Web

Will Splogs Kill .INFO Domains?

An article in the September issue of Wired explores search spam and the role of .info domain names. The article, titled "Spam + Blogs = Trouble" is a good overview of the problems of search spam, blog spam, and other various forms of web activity designed to take advantage of search engines. (The article will be online September 5, but you can read it on page 104 of the print edition that is available to subscribers now). For those not versed in search spam, it's basically creating multiple websites, typically auto-generated by computers, to get good search rankings and then monetize the resulting search traffic through AdSense or affiliate programs. The article focuses much of its attention to splogs, or auto-generated blogs... more

Google Sued in Domainer Lawsuit: Vulcan Golf v. Google

Domainer litigation is heating up, and this lawsuit may be the most ambitious anti-domainer lawsuit to date. First, it is a putative class action lawsuit. Second, in addition to naming four leading domainer firms, the plaintiffs provocatively go after Google for providing ads to domainer sites. I believe this is the first lawsuit against Google for its domainer relationships. The complaint itself is a 121 page, 638 paragraph (with one paragraph enumerating 47 defined terms), 4.3MB behemoth alleging trademark infringement and dilution, ACPA violations, RICO and other claims. more

HTTPS Web Hijacking Goes From Theory to Practice

I've been privately talking about the theoretical dangers of HTTPS hacking with the developers of a major web browser since 2006 and earlier last month, I published my warnings about HTTPS web hacking along with a proposed solution. A week later, Google partially implemented some of my recommendations in an early Alpha version of their Chrome 2.0 browser... This week at the Black Hat security conference in Washington DC, Moxie Marlinspike released a tool called SSL Strip... more

Leading Domain Registries and Registrars Release Joint Document on Addressing ‘DNS Abuse’

A group of leading domain name registries and registrars have joined forces in the fight against abuse in the Domain Name System (DNS), by developing a "Framework to Address Abuse." Each contributing company has shared its expertise and experience mitigating abusive practices with the goal of submitting the resulting Framework as a foundational document for further discussion in the multistakeholder community.  more

When Will Google™ Become Generic?

Today, there are hundreds of once highly protected famous name brands, which were backed by multi-million dollar promotional budgets, now commonly used in daily lingo as generic names, as it was their huge popularity that made them lose their trademark protection. So why is the use of famous trademarked names as 'verbs' in our daily language feared by the attorneys representing that mark? Now this calls for a closer look... more

Bringing Order to The World’s Cybrary: New TLDs Make Sense to Organize the Chaos of the Internet

There has been considerable debate on whether the Internet needs new Top Level Domains. Advertising advocacy groups have objected to the expense of re-investment in online branding. There's a lot of work involved in telling the world .BEYONCE is where you will now find all official Beyonce related information. I'm wondering, why would anyone object to some order being applied to the internet? more

Google CEO Discusses Future of the Web and Enterprise Computing

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was interviewed at Gartner Symposium on the future of the Web and enterprise computing. Eric said to about 5000 CIOs attending the event, that Chinese will soon be a dominant language on the net and broadband connections will be so fast that various forms of media -- such as radio and TV -- will be blurred. more

The Darkening Web: Is there Light at the end of the Tunnel?

In his book "The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace" (Penguin Books, New York 2017), Alexander Klimburg, an Austrian-American academic, gives "Internet Dreamers" a "Wake Up Call". He tells us the background-story why people start to be "anxious about the future of the Internet", as the recent ISOC Global Internet Report "Paths to Our Digital Future" has recognized. Klimburg refers to Alphabets CEO Erich Schmidt, who once said that "the Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity does not understand". more

Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Web

With all of the buzz around apps & app stores it would be easy to assume that mobile apps have unstoppable momentum and that the mobile web is taking a back seat. It's worth taking a step back to see how this is all going to pan out. Will mobile apps dominate completely and overwhelm the mobile web or does the mobile web still stand a chance? more

Will DNS Rescue the Future of Search?

Researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China have started work on a project based on a distributed information retrieval system that promises to address future search engine scalability issues that are believed to be inevitable as the Internet continues to expand: "With the rapid increase of web pages, the coverage of search engines will become poorer and the update intervals will be much longer. If the current architecture of search engines is still in use, it will be an impossible mission to find the precise and comprehensive information in the future. This problem will be more serious when IPv6 technology is widely implemented in communication networks. The problem of 'Too much information means no information' may become a disaster with information explosion." more

Vint Cerf: The Launch of a New Larger Internet

In preparation for the World IPv6 Launch tomorrow, Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, and a founding father of the Internet, discusses the next version of the Internet, and why we need it.  more

SEO Secrets of Keyword-Relevant Domain Extensions

The Domain Name Association (DNA) recently commissioned Web Traffic Advisors, with supporting analysis from Kevin Rowe of Rowe Digital, to do an independent study, Hidden Advantages of Relevant Domain Names, to answer the following question: Can domain name extensions, especially meaningful or relevant domain name extensions (e.g. .Club, .Online, .Rocks, .Today), have the same opportunity as traditional or more generic ones (e.g. traditional .Biz, .Com, .Info, .Org)? more

Super Bust: Due Process and Domain Name Seizure

With the same made-for PR timing that prompted a previous seizure of domain names just before shopping's "Cyber Monday," Immigration and Customs Enforcement struck again, this time days before the Super Bowl, against "10 websites that illegally streamed live sporting telecasts and pay-per-view events over the Internet." ICE executed seizure warrants against the 10 by demanding that registries redirect nameserver requests for the domains to 74.81.170.110, where a colorful "This domain name has been seized by ICE" graphic is displayed. more

A New Privacy-Focused DNS Protocol Released Called Oblivious

Cloudflare and Apple, along with Fastly, on Tuesday announced a new proposed DNS standard that separates IP addresses from queries preventing an entity from seeing both at the same time. more

Putting String Similarity into Context: Bulgaria’s IDN (.??) vs. Brazil’s ccTLD (.br)

Bulgaria is a nation which is directly impacted by the current Fast Track automatic disqualification when Top-Level Domain (TLD) strings are "confusingly similar" to other TLDs, in this case an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD). Bulgaria has already been declined twice (in late 2009, and in May of 2010) to register the *.?? Cyrillic IDN on the premise that it looks confusingly similar to Brazil's *.br ASCII TLD. Being a native Bulgarian, I did not see how these two strings are similar more