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Artemis plans name collision conference next week

Kevin Murphy, August 16, 2013, 09:45:58 (UTC), Domain Tech

Artemis Internet, the NCC Group subsidiary applying for .secure, is to run a day-long conference devoted to the topic of new gTLD name collisions in San Francisco next week.
Google, PayPal and DigiCert are already lined up to speak at the event, and Artemis says it expects 60 to 70 people, many of them from major new gTLD applicants, to show up.
The free-to-attend TLD Security Forum will discuss the recent Interisle Consulting report into name collisions, which compared the problem in some cases to the Millennium Bug and recommended extreme caution when approving new gTLDs.
Brad Hill, head of ecosystem security at PayPal, will speak to “Paypal’s Concerns and Recommendations on new TLDs”, according to the agenda.
That’s notable because PayPal is usually positioned as being aligned with the other side of the debate — it’s the only company to date Verisign has been able to quote from when it tries to show support for its own concerns about name collisions.
The Interisle report led to ICANN recommending months of delay for hundreds of new gTLD strings — basically every string that already gets more daily root server error traffic than legitimate queries for .sj, the existing TLD with the fewest look-ups.
The New TLD Applicants Group issued its own commentary on these recommendations, apparently drafted by Artemis CTO Alex Stamos, earlier this week, calling for all strings except .home and .corp to be treated as low risk.
NTAG also said in its report that it has been discussing with SSL certificate authorities ways to potentially speed up risk-mitigation for the related problem of internal name certificate collisions, so it’s also notable that DigiCert’s Dan Timpson is slated to speak at the Forum.
The event may be webcast for those unable to attend in person, according to Artemis. If it is, DI will be “there”.

On the same topic, ICANN yesterday published a video interview with DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris, in which he recounted some name collision anecdotes from the Mesolithic period of the internet. It’s well worth a watch.


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Comments (2)

  1. Alex Stamos says:

    Kevin, thank you for covering the SSR issue.
    Paypal was invited to speak because the goal of this forum is to engage with the concerns they and others have raised and to come up with a consensus on how to move forward. Brad Hill and I are actually colleagues from awhile back, and I agree with a most of what he actually wrote. Paypal has no reason to support or delay the new TLD program, but those with a financial motivation to stop new TLDs are waiving this letter around and completely misrepresenting its meeting. I thought it was better for the community to hear straight from the man himself.
    Verisign was also invited to speak and tell their side of the story, but unfortunately it looks like they will only be observing.
    A clarification on the NTAG letter: I was the coordinator of the group that drafted it, but I was certainly not the only author. I have a Google Doc with hundreds of tracked changes and a couple of new gray hairs to prove it.

  2. Alex Stamos says:

    s/its meeting/its meaning.
    oops

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