WGIG Too Focused on Negative Side of the Internet?

The following is a report by Susan Crawford at the ICANN meeting in Cape Town where a workshop was held yesterday for increasing awareness and understanding of United Nation's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and issues that directly impact ICANN. "WSIS" is defined as a process in which governments intend to address a broad range of international legal, regulatory, economic, and policy issues related to the Internet. Some governments have proposed that an intergovernmental organization be responsible for "Internet governance," a phrase that remains undefined and some consider to include and/or mean the administration and coordination of the domain name system (DNS). more

ICANN Approves New Domain for Adult Sites

The Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has determined that the proposal for a new top level domain submitted by ICM Registry, Inc. has met the criteria established by ICANN. Accordingly, ICM Registry will now move forward into technical and commercial contractual negotiations with ICANN to generate a voluntary .xxx top-level domain (TLD). more

Success Drivers of New gTLD Applications

Being approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as the owner of a new generic top-level domain (gTLD) extension requires considerable analysis before the application is submitted. You must understand the sources of risk, gauge your risk tolerance, and you must obtain an estimate of the value of your proposed TLD's future revenues (with the effects of potential competitors factored in, a step too many applicants ignore). more

Internet Society Extends Its Significant Financial Support Commitment to the IETF

According to an announcement on Monday, the Internet Society has agreed to extend its existing financial commitment to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for an additional term of six years. more

TLD Registration Enforcement: A Call for Automation - Part II

Last month, I wrote to describe the state of registration restrictions in .BIZ, .US, and .NAME. I noted trends among nonconforming registrations in these TLDs, and I suggested that certain automated enforcement systems might serve to improve compliance. But an important larger question remained unanswered: Why care about registration restrictions in the first place? Much as registries might like to ignore the restrictions, I submit that the Internet community nonetheless ought to hold them to their contracts.
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Freedom of Expression Part 2: Blocking, Filtering and Removing Online Content

The Internet is a catalyst for what has revolutionised and transformed human societies in giving extraordinary access to information that has catapulted development and economic growth. It also comes with threats of exploitation by those who wish to do harm. In Part 1 of these series, we looked at how Twitter banned Graham Linehan for his tweet where we saw that to an extent, it was justifiable under Californian law but that a Judge in the Fiji courts would disagree with. more

Putting a Spammer in Jail

The country's first criminal trial about spam ended in Leesburg, Virginia earlier this month with a conviction of Jeremy Jaynes, better known under his nom de spam of Gavin Stubberfield. I was an expert witness for the prosecution, the Commonwealth of Virginia. The case was brought under Virginia's state anti-spam law, not the weaker Federal CAN-SPAM act... more

Bit.ly Gets You Blocked

URL shorteners, like bit.ly, moby.to and tinyurl.com, do three things... Making URLs shorter was their original role, and it's why they're so common in media where the raw URL is visible to the recipient -- instant messaging, twitter and other microblogs, and in plain text email where the "real" URL won't fit on a single line. From the moment they were invented they've been used to trick people to click on links to pages they'd rather not visit... more

UK’s Government Websites Infected by Cryptocurrency Mining Malware

Thousands of websites are reported to have been infected by malware over the weekend forcing visitors' computers to mine cryptocurrency while using the sites. more

Ye Olde DNS

I've been writing about the intrinsic problem with the use of the DNS as both a technical mechanism and as a source of unambiguous meaning and authority. The problems are much worse than most of the posters seem to note. The current approach assures that the Internet will unravel and worse, that URLs become perversely reused. The commercial terms of service associated with the use of ".com" names exacerbates the problem by imposing arbitrary social policies into the plumbing of the Internet. more

The Future of the Internet: A Political View

Lets face it, gathering a collection of ministerial delegations to laboriously recite prepared speeches to each other sounds about as exciting as watching paint dry. And observing meetings where the major outcome appears to be limited to the scheduling of the next meeting can become somewhat tedious after a while. It should not be surprising that the level of expectation of tangible outcomes for such governmental meetings is invariably abysmally low. So what's the value of adding yet another meeting to governments' schedule? What makes the OECD-hosted ministerial meeting on the Future of the Internet Economy so unique in the context of the Internet's current political landscape and its political future? Why would a meeting about the dismal science of economics hold any interest at all? more

Canada Finishes its Spam Task Force, Result is Pretty Good

Industry Canada, the part of the Canadian government roughly equivalent to the U.S. Commerce Department, has had a task force on spam working for the past year or so. I was invited to participate as an unofficial member, since I'm not a Canadian. Yesterday, it wrapped up its work and published its report (aussi disponsible en francais) to the government. It's quite good, and has a set of 22 recommendations. more

Two Stage Filtering for IPv6 Electronic Mail

I'm a guest at the MAAWG conference in San Francisco this week and several people have now mentioned to me the problem and the opportunity of anti-spam e-mail filtering for IPv6. Tomorrow is World IPv6 Day but since a bunch of the pieces have clicked together in my head I'll post this a day early. more

The Design of the Domain Name System, Part I

Over the past 30 years the Domain Name System has become an integral part of the operation of the Internet. Due to its ubiquity and good performance, many new applications over the years have used the DNS to publish information. But as the DNS and its applications have grown farther from its original use in publishing information about Internet hosts, questions have arisen about what applications are appropriate for publication in the DNS, and how one should design an application to work well with the DNS. more

DNSSEC: Will Microsoft Have Enough Time?

I have previously pointed out the shortcomings of good and user friendly support for DNSSEC in Microsoft's Server 2008 R2. During the period just after I wrote the post, I had a dialogue with Microsoft, but during the last months there has been no word at all. The reason I bring this up again is that more and more Top Level Domains (TLDs) now enable DNSSEC and also the fact that within six months the root will be signed. more