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No One is Immune: Qatar Crisis Started by a Targeted Poli-Cyber Attack

The Qatar Crisis started with a targeted Poli-Cyber hack of an unprecedented nature. Its shockwaves and repercussions continue to alter political and business fortunes, directions and paradigms not only in the Gulf region but globally. Almost everyone around the world is now aware of the this crisis that started early June. By mid July a Washington Post report cited US intelligence officials that the UAE orchestrated hacking of Qatari government sites, sparking regional upheaval that started it all. more

Project dotVinum for .WINE Domain Names

This article is a feedback on the sensitive .WINE dotVinum project which aims to create an extension for the wine community on Internet. Questions to Be Answered: Protection of rights at an international level: how to protect trademarks? Funding: who has the financial capacity to invest in such a project?... more

Verisign Provides Open Source Implementation of Merkle Tree Ladder Mode

The quantum computing era is coming, and it will change everything about how the world connects online. While quantum computing will yield tremendous benefits, it will also create new risks, so it's essential that we prepare our critical internet infrastructure for what's to come. That's why we're so pleased to share our latest efforts in this area, including technology that we're making available as an open source implementation to help internet operators worldwide prepare. more

Swedish Regulator Bans Inclusion of Letters “b”, “a”, “n”, “k” in Domain Names Under .SE

Swedish Regulator PTS have today notified .SE, the Swedish (.SE) TLD registry that they have to change the rules... In short, the decision implies that any form of the sequence of the characters "b", "a", "n", "k" are illegal in domain names in Sweden. Further that checks of what domain names are registered are to be checked before registration. more

Analysis of 7.5 Trillion DNS Queries Reveals Public Resolvers Dominate the Internet

A recent report by NS1 provides a comprehensive look at global DNS traffic trends. It reveals that public resolvers dominate the internet, accounting for nearly 60% of recursive DNS usage. Telecom giants represent nearly 9%, with Google the clear front-runner at a little over 30%, followed by Amazon Web Services at 16%. more

ICANN Tests IDN TLD (Live!)

At ICANN San Juan, I found out from Tina Dam, ICANN's IDN Program Director, that she was putting together a live IDN TLD test bed plan which includes translations of the string .test into eleven written languages (Arabic, Chinese-simplified, Chinese-traditional, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Russian, Tamil and Yiddish) and ten scripts (Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Han, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Katakana, Tamil)... Two days ago, ICANN provided an update on this project... more

Can’t Connect… Won’t Connect

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones must be hoping that his near neighbours don’t decide they want a larger family. He recently spent ages setting up a high-speed wireless network at home, documenting the whole tortuous process on the BBC Technology blog, but all his hard work could apparently be ruined by a single baby listener in the neighbourhood... more

ITU Workshop on Internet Governance

The World Summit on the Information Society will hold its first workshop on internet governance in late February, it has emerged. ...The WSIS, backed by the UN and its International Telecommunications Union, said this week that it will hold the workshop February 26 and 27 at the ITU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. more

Deloitte: DDoS Attacks to Enter Terabit Era in 2017

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks will become larger in scale, harder to mitigate and more frequent, says Deloitte in its annual Global Predictions report. more

Confusing New gTLDs

Choosing the right domain name is like choosing a Trademark, it has to be taken seriously because it is a long time image investment. If new gTLDs have brought new options to those in charge of creating a name (precision, availability, novelty) and registering its (their) domain name(s), they also brought the possibility to make a terrible mistake when choosing the right extension for a domain name. more

Department of Commerce Cancels IANA Contract RFP

The United States government has cancelled IANA Request for Proposal (RFP) SA1301-12-RP-IANA according to an updated page made today on the FedBizOpps website. The change -- time stamped Mar 09, 2012 2:44 pm -- states: "The Department of Commerce intends to reissue the RFP at a future date, date to be determined (TBD). Interested parties are encouraged to periodically visit www.fbo.gov for updates." more

WHOIS Redux: Demand Privacy in Domain Name Registration

Doc's post and the impending comments deadline for the next iteration of ICANN's never-ending WHOIS saga finally pushed me to write up my thoughts on the latest iteration of ICANN debate. As Doc points out, much of the current debate is very inside baseball, tied up in acronyms atop bureaucratic layers. Small wonder then that ordinary domain name registrants and Internet users haven't commented much, while the fora are dominated by INTA members turning out responses to an "urgent request" to "let ICANN know that Whois is important to the brand owners I represent"... more

The IPv4 Market - 2018 Mid-Year Report

The number of IPv4 transactions and volume of IP addresses flowing to and from organizations in the ARIN region in the last 6 months put 2018 on track to be the most active year in the history of the IPv4 market. Nearly 25 million numbers were transferred in the first half of this year, more than doubling the volume of numbers transferred by this time last year and continuing the level of market activity in the last half of 2017 when just over 28 million numbers were transferred. more

ICANN Compliance Lends a Hand to a Violent Criminal While Trashing a Legitimate Business

Imagine a California non-profit corporation providing material assistance to a criminal wanting to do you physical and financial harm. Then, imagine that corporation is ICANN. Imagine no longer, because that is precisely what the ICANN Compliance department managed to pull off this week, in an all-too-common demonstration of the havoc they can cause by sheer ineptitude, without apology or concern. This is the situation which crossed my desk this week. more

The Blurr-Cade Proposal on Root Zone Oversight

Becky Burr (former NTIA official) and lobbyist Marilyn Cade has made a proposal to create a multilateral working group to oversee the root zone file updates. I would characterize the Burr-Cade proposal as a "small step for mankind and a giant step for the US" to paraphrase Neil Armstrong. The main merit of the proposal is that it looks like something the USG might want to follow. Sevaral people suggested there should be no governmental oversight at all but that does not look realistic, in the sense that there can be huge economic and political interests behind ICANN decisions. more