News from the Authentication Summit in NYC

At The Email Authentication Implementation Summit in New York City last week, several major ISPs surprised attendees with their announcement that they are jointly backing a single authentication standard. Yahoo!, Cisco, EarthLink, AOL, and Microsoft got together and announced they are submitting a new authentication solution, DomainKeys Identified Mail to the Internet Engineering Task Force for approval as a standard. This is big news... more

Rumor: Rod Beckstrom Next ICANN CEO

Sources indicate former director of the US Homeland Security Department's National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC), Rod Beckstrom, will be replacing the current ICANN CEO, Paul Twomey, who announced his resignation earlier this year. Milton Mueller in a blog post on the IGP website writes: "This is still unconfirmed by ICANN but comes from well-informed sources. We also hear that David Eisner, the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service under G.W. Bush and former VP at AOL, was also in the running." Beckstrom recently made headlines for his sudden resignation from his post at NCSC, criticizing the lack of funding from the NSA and its move to try to "rule over" the NCSC. more

NIST Publishes Guide for DNS-Based Email Security, Draft Open for Public Comments

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has invited comments on a draft practice guide to help organizations improve email security and defend against phishing, man-in-the-middle, and other types of email-based attacks. more

Premium TLDs, Real Value for Money

There is an intrinsic value proposition to new gTLDs. They mean to give users fresh naming possibilities and provide more meaningful Internet addresses. And to do so at much reduced prices. Reduced prices? Really? This is where eyebrows start being raised. How so? Well before the advent of new gTLDs, few suffixes offered any real ability to differentiate. Users thus looked to the second level, not the top level, for a way to get their web addresses to stand out from the crowd. So began a vicious circle of value going to the limited number of meaningful second level names since at TLD level, the only string with any real equity was .COM. more

TLD Operators: Cleaning Up Lame Delegations

ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SECSAC) recently released some recommendations regarding the DNS infrastructure, specifying among other things, that sub-zone delegation be kept up-to-date. ...The SECSAC report doesn't mention, but I believe is trying to address, is the alarming fact that nearly 10% of the name servers listed in the root zone are lame, either they aren't authoritative for the zones they are supposed to be, or they are unreachable much of the time.
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ICANN and the Data Quality Act: Part IV

This is the fourth part of a multi-part series reported by ICANNfocus. This part focuses on the Information Correction Process. "The Data Quality Act provides affected persons the right "to seek and obtain correction of information maintained and disseminated by the agency that does not comply" with the Data Quality Act and implementing guidelines. ...The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) provides detailed instructions on how to request correction of information not meeting their Data Quality guidelines. NTIA is the operating unit of the Department of Commerce that is responsible for ICANN." more

Another Year of the Transition to IPv6

I bet that nobody believed in 1992 that thirty years later, we'd still be discussing the state of the transition to IPv6! In 1992 we were discussing what to do about the forthcoming address crunch in IPv4, and having come to terms with the inevitable prospect that the silicon industry was going to outpace the capacity of the IPv4 address pool in a couple of years, we needed to do something quickly more

Did Navigation Catalyst Systems Get Off Easy in Verizon’s $100 Million Plus Lawsuit?

Navigation Catalyst Systems (NCS) has settled the well publicized cybersquatting lawsuit brought against it by Verizon. The terms of the settlement are simple and straight forward, amounting to little more than an agreement by NCS to no longer register domains similar to Verizon's trademarks again. No money was apparently paid by NCS as part of the resolution. more

Advocating Ratio Model for Deleting Domains

To date, end-users (of all levels of technical ability) who are trying to find a good domain name to establish an online identity have been endlessly frustrated by the lack of a method to fairly re-allocate "used" domain names. A full resolution to that problem is a separate (and much bigger) discussion... more

End of Domain Name Auction Sites

Having eBay has worked out pretty well for the world at large; now it's time for the world of domain names to start using it. We need to throw away the jumble of different auctions and dealer sites. Speculators may not like having their haunts cleaned out, but corporate (end-user) buyers and investors will welcome the chance to deal with one centralized auction mechanism with one set of rules. more

Domain Registrations Hit 112 Million

VeriSign is reporting that over 112M domains have been registered as of the end of Q3 2006. A record number of domain names are now registered, at 112 million, which is 30% higher than just one year ago and 6% higher than the previous quarter. The five largest TLDs remain .com, .de (Germany), .net, .uk (Britain), and .org... more

Cloudflare Challenges Google’s AI Dominance With New Web Content Policy

Cloudflare's new policy challenges Google's AI practices, giving website owners legal tools to control how their content is scraped, used, and monetised by AI systems. more

UDRP Good for Trademark Protection, Not So Good for Political Process

Social Science Research Network has published a paper examining "the large gaps and inconsistencies in current domain name law and policy" as compared with domain name use in the political context. The paper suggests that the current domain name policy is focused on protecting trademark uses of domain names against bad faith commercial 'cybersquatters' but does not deal with protecting use of domain names as part of the political process. more

Are Botnets Run by Spy Agencies?

A recent story today about discussions for an official defense Botnet in the USA prompted me to post a question I've been asking for the last year. Are some of the world's botnets secretly run by intelligence agencies, and if not, why not? Some estimates suggest that up to 1/3 of PCs are secretly part of a botnet. The main use of botnets is sending spam, but they are also used for DDOS extortion attacks and presumably other nasty things like identity theft. But consider this... more

Unraveling the Myths of the Internet’s Origins - Part I

There are several myths that dominate the public perception of the Internet. These myths make it hard to understand the needs and nature of the Internet and its future development. One of the most dominant myths equates the early U.S. packet switching network known as the ARPANET with the metasystem linking diverse networks that we call the Internet. One such example is demonstrated by the time line at the AT&T web site. They write... more