Microsoft’s Size Means Malicious Cyber Actors Thrive

Last month, the Russian state-sponsored hacking group "Midnight Blizzard" gained access to the email accounts of Microsoft leadership, even exfiltrating documents and messages. The group reportedly used a simple brute-force style attack to access a forgotten test account and then exploited the permissions on that account to access the emails of employees in the cybersecurity and legal teams. more

Panel Allows Woman to Keep Domain Name That Is Her First Name

In this action under the usTLD Dispute Resolution Policy (which mirrors the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy), Complainant sought transfer of the Domain Name grazia.us. Complainant, an Italian company, has used the mark GRAZIA for many years in several markets around the world in connection with its fashion magazine. more

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

ICANN Receives 67 Unique Applications for Chinese gTLDs

At the press conference held in London on June 13, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) officially announced a list of 1930 applications for the new generic top level domain (gTLD). During the 40 years since the launch of the Internet, there are only 22 gTLDs such as .com. The 1930 applications represent a historical change to the Internet; For the first time, Chinese gTLDs will become available and there are 67 unique applications for Chinese gTLDs. more

The Rise of Cyrillic Domain Names

This week, on a cruise ship navigating Russia's Neva river, around 250 domain registrars and resellers are gathered for the RU-CENTER annual domain conference. RU-CENTER is the largest Russian registrar in a market that is dominated by three companies. RU-CENTER and competitor Reg.Ru both manage around 28% of domains registered in the country's national suffix... RU-CENTER is also a figurehead for Russia's drive to make Internet use more palatable for those who are not natural ASCII writers. more

Beavers Chewing Through Fiber Cable Cause Hundreds Lose Internet in a Canadian Remote Community

Internet service was down for nearly 900 customers in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, over the weekend after beavers chewed through a crucial fiber cable, resulting in "extensive" damage. According to a statement from the area's telecom provider, Telus, the outage also affected some cable TV customers and caused disruptions to local cell phone services. more

The London Process Arrived in Budapest: Another Travel Circus for the Internet Community?

The Budapest Conference on Cyberspace brought together nearly 20 heads of states and ministers plus 700 high level experts from various stakeholder groups from 60 countries. However, after two days of discussion there is less clarity where the so-called "London Process" - established by the British Foreign Minister William Hague in November 2011 in London - will go. The next meeting is scheduled for October 2013 in Seoul. Another flying circus for another Internet Governance talking shop? more

ICANN Meetings in Luxembourg

The ICANN Meetings are in full flow here in sunny Luxembourg. The venue is immense and located a cab, bus, or shuttle ride from the various hotels. So far, the big topics are the .Net finalization (focusing on the readjustment of the pricing verbiage), the USDOC root announcement, the shell registrar accreditations used in the batch pool for the purposes of getting dropped names, and the practice of registrars exploiting the 5 day add grace period to register in excess of 50000 names to watch how much web traffic they have, and returning the ones that do not at no cost... more

An Afnic Study of the Global Domain Name Market in 2020, COVID Impact on ccTLDs

Afnic, the French Network Information Centre and manager of the .fr TLD, has just published its Afnic's Global Domain Name Market in 2020 Report on the global domain market in 2020. The study is based on ICANN statistics, information from registries, specialized websites, and its own research. This is an overview of global trends and an analysis of the mechanisms at work during the health crisis. more

Update on China SatNet’s GuoWang Broadband Constellation – Can They Do It?

In 2020, China applied to operate GuoWang, a constellation of 12,992 low-Earth orbit (LEO) broadband Internet satellites, and in 2021, it became clear that it was intended to become China’s global LEO broadband constellation. Can they do it? Maybe, but it will take a long time. China does not have the capacity to launch 12,992 satellites today. I don’t know the mass of their planned satellites, but GuoWang is informally referred to as China’s answer to Starlink. more

Copyright Infringement and ccTLDs

.tk was once designated as the riskiest ccTLD. .ru is often said to be, after .com, the most used in the content of spam messages. But is there a ccTLD that is a favorite destination for copyright infringement? The question is worth asking in view of the growing trend for .com domain names seizures related to copyright infringement. more

Putting String Similarity into Context: Bulgaria’s IDN (.??) vs. Brazil’s ccTLD (.br)

Bulgaria is a nation which is directly impacted by the current Fast Track automatic disqualification when Top-Level Domain (TLD) strings are "confusingly similar" to other TLDs, in this case an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD). Bulgaria has already been declined twice (in late 2009, and in May of 2010) to register the *.?? Cyrillic IDN on the premise that it looks confusingly similar to Brazil's *.br ASCII TLD. Being a native Bulgarian, I did not see how these two strings are similar more

Preliminary Thoughts on the Equifax Hack

As you've undoubtedly heard, the Equifax credit reporting agency was hit by a major attack, exposing the personal data of 143 million Americans and many more people in other countries. There's been a lot of discussion of liability; as of a few days ago, at least 25 lawsuits had been filed, with the state of Massachusetts preparing its own suit. It's certainly too soon to draw any firm conclusions... but there are a number of interesting things we can glean from Equifax's latest statement. more

Why Are the EU Data Protection Authorities Taking Away Our Fundamental Right to be Safe?

What if we created a rule that gave everyone - good or bad - the right to hide their license plate, where they live, who they are, and just go incognito? What if we made it a right to walk into any building in the world, and simply say "No, thank you" when the security guards asked for one's identification? The criminals would celebrate, and we'd all be utterly alarmed. We would immediately be afraid for our personal safety. more

The Future of Home Networking: A Problem Statement

I'm a network engineer, and like many engineers I often gravitate to the big projects; large networks with problems of scale and complexity in my case. However, I also consider myself a student of Occam's razor and often quote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." In this spirit of "less is more" I have recently become intrigued by the problems appearing in home networking. more