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The following excerpt is from the Free Software Magazine, March 2005 Issue, written by Kirk Strauser. To read the entire article, you may download the magazine here [PDF]. Also thanks to Yakov Shafranovich for making us aware of this publication. "Spam has existed since at least 1978, when an eager DEC sales representative sent an announcement of a product demonstration to a couple hundred recipients. The resulting outcry was sufficient to dissuade most users from repeating the experiment. This changed in the late 1990s: millions of individuals discovered the internet and signed up for inexpensive personal accounts and advertisers found a large and willing audience in this new medium." more
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
In the absence of any formal announcements, news of Google being accredited by ICANN as a domain name registrar, spread fast in the media today after it was first reported by Bret Fausett on Lextext -- see Google is a Registrar. The company has since mentioned that "Google became a domain name registrar to learn more about the Internet's domain name system," and that it has no plans to sell any domain names at the moment. However, speculations on what Google could do as an accredited registrar are far and wide. Here are ten, listed in no particular order... more
In its February 18, 2005 press release, WIPO has reported filing an average of 3.4 UDRP and UDRP-based cases per calendar day in 2004, bringing the total number of cases received in 2004 to 1,179 -- an increase of 79 cases (or 6.6%) as compared to 2003. Also mentioned in the report is a 37 percent increase in ccTLDs cases over the previous year. Listed below are a number of additional facts and figures reported... more
Last week's tizzy about IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) spoofing was an interesting exercise in watching how people react to the unknown. The nearly-universal response to the problem that had been described in detail many years ago was "turn off IDNs" instead of "assume that the people who created IDNs knew about this, so let's do some research." The following is based on my thoughts this week. For those of you who are not familiar with my earlier work, I'm one of the authors of the IDN standards... more
ICANN is now seeking public comments regarding the .net bids. Unlike before, I am not going to offend one friend or another by siding with one proposal over another. They are all qualified and experienced registry operators. Instead, I will make some general observations. 1. None of the Revenue and Pricing Model (i.e. Section 4) about the bids are available to public... more
Given the recent panix.com hijacking, I will give an outline of the current ICANN transfers process for gtlds. In the case of panix.com, evidence so far indicates that a third party that holds an account with a reseller of Melbourne IT, fraudulently initiated the transfer. The third party appears to have used stolen credit cards to establish this account and pay for the transfer. That reseller is analyzing its logs and cooperating with law enforcement. more
There's a thread on NANOG to the effect that Panix, the oldest commercial Internet provider in New York, had its domain name 'panix.com' hijacked from Dotster over to MelbourneIT and it has pretty well taken panix.com and its customers offline. Looks like this may be among the first high-profile unauthorized transfer under the new transfer policy. It begs the question, despite the existence of the dispute policy under the new system, what provisions should there be for a situation like this where every hour causes untold damage to the party in question... more
The NANOG list yesterday was the virtual equivalent of a nearby nocturnal car alarm: "panix.com has been hijacked!" (whoo-WEE, whoo-WEE); "those jerks at VeriSign!" (duhhhhh-WHEEP, duhhhh-WHEEP); "no one's home at Melbourne IT!" (HANK, HANK, HANK, HANK). Finally, on Monday morning in Australia, the always-competent and helpful Bruce Tonkin calmly fixed the situation. So the rest of us can get some sleep now. But as we nod off in the quietness, let's consider just exactly what happened here. more
A friend pointed me to the latest Internet Society budget for 2005 :- ISOC is expecting PIR (ie, .ORG) to contribute 3.4M to the society! Wow, thats 2-3x as much as what Internet Society gets from its membership! I think that's pretty neat because ISOC has been in the red for many years and could certainly use some help financially. After all, it is hosting IETF and also paying for the IANA registry and RFC-Editors, all of which is critical to the Internet standardization process... more
During ICANN's public forum in Cape Town, an interesting conflict accidentally came up, even if somewhat concealed by the usual exchange of well-known views on whether ICANN should finally allow the world to get more new Top Level Domains (TLDs) on a regular basis. I know I am oversimplifying thoughts and positions, but basically the discussion was between a couple of 30-year-old engineers from the floor asking to be given the opportunity to try new things, and a couple of 60-year-old engineers from the podium putting up any kind of unproven excuses... more
News.com published a well-research article on the Chinese Domain Names by Winston Chai: "This approach works fine in the English-savvy world. However, for non-English speakers, they could be faced with the unenviable task of rote-learning numerical IP addresses, which is highly improbable, or the English spellings of dozens of Web sites they want to access." Just a few points of interest... more
ICANN's latest announcement of preliminary approval for two new top level domains (.mobi and .jobs) and it's recently ended meetings in Cape Town, South Africa, have sparked off renewed discussions for the introduction of new TLDs -- more specifically, the expansion of sponsored and generic top level domains (TLDs). The following is a collection of recent commentaries made by both technical and non-technical members of the community with regards to the expansion of the domain name space. To add your comments to this collection, please use the comment entry form at the bottom of the page... more
A new type of domain-name hijacking is being carried out unnoticed. It involves third-level domain-names associated with affiliate programs. If you had been an online affiliate of, say, company xyz.com, your affiliate Internet address could have looked like YourCompanyName.xyz.com. more
I have no idea who wrote that wonderful piece, Time for Reformation of the Internet, posted by Susan Crawford. (It wasn't me - I never use the word "netizen".) Elliot Noss of Tucows wrote a partial rebuttal, I must be attending the wrong ICANN meetings. Elliot's company, Tucows, has been a leader in registrar innovation and competition. And Tucows has constantly been among the most imaginative, progressive, responsible, and socially engaged companies engaged in these debates. ...But the points made by Time for Reformation of the Internet go far beyond registries and registrars. more
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