that title away from BIND8 which had a few years earlier taken it from BIND4. I used to work on BIND, and I founded ISC, the home of BIND, and even though I left ISC in July 2013 to launch a commercial security startup company, I remain a fan of both ISC and BIND. more

Internet Users: Is It Time For A Declaration Of Independence?

Although, undoubtedly, it is disappointing, it is not surprising that after four years of experimenting with Internet governance, the first corporate entity to take on the ambitious task -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) -- has not achieved the legitimacy of a global consensus-based manager of the Internet's domain name system. Simson Garfinkel explains, in his insightful piece in the March 2003 issue of Technology Review, that it has become conventional wisdom that "ICANN serves as a model for systematically shutting the public out" of its policy making activities. It should go without further explanation that the ICANN model is a particularly bad governance model, if consensus-building is supposed to be the corporation's linchpin of legitimacy. Among a few other concerns, ICANN, unmistakably, suffers from power-sharing phobia. more

How to Handle an Outage Like a Pro

In just the last two weeks, there were three major DNS outages between Google, Microsoft Azure, and Fonality. But only one of these companies was able to make even bigger waves with the way they handled their blunder. Fonality, who sells VoIP services and business phone systems, offered a very rare and transparent analysis of their outage. In a detailed statement from Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Valentine, readers were given crucial insight on how to prevent the same mistakes from happening to other companies. more