New gTLDs Are Great for Pump-and-Dumps, Phishes and More…

Yesterday, egregious financial truth-tellers (a client of ours at easyDNS) ZeroHedge broke the news that parties unknown, engineered what looks to be a textbook "pump-and-dump" on Twitter's stock by putting up a fake "Bloomberg Financial News" site on the domain bloomberg.market and proceeded to run a story on it about Twitter being acquired. The story spread and shares of Twitter stock promptly spiked on volume, Twitter finishing the day on nearly double the average daily volume. more

Internet Governance and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Part 6: Articles 18-19

Internet Governance, like all governance, needs guiding principles from which policy making, and acceptable behavior, are derived. Identifying the fundamental principles to guide Internet ecosystem policy making around digital citizenship, and around the integrity of digital practices and behavior, can and should start with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (UDHR). more

Arrest Made in Connection to Spamhaus DDoS Case

According to a press release by the Openbaar Ministerie (the Public Prosecution Office), a dutch man with the initials SK has been arrested in Spain for the DDoS attacks on Spamhaus. more

Wikileaks Calls for Boycott of Domain Registrar eNom

In the aftermath of the shutdown of Wikileaks.org by a court order issued at the request of Swiss Bank Julius Baer, Wikileaks has called for the boycott of registrar eNom. eNom is best known as the domain registrar that complied with the federal government's order to shut down a Spanish travel agency because it did business with Cuba -- the agency was not under U.S. jurisdiction and so was hardly violating U.S. law, but their domain was registered in the United States, and that was good enough for the feds. more

The JavaScript Ecosystem

JavaScript started out as a simple extension for the browser but has become so much more. In part, this is true in building on rich concepts going back to Lisp. Along the way, it has challenged the givens of programming and given us a high-performance flexible language along with rich libraries and rich tools. We're just beginning to discover the possibilities. more

XXX Litigation Looms

The XXX drama isn't over. Today ICM Registry announced that it would file a reconsideration request with ICANN and a judicial appeal to challenge redactions and omissions from the internal US government documents released to it under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. These could prove to be opening moves in a more extended round of litigation. In connection with its judicial appeal, ICM Registry released 88 pages of internal US Commerce Department documents obtained under the FOIA showing how the U.S. handled its application. more

Broadband Now: Yes We Can… Stimulate the Economy, Says Industry Association

With the upcoming inauguration of United States' 44th President, USTelecom Association has released a Broadband Now video highlighting challenges facing the country, and how broadband can make a significant difference. From revitalizing the economy to tackling health care, education and global climate change, broadband can play a vital role, says the association which represents broadband service providers, manufacturers and suppliers providing advanced applications and entertainment. more

New gTLDs and Endangered Languages

While exploring the UNESCO's interactive atlas of the world's languages in danger, I am happy to see that new generic Top-Level Domains could help save some of these languages. .CAT for Catalan language already exist; .BZH will probably have the "Breton" language to help survive; "Basque" is vulnerable but there is a .EUS initiative; .CORSICA will certainly help the "Corsican" language to develop... more

Potential Danger Ahead for Registrants: dot-info Abusive Domain Use Policy

ICANN has posted a request by Afilias for a new registry service in relation to "abusive" domains in dot-info. While in general the proposal is motivated by good intentions, the devil is in the details. While most folks (including myself) probably care very little about the .info TLD, my concern is that any bad implementation in .info might be copied or used as a precedent in other more important TLDs, in particular .com run by VeriSign. more

Changes to the Domain Name Marketplace

The new gTLD program and the introduction of 1200+ new domain name registries has significantly altered the marketplace dynamics. New domain name registries must navigate an environment that is, to an extent, stacked against them. This article recommends creation of some improvements and a general de-regulation of the marketplace to encourage innovation and promote its overall health. ICANN, or a combination of Registry Operators, should fund a brief, thorough study of the current marketplace because of the changes that have occurred from the original marketplace for which current regulations were developed. more

Building Caribbean Internet Infrastructure… One IXP at a Time

Encouraging the development of Internet-based services and accelerating the development of local content are often touted as noble objectives. It is also widely acknowledged that reaping the benefits of technology is dependent on reducing Internet connectivity and bandwidth costs, improving infrastructure, and improving quality of service to all Internet users. Yet in a region with over 20 million potential Internet users and great ambitions to create a "knowledge-based society" and develop "technology-driven economies", the cost of access remains prohibitively high and there is a glaring absence of critical Internet infrastructure. more

New gTLDs and Their Hidden Costs: Part 1

New generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) appear to be headed for introduction next year, finally. That's a good thing for many ICANN constituents who have been waiting for them to become available. Important questions persist about how new gTLDs will affect ICANN and its constituents, however, despite a lot of effort to resolve concerns. Pressing those questions should not be taken as criticism of the basic wisdom of making new gTLDs available to many constituents under many circumstances. But too much is at stake not to get it right. more

ICANN Workshop Displays Diverging Perspectives on WHOIS

At a workshop held in late June in Montreal (Canada) -- Karl Auerbach had submitted some live coverage to CircleID --, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) had an in-depth look at various aspects of the Internet's WHOIS databases. These databases associate social information (like holders' names and contact information) with network identifiers, such as IP addresses and domain names. Current policy for these databases -- in particular in the generic top level domain area -- is part of ICANN's contracts with domain name retailers ("registrars") and database operators ("registries"), and permits for use of the data by arbitrary parties for arbitrary purposes. more

The Risk Factors of CDNs and Centrality

On the afternoon of June 17 of this year, there was a widespread outage of online services. In Australia, it impacted three of the country's largest banks, the national postal service, the country's reserve bank, and one airline operator. Further afield from Australia, the outage impacted the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and some US airlines. The roll call of affected services appeared to reach some 500 serv more

How the Cable Industry is Adapting to Cord Cutters

For people attending The Internet and Television Exchange (INTX), the redubbed Cable Show for 2015, enabling technologies are as important as always, but the transformation of business models in the video delivery industry has certainly cast a huge grip on an industry caught in the middle of a seismic change -- driven by ever-increasing broadband speeds, mobile access to content, and yes, disruptive Over-The-Top (OTT) offerings. more