The Ugly End of the Phone Network

I was a little early. "By the end of President Obama's first term, there won't be any more copper landlines left in the country, I blogged just after Obama had been elected. Before that I'd prophesized the end of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) by 2010. Nevertheless, the end is nigh. And it's gonna be ugly without some planning. more

Hints and Solution for the Protection of Wine Geographical Indications in the ICANN New gTLD Program

This article is a copy of a letter sent today, 3 of April 2013, to the attention of Mr Fadi Chehadé, CEO of ICANN and other members of the ICANN board. Protecting wine Geographical Indications in the new gTLD program is a problem. This letter is also an article providing hints for the protection of Wine Geographical Indications in the ICANN new gTLD program. more

Wall Street and Virtual Space Data: Internet Domain Name Index (IDNX) Listed on Bloomberg, Reuters

The financial industry is all about pinstripe suits, excessive Excel sheets and boring data. Or is it? Financial markets are more colorful than their reputation: take a look at Bloomberg's or Reuters' sites, and you'll see that pork belly is as much an object of investment speculation as coffee, electricity, bananas, hides, or fishmeal. Recently, the universe of data available to financial analysts and investment bankers grew further, with the addition of the Internet Domain Name Index (IDNX) to leading financial data distributors Bloomberg (ticker symbol: IDNX <Index>) and Reuters (ticker symbol: .IDNX). more

InternetNZ Has Disclosed a Vulnerability That Can Be Weaponized Against Authoritative DNS Servers

New Zealand's .nz operator, InternetNZ, on Wednesday disclosed a vulnerability against authoritative DNS servers. The vulnerability called TsuNAME was first detected in February 2020 in the .nz registry and found that it could be exploited to carry out Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks across the world. more

Brand Protection Domain Registrations: There Are More Than You Think

One of the major problems for brand owners is protecting the brand in new TLDs. Most new Top-Level Domain (TLD) registries will depend on brand protection registrations for a major part of their registration volume and some may become almost completely dependent on these registrations if the new TLD fails to capture the public's imagination. Short of comparing the registrant data for each individual domain, there is no 100% accurate method of measuring the level of brand protection registrations in a TLD. more

Tangible Property: First Domain Lawsuit Filed After Federal Ruling

Storage specialist Optima Technology Corporation has filed a lawsuit against Network Solutions alleging that the registrar gave away its domain name without its permission causing damage to its business. The suit alleges that Network Solutions transferred ownership of its domain name "optimatech.com" to a former Optima employee Michael DeCorte, which has allowed him to redirect Optima's revenue to his possession. Optima claims that DeCorte along with another former employee Raymond Martin, used a fake webiste to divert Optima's revenue. more

Spamming the News Cycle: Spamhaus Non-Story Goes Viral

Google News now shows more than 300 stories about Spamhaus, most about a proposed court order following a district court default judgment. To me, the most interesting is the meta-story -- why the non-event of a proposed order has the blogs scrambling with claims of constitutional crisis and even the notoriously close-lipped ICANN issuing an announcement "in response to community interest expressed on this topic." more

ICANN Subject to the Data Quality Act

CRE notified Dr. Twomey, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN, of the applicability of the Data Quality Act to ICANN in a detailed letter of October 29th. CRE asked ICANN for a meeting to discuss the issue of the applicability of the Data Quality Act to ICANN since CRE received no communication in response to the letter. In mid-December ICANN agreed to a January 23rd meeting with CRE. Notwithstanding CRE's trip to ICANN's headquarters in California for the scheduled meeting, the organization refused at the last moment to meet with CRE. CRE now knows how Dr. Twomey felt when he was expelled from an ICANN-related planning meeting in Geneva. more

ICANN Violating Free Enterprise?

Message to ICANN: Let those who want to create a TLD, simply register it with ICANN. If the TLD is not already taken, if they have the technical capability to mange the TLD, and they have the desire to market domain names on that TLD, then let them do so. ...Do you present a businesss plan to the city you live in before they allow you a business license? Does the city ask you to prove you are financially stable before issuing you a business license? If you apply for a business license to open a clothing store, does the city ask how you will run your clothing store or if you have the necessary expertise to run a clothing store? Does the city think you will hurt them economically if your clothing store goes out of business? No, it's none of their business... more

Letter from Rome

I am at the ICANN meeting in Rome. The big story here is that ICANN is under attack for not sticking to its narrow mission -- technical coordination of the DNS and IP numbering system. People here are referring obliquely to the VeriSign lawsuit as "recent events" (as in "in light of recent events"). This euphemism reminds me of words used to reference the US Civil War ("the late unpleasantness"). more

The Internet Lost in Translation

In 1949 a Bell Laboratory researcher, Claude Shannon, published a paper on a new science of "Information". Bell Labs had sponsored the research with the goal of improving phone networks but was not prepared to embrace the full implications of the new science which made explicit the distinction between information in the information sense and information encoded in numbers or bits... more

Google Launches First Japanese IDN

John Yunker reporting in Global by Design: "Google has gone live with one if its many Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs): ???. I want to emphasize here that this is a top-level IDN - that is, the equivalent of a .com or .org. This TLD, according to Google, stands for 'everyone.' So you could in effect register 'someword.everyone,' which sounds a bit odd to me but I'm not Japanese. And, frankly, the Japanese have not been blessed with much in the way of IDN options up to this point." more

Law Requiring Sex Offenders to Hand Over All Internet Passwords Going Too Far?

Maybe you've seen one of the news stories about the revised Georgia statute (Georgia Code § 41-1-12) that now requires sex offenders to turn their Internet passwords, screen names and email addresses over to authorities. The purpose of the revised statute is to give authorities the ability to track what sex offenders are doing online, to, in the words of one news story, "make sure" they "aren't stalking children online or chatting with them about off-limits topics." more

Transport vs. Network

One of the basic tools in network design is the so-called "stacked" protocol model. This model was developed in the late 1970s as part of a broader effort to develop general standards and methods of networking. In 1983, the efforts of the CCITT and ISO were merged to form The Basic Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection, usually referred to as the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model or the "OSI model." more

The .Name Domain Disrupted by Site Finder Patch

The "delegation-only" patch to BIND that was released for Internet Service Providers and others who wanted to block Site Finder service is reported to be disrupting emails to .name emails (that look like 'firstname@lastname.name'). As a result, the Global Name Registry has submitted a letter to ICANN stating... more