At a closed-door security summit hosted on Yahoo’s Sunnyvale campus last week, a researcher demonstrated a new technique to more easily identify phishing and other malicious Websites. Dan Hubbard, vice president of security research for Websense, showed a tool their researchers have built that detects domains that were automatically registered by machines rather than humans… The tool is reported to have 99.9% rate of accuracy, and that automatically generated domains to date represent over 1 percent of the nearly 1 million domains registered each day — and rising. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

In the news lately have been a number of incidents where U.S. courts, or the U.S. government itself has ordered domain registrars to shut down free speech. First was the E360 vs Spamhaus case, in which accused spammer E360 Insight sued anti-spam organization Spamhaus for labeling them as spammers and won by default when Spamhaus insisted that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction over them in England and didn’t appear. Unfortunately, U.S. courts did have jurisdiction over Spamhaus’ domain registrar, who was nearly ordered to shut Spamhaus down (a court order was under consideration). Fortunately, Spamhaus was able to move their registration overseas before any shutdown order could be issued… More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

Several people pointed out that although the suit still hasn’t appeared in PACER, copies of the complaint are available online, including this one [PDF] at Lextext. Having read it, I’m rather underwhelmed… I do not purport to be a lawyer (nor do I usually play one on the net), but it’s hard to see how the facts, which are not in serious dispute, would support any of these charges. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

This post is based on the scenario that a trademark.tld domain name is registered with a UK ICANN accredited registrar, (they have an exclusive UK jurisdiction clause in their contracts), the trademark.tld criticism website located at that domain name is strictly non-commercial, the servers are located in the UK, and the registrant is a British citizen. In the above circumstances, the corporations and/or their lawyers are taking a big risk when they use the Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policies (UDRP) in order to silence criticism at trademark.tld. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

In a recent press release, Los Angeles law firm Kabateck Brown Kellner says it’s filed a class action suit against Network Solutions and ICANN for front running. (If you tuned in late, NetSol admits that if you query a domain name on their web site, they will speculatively register it so that it’s only available through NetSol for five days, at their above market price.) This is a very peculiar suit… For one thing, it’s hard to see how the total class damages would be large enough to be worth a suit… More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

A Los Angeles firm today announced a federal class action lawsuit against Network Solutions (NSI) and ICANN over the NSI’s practice of locking up domain names as soon as they are searched for on its website, which means the party searching can buy the name only from Network Solutions. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

Around 350 attendees came from Russia in the east to Ireland in the west, as well as a few people from elsewhere around the globe, to attend Domain Pulse 2008 in Vienna on February 21 and 22. Day one’s focus was internet governance. The future of the DNS was one of the key issues addressed by Michael Nelson of Georgetown University in Washington DC, with domain names becoming less important, but their numbers still increasing, as online access by a myriad of devices skyrockets connect — everything from the television, refrigerator, washing machine, pets, sprinkler systems and cars. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

Domain Pulse, the yearly get-together of the German-speaking registries of nic.at (Austria), Denic (Germany) and SWITCH (Switzerland) is happening on February 21 and 22 in Vienna. The conference alternates between the countries — last year it was Switzerland, this year Austria and next year Germany… Domain Pulse covers everything in the domain name arena from management of the DNS, what’s happening in each of the ccTLDs, after market and domaining, security threats to the DNS and internet as well as wider issues affecting the internet’s development such as internet governance. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

In a message posted to the ICANN GNSO list, Avri Doria forwarded along a most interesting document from Neustar, who runs the .biz domain… Neustar proposes to change their registrar agreement so that each registrar will only get credit for deletions of 10% of their new domains, with a few minor exceptions for tiny registrars and bulk registrations due to one-time mistakes. They say they expect Afilias to propose the same change for .info. More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back

In October, Dell sued a group of domain registrars, alleging the companies bought more than 1,100 domain names with trademark-infringing characteristics, such as “dellbatterrogram.com” in order to put advertising links on the pages… “Dell contends the defendants control some 1 million domain names, and believes they also have used at least 64 million other unique domain names.” More…

Original post by submitnews@thewhir.com (Web Hosting’s Premier Daily News) and software by Elliott Back