European Court Declares Dynamic IP Addresses are Subject to Privacy Protection Rules

The Advocate General, top advisor to the European Court of Justice, has issued an opinion today about Internet anonymity, Electronic Privacy Information Center reports. more

Live Streaming Apps: Piracy Trends Are-A-Changing

Until recently, digital pirates have used both P2P sites and cyberlockers to upload and share pirated content. But as Internet connection speeds have increased, the piracy landscape has changed, and the appearance of streaming content has proliferated. In fact, 38% of online sporting fans are watching live streaming of their favorite events. However, the recent introduction of live streaming apps is further compounding issues surrounding online piracy... more

Brand TLDs Become Official

It seems that pigs can, after all, fly. From the start of its new gTLD program, ICANN ignored what was obvious to pretty much everyone else: corporations might wish to apply for their brands and run them as closed ecosystem TLDs servicing only the brands in question. No longer. By releasing a proposed addendum to its registry contract, called Specification 13, ICANN has done two things it has always said it would never do: acknowledged that "brand TLDs" should be considered in the new gTLD program, and created a new category of TLD for this specific class of application. more

Chinese Hackers Have Infiltrated US Navy Contractors to Steal Range of Data Including Missile Plans

Chinese hackers have breached U.S. Navy contractors to steal a wide range of data from ship-maintenance data to missile plans through what is reported as the most debilitating cyber campaigns linked to Beijing. more

Hal Lubsen, Industry Leader and Former CEO of Afilias, Has Passed Away

Hal was an American entrepreneur and a visionary leader who managed and grew successful companies. He had a special impact on the domain name industry, where he founded domain retailer DomainBank and, in 2000, domain registry, Afilias. Hal grew Afilias into an industry leader and was also instrumental in founding Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit that manages the .org domain. more

Will VeriSign Be Able to Engage in Tiered Pricing for .com Soon?

According to the draft of new Generic Top-level Domains (gTLD) contracts for Section 7.3, "Price controls have been removed for 2008 in favor of the transparent pricing model outlined above." Section 3.2.b) of the .com registry agreement states: "ICANN shall not apply standards, policies, procedures or practices arbitrarily, unjustifiably, or inequitably and shall not single out Registry Operator for disparate treatment unless justified by substantial and reasonable cause." In my opinion, VeriSign (and other existing gTLD operators) are almost being invited to ask for their contracts to be amended... more

President of easyDNS Responds to WLS Issue

When I came out of the Verisign Product Round-Table at the ICANN Meeting it became clearer to me why I sometimes feel that registries were dangerous things to put in the hands of a for-profit corporation. Here in Canada the .CA namespace is regarded as a "Key Public Resource", thus the registry is administered by a non-profit corporation. The monopoly over the root (which is what it is) is treated very carefully, almost with a "necessary evil" mentality, which if done properly cultivates private enterprise and competition at the registrar level, where it should be. more

NASA Teething Troubles Teach a DNSSEC Lesson

On January 18, 2012, Comcast customers found they could not access the NASA.gov website. Some users assumed that Comcast was deliberately blocking the website or that NASA, like Wikipedia and Reddit, was participating in the "blackout" protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) going on that day. As it turned out, the truth was much less exciting, but it offers important lessons about DNSSEC. more

What the ITU WSIS Spam Meeting Accomplished

The first week in July I went to an acronym-heavy World Symposium on the Internet Society Thematic Meeting on spam in Geneva. A few people have reported this as a meeting by "the UN", which it wasn't. Although the International Telecommunications Union is now part of the UN, it dates back to an 1865 treaty to manage international telegraph communication... more

Extraterritoriality

Black's Law Dictionary defines it as "the extraterritorial operation of laws; that is, their operation upon persons, rights or jural relations, existing beyond the limits of the enacting state, but still amenable to its laws. The term is used to indicate jurisdiction exercised by a nation in other countries, by treaty..." Extraterritoriality is also the most significant emerging development today in the law shaping virtual network architectures and services that includes OTT and NFV-SDN. more

Is NIST’s Recent Letter on o.com a Bureaucratic Coup d’Etat?

Verisign recently informed ICANN that it had received a letter from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, regarding the proposed auction of o.com described in the Second Amendment to the .com Registry Agreement agreed to by ICANN and Verisign in March 2019. This letter, which doesn't appear to be on official letterhead, is from a NIST Grants Officer and purports to overturn a letter raising objections to the auction... more

The 2024-2026 Root Zone KSK Rollover: Initial Observations and Early Trends

On Jan. 11, 2025, Verisign supported the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in taking a major step to ensure the continued security, stability, and resiliency of the Domain Name System (DNS). While imperceptible to most users, this action - specifically, the introduction of a new Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) Key Signing Key (KSK) in the root zone - is the next step of a multi-year-long process to change, or "roll," the cryptographic key that secures the root of the DNS. more

The Christmas Goat and IPv6 (Year 1)

The city of Gävle in Sweden have a special Christmas tradition for which it is quite famous. Every year in December a giant Christmas Goat in straw is put in to place in one of the central town squares. In relation to this tradition a sub-tradition has emerged which the city is even more renowned for -- to burn down the poor Christmas Goat. This is of course an "illegal" act, but still of quite some interest! Web-cameras showing the status of the Christmas Goat have been put up by the city of Gävle, primarily in a purpose of control. However, when someone sets fire to the poor Goat, the traffic and need for bandwidth tend to go sky-high for these cams. more

Study Finds $9.8B Opportunity In Universal Acceptance of All New Generic and Internationalized TLDs

Report from a new study by Analysys Mason, commissioned by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), says there is a potential USD $9.8 billion growth opportunity in online revenue through a routine update to Internet systems, including those for speakers of languages that do not use the English script. more

The UDRP “Celebrates” Its 500th Reverse Domain Name Hijacking Case

Today, for the 500th time, an expert panel under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy or "UDRP", issued a decision finding a Complainant guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking or "RDNH". RDNH is an attempt to egregiously misuse the UDRP to unjustly seize a domain name from its lawful owner... To-date, the UDRP has adjudicated over 80,000 domain name disputes. The vast majority of them result in the transfer of a cybersquatted domain name to the rightful trademark owner. more