Problems With Defining Jurisdiction on the Internet

The term "jurisdiction" has various definitions in law, but for our purposes here we can say it is the power of some legal body to exercise its authority over a person or subject matter or territory. In the Internet today, it is territory that gives rise to many major issues. As in real estate, what matters in jurisdiction is "location, location, location". When the Internet and trademark rights began to intersect, it quickly became apparent that traditional concepts of the jurisdiction of courts and legislatures would be seriously strained by situations where a registrant in one country could use a registrar in a second country to register a domain name in yet a third country. more

ICANN and the DOC

ICANN today issued a press release and a series of documents about its relationship with the U.S. Department of Commerce. ...ICANN is no longer bound by the specific set of milestones that were in its prior MoU with DOC. With this freedom comes great responsibility. Without detailed government oversight, and without market competition for policymaking for domain names, ICANN (and the ICANN Board) has a great obligation to be accountable to its community. more

Huge Increase in Spam in October Email

You may have read reports that the total amount of spam is on the decline. Don't believe them. In the month of October, I saw the amount of spam in my traps here roughly double, from about 50,000 per day to 100,000/day now. In conversations with managers at both ISPs and corporate networks, I'm hearing the same thing. more

Iran’s Top-Level Domain Approved by ICANN, That is .IRAN in Non-Latin

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced today its approval of non-Latin string evaluation of Iran. This approval will allow the availability of Iran's top-level domain in its own native language, Persian, also known as Farsi (that is, the domain name .IRAN, in non-Latin characters). According to ICANN, there are currently 33 requests for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) representing 22 languages out of which 18 countries/territories have so far been approved. Other countries that have also successfully passed this string evaluation by ICANN include: India, Republic of Korea, Syrian Arab Republic and Singapore. more

Registrar Market Share: An Alternative Perspective

In the past, most measurements of registrar market share have tracked overall registrar shares -- number of domains registered by a registrar divided by number of domains registered by all registrars. In this article, I propose some alternatives -- particular subsets of domains in which to measure registrar market shares, providing a basis for comparison with overall market shares. Results vary dramatically across these subsets, with implications on the future customer retention rates of the corresponding registrars.  more

Why Is It So Hard to Run a Bitcoin Exchange?

One of the chronic features of the Bitcoin landscape is that Bitcoin exchanges screw up and fail, starting with Mt. Gox. There's nothing conceptually very hard about running an exchange, so what's the problem? The first problem is that Bitcoin and other blockchains are by design completely unforgiving. If there is a bug in your software which lets people steal coins, too bad, nothing to be done. more

New CSC Research Finds Significant Lack of Redundancy for Enterprise DNS

As outlined in CSC's recent 2020 Domain Security Report: Forbes Global 2000 Companies, cybercriminals are disrupting organizations by attacking the protocol responsible for their online presence -- their domain name system (DNS). When a DNS is overwhelmed with traffic due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack or configuration error, content and applications become inaccessible to users, affecting both revenue and reputation. more

Internationalizing Top-Level Domain Names: Another Look

A paper by Dr. John C. Klensin, former Vice President of Internet Architecture at AT&T, a Distinguished Engineering Fellow at MCI WorldCom, and Principal Research Scientist at MIT. This paper has been reproduced with kind permission from the Internet Society. "Over the last few years, rising interest in internationalized domain names has been accompanied by interest in using those names at the top level and, in particular, replacing or supplementing country-code based domain names with names in the language of the relevant countries. This memo suggests that actually creating such names in the DNS is undesirable from both a user-interface and DNS management standpoint. It then proposes the alternative of translating the names so that every TLD name is available to users in their own languages." more

The Government of Niue Launches Proceedings With ICANN to Reclaim Its .nu Top-Level Domain

The Government of Niue, a small island 2,400 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, launched proceedings today demanding a "redelegation" of its country code top-level domain, .nu, from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). more

Are Blockchains the Most Expensive Database Ever Invented?

One of the oft-made claims about Bitcoin and its blockchain transaction ledger is that they make transactions really cheap, so you can pay someone anywhere in the world for free, or close to it. But when you look closer, is that really true? Not by a long shot. Bitcoin transactions are stored in a large shared database called the blockchain. more

In Memory of Jon Postel

Jonathan B. Postel, one of the Founding Fathers of the Internet passed away on October 16, 1998. Jon had a great deal of influence over how the Internet works and how it was designed. The following is a letter written by Vinton G. Cerf on October 17, 1998 in honor of Jon's death. The letter was called "I Remember IANA".

"If Jon were here, I am sure he would urge us not to mourn his passing but to celebrate his life and his contributions. He would remind us that there is still much work to be done and that we now have the responsibility and the opportunity to do our part. I doubt that anyone could possibly duplicate his record, but it stands as a measure of one man's astonishing contribution to a community he knew and loved." more

How to Track Online Malevolent Identities in the Act

Want to be a cybersleuth and track down hackers? It may sound ambitious considering that malevolent entities are extremely clever, and tracing them requires certain skills that may not be easy to build for the typical computer user. But then again, the best defense is offense. And learning the basics of sniffing out cybercriminals may not only be necessary nowadays, it has become essential for survival on the Web. So where can you begin? more

78% of Cybersecurity Professionals Expect an Increase in DNS Threats, Yet Have Reservations

A recent survey conducted by the Neustar International Security Council confirmed the heightened interests on domain name system (DNS) security. The survey reveals that over three-quarters of cybersecurity professionals anticipate increases in DNS attacks, especially with more people shopping online amid the pandemic. Yet, close to 30% have reservations about their ability to respond to these attacks. more

The Internet: Missing the Light

Today's Internet is wonderful for solving hard problems such as connecting to Amazon to buy goods or for using Netflix. Amazon and Netflix, among others, demonstrate what is possible if you put in enough effort. Yet if we are to understand the Internet we need to look beyond those applications to the simplest application such as sending one bit of information from a light switch to a light fixture. more

CircleID’s Top 10 Posts of 2009

Looking back at the year that just ended, here are the top ten most popular news, blogs, and industry news on CircleID in 2009 based on the overall readership of the posts. Congratulations to all the participants whose posts reached top readership in 2009 and best wishes to the entire community in 2010. more