In connection with the recent publication of the IANA RFP, there have been some commenters that have proclaimed that removing the requirement of the Contractor to document the consensus of relevant stakeholders in connection with the delegation of new gTLDs from the original draft Statement of Work as a win for ICANN. However, when reading the recently revised IANA RFP language in light of the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) Dakar Communiqué, a rather compelling legal case can be made... more
ICANN has opened the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Whois study on privacy/proxy abuse for public comment. Performed by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), this study is one of many commissioned by the GNSO to examine the current, disparate, and often maligned registration directory service, and aims to measure the hypothesis that "a significant percentage of the domain names used to conduct illegal or harmful Internet activities are registered via privacy and proxy services to obscure the perpetrator's identity." more
Because DNS is such an omnipresent part of modern networking, it's easy to assume that functional DNS infrastructure can be left running with minimal adjustments and only needs to be investigated in the event of a malfunction. Yet there are small telltale signs that precede DNS issues -- and knowing what they are can help to prevent disruption before it happens. more
Throughout this series of blog posts we've discussed a number of issues related to security, stability, and resilience of the DNS ecosystem, particularly as we approach the rollout of new gTLDs. Additionally, we highlighted a number of issues that we believe are outstanding and need to be resolved before the safe introduction of new gTLDs can occur - and we tried to provide some context as to why, all the while continuously highlighting that nearly all of these unresolved recommendations came from parties in addition to Verisign over the last several years. more
On the morning of Wednesday 15th October, the The Domain Name Association (the DNA) held an important working group meeting during ICANN 51 Los Angeles. The topic was to discuss several operational issues between registries and registrars. The meeting's unofficial ongoing name is the Registry-Registrar Operations Working Group. The meeting was a continuation of an inaugural meeting that was held back in June of this year, and covered in a Industry Association: An Implementation Model circulated by the DNA from September 17, by Executive Director Kurt Pritz. more
In 2019, we've seen a surge in domain name system (DNS) hijacking attempts and have relayed warnings from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, U.K.'s Cybersecurity Centre, ICANN, and other notable security experts. Although the topic has gained popularity amongst CIOs and CISOs, most companies are still overlooking important security blind spots when it comes to securing their digital assets outside the enterprise firewalls -- domains, DNS, digital certificates. more
Luxury brand Chanel has engaged in a fierce campaign against counterfeit websites in federal court in Nevada. It has seized approximately six hundred domain names in the last few months, reports Venkat Balasubramani. "I'm sympathetic to the "whack-a-mole" problem rights owners face, but this relief is just extraordinarily broad and is on shaky procedural grounds." more
More than six hundred brands have applied for their own dotBrand (a new top level domain associated with a trademarked brand). These represent every segment of our economy: banks, tech companies, media, food, luxury goods, etc. Quite a few dotbrands have already gone live. The current application period is closed, but the next round will likely begin in 24 months or so. more
It's not particularly clear whether a marketing intern thought he was being clever or a fatigued pentester thought she was being cynical when the term "Purple Team Pentest" was first thrown around like spaghetti at the fridge door, but it appears we're now stuck with the term for better or worse. Just as the definition of penetration testing has broadened to the point that we commonly label a full-scope penetration of a target's systems with the prospect of lateral compromise and social engineering as a Red Team Pentest -- delivered by a "Red Team" entity operating from a sophisticated hacker's playbook. more
President Sarkozy of France recently managed to get his 'Création et Internet' law passed by the National Assembly, and if all goes well in the Senate then French internet users will soon find their activities being supervised by HADOPI, the grandly named 'Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet.' The rights it is concerned with are not those of ordinary net users but of copyright owners, and especially the large entertainment companies that have lobbied so hard and so successfully for the power to force internet service providers to terminate the accounts of those accused of downloading unlicensed copies of music, films and software... more
There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that noted that the business world still uses a lot of landline telephones. Landline telephones have been steadily disappearing from homes, but are still not gone. I see ISPs still selling a telephone line to 10% or more of passings, and surveys show that the average residential landline penetration rate is still somewhere between 15% and 20%. more
The Internet Service Provider (ISP) community is carefully watching the impending depletion of the unassigned IPv4 address pool. Most estimates place the depletion of the central pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses by mid-2011. After that, each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) will continue to satisfy requests for additional IPv4 space for a limited time (depending on the rate of incoming requests and the amount of address space on hand in the RIR at the time of central pool depletion). more
All things come to those who wait, and bufferbloat measurement tools are no exception. When we hosted a workshop on reducing Internet latency way back in 2013, one of the identified outcomes was the need for better tools to help users understand when they had a bufferbloat problem, and now we have just such a tool from the awesome folks over at DSLReports. Before going any further I should probably clarify what we mean by bufferbloat. more
The more I read, the more I see conflicting views on the state of the criminal cybercrime world. On the one hand, the Russian criminal cybercrime underworld is a scary, organized place... On the other hand, there is the position that that position is an exaggeration of what it is actually like and that it's a bunch of ragtag folks who have some advanced computer skills but they are not formally organized. ... I see this very similarly to how I see cyber warfare... more
Internet Society recently announced the appointment of former chief technology officer of Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The decision has raised concerns within the Internet community as Paul Brigner had campaigned for SOPA while at MPAA as well as being on record opposing net neutrality while being an official at Verizon. more