Study Assesses Potential Impact of DNSSEC on Broadband Consumers, Results Not Good

Recent collaborative test by Core Competence and Nominet have concluded that 75% of common residential and small SOHO routers and firewall devices used with broadband services do not operate with full DNSSEC compatibility "out of the box". The report presents and analyzes technical findings, their potential impact on DNSSEC use by broadband consumers, and implications for router/firewall manufacturers. Included in its recommendations, the report suggests that as vendors apply DNSSEC and other DNS security fixes to devices, consumers should be encouraged to upgrade to the latest firmware. more

Unreasonable ccTLD Registry Price Increases!

It highly concerns me when domain registries controlling a certain Top-Level Domain (TLD) raise the wholesale prices they charge to registrars (domain retailers) without consultation to domain registrants (domain buyers). When this happens, all the registrars will need to pay more to the registry for every domain which they register or renew for a customer. They will in turn raise their prices to cover the additional cost to them. Transferring the domains to a different registrar will not help, as all the registrars for that TLD will be forced to raise prices as they all have to pay more to the registry. Don't think it hasn't happened before? more

WiMAX Will Be Successful, as a Fringe Technology

A recent Infonetics press release says "WiMAX has gained such momentum across so many regions that it is no longer sensible to suggest that WiMAX growth will be flattened by the emergence of LTE [Long Term Evolution] in the next few years." Probably true, but it's also clear WiMAX will never reach the scale of either mainstream wireless family, i.e., WiFi or GSM/3GSM. By comparison with these giants, WiMAX will be a fringe operation. The critical issue is volume, and what counts is the wireless technology brand, not the technology itself. more

Email Portability, DKIM, and Socio-Political Implications on Tech Development

A few years ago, cell phone portability was introduced in the United States which caused a major shift in the market. The same thing happened this past year in Israel, following a major battle involving the cell carriers, consumer groups and the Israeli parliament (The Knesset). What if the same happened with email addresses? Ridiculous, you say? May be so, but there is chatter here in Israel to create a law which forces the local service providers hands to do just that. more

Censorship: A Threat to the Stability and Security of the DNS?

Censorship practices by governments and other private actors are becoming more increasingly more sophisticated, and their effects are increasingly being felt globally. A case in point, the YouTube incident in Pakistan was a recent example affecting both users and the DNS at a national and global level. Likely other incidents will occur in the near future. As such, I believe censorship should be considered as a threat to the stability and security of the DNS. In the context of Internet governance discussions, I believe the issue should be raised both at ICANN and the Internet Governance forum. Do others agree? more

A Case of Mistaken Identity

As far as facebook is concerned, your email is your identification. This is true for other social networks like linkedin, and is slowly catching on to many other Web 2.0 services. It actually makes a lot of sense that your unique identifier (your "ID") would be your email -- it's unique by definition, it's easy to remember and most services need the email information anyway... So if email is destined to become the equivalent of your social security number or identification number (depending on which country you live in) how do we proof check that the email address we typed does not contain any typos? more

Are Botnets Run by Spy Agencies?

A recent story today about discussions for an official defense Botnet in the USA prompted me to post a question I've been asking for the last year. Are some of the world's botnets secretly run by intelligence agencies, and if not, why not? Some estimates suggest that up to 1/3 of PCs are secretly part of a botnet. The main use of botnets is sending spam, but they are also used for DDOS extortion attacks and presumably other nasty things like identity theft. But consider this... more

Bandwidth Demands Exceeding Internet Infrastructure Investment

Nemertes Research has released a report on the future of the Internet infrastructure. The key finding from the report is that bandwidth demands are exceeding infrastructure investment, especially at the access layer. We noted in the project that users may begin to see the impact of degraded application performance as early as 2010. We also noted that the planned investments in Internet infrastructure are insufficient to meet growing demand. more

ICANN: WHOIS Back to Rathole #0

ICANN's GNSO council had WHOIS on its agenda for today. The options on the table: (1) Accepting the outcome of years of policy development processes; (2) rejecting that outcome (again?), but calling for some kind of fact-gathering to feed into future policy work, in order to keep the space occupied; (3) acknowledging that there is broad dissent in the Internet community, and calling for a sunset on the WHOIS clauses in current agreements, as these clauses are not backed by community consensus any more. Not very surprisingly, motions (1) and (3) failed; (2) was accepted; all that after lengthy discussion, with lots of procedural bells and whistles. more

Short Domain Names Threatened by Proposed Policy on IGO Dispute Resolution Procedure

ICANN staff has published a draft report on dispute resolution procedures for IGO (inter-governmental organization) domain names. This proposal has deep flaws and should be rejected by the community, as it does not have the balance and protection of registrant rights present in the existing UDRP. Initially, the proposed policy would apply to new Top-Level Domains (TLDs), but via a Policy Development Process (PDP) it could be extended to existing TLDs. more

If WHOIS Privacy is a Good Idea, Why is it Going Nowhere?

ICANN has been wrangling about WHOIS privacy for years. Last week, yet another WHOIS working group ended without making any progress. What's the problem? Actually, there are two: one is that WHOIS privacy is not necessarily all it's cracked up to be, and the other is that so far, nothing in the debate has given any of the parties any incentive to come to agreement. The current ICANN rules for WHOIS say, approximately, that each time you register a domain in a gTLD (the domains that ICANN manages), you are supposed to provide contact information... WHOIS data is public, and despite unenforceable rules to the contrary, it is routinely scraped... more

Another Whois-Privacy Stalemate

The report of the Whois Working Group was published today. The Working Group could not achieve agreement on how to reconcile privacy and data protection rights with the interests of intellectual property holders and law enforcement agencies. So the Working Group Chair redefined the meaning of "agreement." See the full story at the Internet Governance Project site. more

Temporary Restraining Order Issued Against Domainer’s Use of “mylennar.com”

Companies sometimes find that opportunistic purchasers of domain names (often referred to as "domainers"), will purchase a domain name quite similar to that of the company, and establish a site at the URL loaded with revenue-generating sponsored ads. To accomplish these purposes, domainers seem to prefer the services of companies like HitFarm and Domain Sponsor. A web user types in the confusingly similar URL and is bombarded with pop-up ads and sponsored links to goods and services, often competitive to the company whose name or trademark is being appropriated in the URL... more

The Inextricable Issue of Internationalized Domain Names

ICANN has embarked on the IDN boat at the same time it wants to introduce DNSSEC and new gTLDs. This promises lots of fun. Or grey hair, depending how you look at it. First is the issue of country code IDNs. The ISO-3166 table, based on two letter codes, is a western convention. Some cultures do not use abbreviations or acronyms. Some do not use a character-based alphabet, but a syllabic one. Hence, the next logical step would be to represent the full country name in local script, rather than a transliteration of the ISO string... Imagine the case of India, where there are 1.652 languages, of which 24 are spoken by more than one million people... more

UDRP Good for Trademark Protection, Not So Good for Political Process

Social Science Research Network has published a paper examining "the large gaps and inconsistencies in current domain name law and policy" as compared with domain name use in the political context. The paper suggests that the current domain name policy is focused on protecting trademark uses of domain names against bad faith commercial 'cybersquatters' but does not deal with protecting use of domain names as part of the political process. more