Goodmail Shutting Down

Yesterday Goodmail sent out mail to all their customers announcing they are ceasing operations and taking all their token generators offline as of 5pm pacific on February 8th. While this is a bit of a surprise on one level, I'm not that shocked. Ken Magill mentioned in August that Goodmail was on the sales block and rumors have been circulating for weeks about significant changes coming to Goodmail. ... Despite the free service, people at some of those ESPs told me they were having difficulty getting customers to adopt Goodmail. more

At the Moment, No One Governs the Internet

What's remarkable about this moment is that the hot potato of DNS standard-setting is still up in the air. The US government didn't want to appear to be in charge, and wanted to convince European governments that it wasn't in charge, and so it created (or called for the creation of) ICANN. ICANN was designed to keep other governments at bay. ICANN has, however, no particular delegated power beyond that accorded to it by the contracts it has signed with registries and registrars. In fact, it can't have more power than that, because if it pretends to be a regulatory agency it should be complying with the APA -- and if it pretends to be a regulator its private nature probably violates US law in a number of respects. more

Borders, In Bankruptcy, Aims To Sell 65,536 IPv4 Addresses at $12/Address

With IPv4 address exhaustion upon us, it appears that the going market rate for IPv4 addresses is now $12/address. Over at the Register, Kevin Murphy reports on a bankruptcy filing from Borders seeking to sell a /16 block of to healthcare software vendor Cerner for a total of $786,432. At $12 per IPv4 address, this sets a new public record given that the previous high was Microsoft's acquisition of a block of Nortel IPv4 addresses... more

VIPR: New Developments in the VoIP Market

This is a new development in the VoIP market. This is how one of my colleagues, Cullen Jennings explained it to me. Today we have two widely deployed global identifiers for reaching people. One is delegated address out of DNS and the other is phone numbers. So I consider an address like email: carol@johnson.com or xmpp:john@gmail.com to roughly be out of the DNS namespace and phone number to be out of the E.164 name space. Phone numbers have lots of parts that are not cool, but they also have some cool parts... more

There Is No “Spam Problem”

This month I thought I could feel smug, deploying Postfix, with greylisting (Postgrey), and the Spamhaus block list (SBL-XBL) has reduced the volume of unsolicited bulk commercial email one of our servers was delivering to our clients by 98.99%. Alas greylisting is a flawed remedy, it merely requires the spambots to act more like email servers and it will fail, and eventually they will... more

Microsoft Direct Access: Is it Heaven or Hell for IPv6?

I must confess, during the past couple of years I have highlighted the VPN-solution Direct Access (DA) from Microsoft as a killer application for IPv6. I still have hope for this solution, but as I now have had the chance to study the UAG/DA-solution more closely and in practical implementation, I must also highlight some issues for Microsoft to handle. My conclusion is that using DA today brings difficulties when it comes to an organization that already has, or wants to, deploy native IPv6 internally. more

Usage Trumps Registrations: Why Past TLDs Failed and Why Many Will Follow in Their Path

First of all, I am biased. I am a common sense thinker who tries to analyze risk and reward based on societal trends and conventional wisdom. Watching the new gTLDs (generic Top Level Domains) launch over the last 2 years reminds me of the circus we are now seeing in the U.S. election. Myself, a self-proclaimed libertarian, can now be labeled as the establishment, while the so-called "outsiders" act and behave like they are not politicians yet seem to be masters of messaging and propaganda. more

Is Industry Underestimating the Ending Dot?

According to RFC1034, "cnn.com" and "cnn.com." should be the same domain names. However, it doesn't appear that programmers always understand that trailing dots can be added to domain names. Web servers also can't seem to agree what to do with a period at the end of a host name. IIS, thttp, and Akamai's Web server all get confused while Apache doesn't seem to care. How much other software behaves incorrectly because of a trailing period on a domain name? Can spam-filtering software be bypassed with dotted email addresses? Here is a situation when bad things can happen -- "WebShield SMTP infinite loop DoS Attack"... more

The Small, But Limitless World of .kids.us

Erica Wass is the editor and contributing author of the recently published book, "Addressing the World: National Identity and Internet Country Code Domains", (Rowman & Littlefield, October 2003). This book is an edited collection of original essays by domain name administrators, academics, journalists and lawyers that examine the connections between various cultures and the use and regulation of their country code domain names. This is the second part of a three-part series. "Congress and the President of the United States believed so much in the idea that the Internet needed a "safe zone" for children that they passed a law designating such a space. One year after its passage I sought to examine the development of the .kids.us name space. I found an initiative that has yet to live up to its potential, but has a limitless, albeit difficult future ahead." more

DNSSEC Update from ICANN 42 in Dakar

While the global rollout of DNSSEC continues at the domain name registry level - with more than 25% of top-level domains now signed - the industry continues to focus on the problem of registrar, ISP and ultimately end-user adoption. At the ICANN meeting in Dakar in late October, engineers from some of the early-adopting registries gathered for their regular face-to-face discussion about how to break the "chicken or egg" problems of secure domain name deployment. more

In Pursuit of IDN Perfection?

Many of the problems of IDNs come from trying to do multiple languages at the same time or languages one can't read. The biggest difficulty is implementing them in gTLDs like .com or .org. I think that if we focus on helping the country level TLDs (ccTLDs) get going with IDNs in their own native languages, we would be solving the problem for 80% or so of the people. My concern is holding up the ability for these people to use IDNs because we can find the perfect solution for the edge cases. more

The Debate Continues: Geist Replies to CENTR Response

While this may be better suited as a comment to the CENTR posting, I thought that its length might warrant a separate submission. Many thanks to CircleID for hosting this interesting discussion. Below is the full text of a comment I forwarded to CENTR earlier today in reply to its commentary on my recent study on national governments and ccTLDs. ...I should also preface my remarks by noting that I speak for myself -- not the ITU (see below), nor CIRA, (a CENTR member ) on which I serve on the board of directors, nor the Public Interest Registry, which manages the dot-org domain and on which I serve on the Global Advisory Council. more

Why the Dot Com Kingdom Will Continue to Rule Post New gTLDs

Today, with the launch of new and exciting 1600 proposed gTLDs, the choices will simply unleash a slew of unlimited new ideas for the global end-users. The influx will create amazing times for the right names and the right parties. The global public will get the taste of owning multiple domain names for multi-layers of communication to enhance richer and selective experiences. No need to be in pool with 800 million folks but rather interacting with '117 winemaker, left-handed and collectors of toy trains'. 'Divorce lawyers, only handling 3.7 million dollar pre nuptials, only serving Jersey wives'. more

Why Colombia Is About to Make a Colossal Mistake With .CO

Ten years ago, the most effective branding exercise the internet registry market has ever seen began. And to celebrate the anniversary, its owner is going to strangle it. At the ICANN meeting in Montreal this month, the Government of Colombia booked a meeting room, prepared a Powerpoint presentation and invited representatives of the world's largest registry operators to attend. Once there, they were offered a rare and valuable opportunity: to take over running of the .co registry. more

With No Privacy Standards Who Knows Who Is Abusing The Whois Database

John Banks is a loan officer in New York. John's supervisor recently warned John about the potential number of bad loans he may be carrying as part of his portfolio. To dump some of the bad loans he might be carrying, John came up with a scheme. He pointed his web browser to www.whois.org and entered terms denoting disease or poor health such as 'cancer' and 'illness'. This query on the Internet's WHOIS database reported results of names and addresses of domain name owners who had developed websites devoted to providing information on certain serious illnesses. John compared these names and addresses with those in his portfolio of loans. For the matches, he canceled the loans and required immediate payment-in-full. more