End of Cybersquatting? The gTLD Advantage

On the other hand, major dot brand generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) are for internal and controlled sub registrations, they would not be open to first come public offerings and therefore it makes no sense for IBM to plan advance purchase of ibm.canon, as Canon, owner of their own gTLD dot canon, unless mutually agreed between two brands, would have no incentive to sell such a registration to a cyber squatter or to anyone else for that matter. more

ChatGPT Used to Create Polymorphic Malware

ChatGPT, the newly released language model, has quickly gained popularity and is used for various tasks, from automation to music composition. While having useful features like fast and easy-to-use code examples, it also has the ability to create sophisticated malware without malicious code. more

Beyond Smart Cards and Guns in Schools

On January 8, 2013, a Judge from the United States District Court in Texas ruled against a high school sophomore's refusal to wear a smart identity card embedded with a radio frequency chip which is part of the school's smart ID card student locator project. The Judgment show the Testimonies of Superintendent and the Principal in stating that the sensors do not give exact readings nor are they able to pinpoint the exact location of the students. more

ICANN Sets the Schedule to Kill Domain Tasting

Domain tasting, as everyone probably knows by now, is the disreputable practice of registering lots of domains, seeing how much traffic they get, and then using the five day Add Grace Period (AGP) to refund the 99.9% of them that aren't worth paying for. A related abuse is front running, registrars speculatively grabbing domains that people inquire about to prevent them from using a different registrar. more

A Politically Incorrect Guide to IPv6

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've doubtless seen reports that the supply of IPv4 addresses is running out. Earlier this month IANA, the master allocation authority, handed out the last so-called /8, a large chunk of 16 million addresses, to one of the regional address registries... Then what? The conventional wisdom is that everyone needs to support IPv6, a mostly compatible upgrade to IPv4 with much larger addresses, by the time the v4 space runs out. But I'm not so sure, particularly for e-mail. more

The DNSSEC “Onus of Reality Check” Shifted to gTLD Administrations by ICANN

Last month, there was an exchange of letters between a gTLD administration and ICANN about DNSSEC deployment. This gTLD administration is PIR or Public Interest Registry, the gTLD administration for the .org TLD. Interestingly, PIR is a non-profit organization that makes significant contributions to ISOC (Internet Society) initiatives: thus, both ICANN and PIR are organizations dedicated to the well-being of the Internet. more

Announcement: Critical Internet Infrastructure WG is Now Open to Public Participation

ISOTF Critical Internet Infrastructure WG is now open to public participation. The group holds top experts on internet technology, critical infrastructure, and internet governance, from around the globe. Together, we discuss definitions, problems, challenges and solutions in securing and assuring the reliability of the global internet infrastructure, which is critical infrastructure for a growing number of nations, corporations and indeed, individuals -- world wide. more

Nominet Passes Governance Test With Flying Colours

The dot-uk registry Nominet has passed a crucial governance test with flying colours, voting yes on eight Board resolutions with more than 93 percent member support... The vote was a crucial test for both Nominet's Board and members: trust and confidence in the Board had been damaged by an acrimonious internal battle, which had subsequently led to the UK government threatening to end self-regulation of the UK's registry operations. more

First Geographic NewgTLD, .RUHR, Now Delegated

Each week ICANN has been delegating more new generic top-level domains (newgTLDs) and it's been somewhat entertaining to watch the list of delegated strings to see what new TLDs will enter the domain name space starting sometime in early 2014 when they become generally available for people to register new domains under. more

2022 Domain Name Year In Review

I can hardly believe it's that time of year again -- time for our annual top 10 year in review. Having been at this for more than 20 years, you'd think I'd seen it all? But with the domain name industry, things are always in flux, and I could never have predicted some of these items. So without further ado -- here are the top 10 biggest stories from 2022. more

Cyber Risk Now on Top of Corporate Risk Agendas, Cyber Insurance Expanding

Results from the 2019 Marsh-Microsoft Global Cyber Risk Perception survey indicates several encouraging signs of improvement in the way organizations view and manage cyber risk. more

Will the GNSO Review Be Pushed Back Another Year?

ICANN bylaws mandate periodic reviews of the organisation's main structures. For the body that handles gTLD policy making, the GNSO, that review was due to start in February this year. The review appears much needed. The GNSO Council is the manager of the gTLD policy process and as such, it has representatives of all GNSO groups. But according to repeated statements by many of those representatives, the Council's current bicameral structure has not lived up to expectations. more

Looking Ahead - UDRP Bad Faith Analysis and New gTLDs

The Internet, at nearly every stage of its evolution, has effected change in existing intellectual property industries as those industries struggle to keep up with the march of technological advancement. For example, the entertainment industry has seen widespread piracy and bootlegging of just and soon-to-be released movies as a result of the increased availability of broadband Internet access in the home, and efficient peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies online. In response the entertainment industry has backed a wave of proposed legislation including the maligned Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). more

Greylisting Still Works - Part I

Greylisting is a hoary technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets and other poorly written spamware. When a mail server receives an attempt to deliver mail from a hitherto unseen sending host IP address, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail software does try again, at which point you note that the host knows how to retry and you don't greylist mail from that IP again. more

IPv6 and the Browser Wars

IPv6 adoption continues to gain ground at a slow pace. This is to be expected. The complications associated with hardware and software upgrades, as well as the lack of reachable content, means that IPv4 is still king of the hill. To me, this situation seems to mirror one a few years back with web browsers. Sometime around the turn of the century, Internet Explorer became the dominant browser. Riding on a 90% market share for Windows, the incumbent - Netscape Navigator - did not stand a chance. However, with it came a dark age for web developers. more