Microsoft launches Kinect without Kinect.com

Microsoft has revealed that its long-awaited gaming platform previously known as Project Natal will be officially known as “Kinect”.
While the company has a trademark on the word, it does not currently own the domain name kinect.com.
It’s registered and redirecting to CAHG, which appears to be an advertising agency specialising in the pharmaceutical industry.

Kinect is widely recognized as a global leader in interactive marketing and promotion and serves as the Interactive Agency of Record for many market-leading brands in the US, Europe, Asia, South Africa, and the Middle East.

I expect lucky CAHG could shortly find itself on the receiving end of an offer it cannot refuse.
There is some precedent: four years ago, when Nintendo launched the Wii, the domain wii.com belonged to Weyerhaeuser, a forestry products company.
It took a few months for the name to change hands, for an undisclosed sum.

5 Comments Tagged: cahg, kinect, kinect.com, Microsoft, nintendo, wii

Employ Media asks ICANN for a .jobs landrush

The company behind the .jobs sponsored top-level domain wants to loosen the shackles of sponsorship by vastly liberalizing its namespace.
Employ Media has applied (pdf) to ICANN to get rid of the current restrictions on .jobs domain ownership and open hundreds of thousands of strings to the highest bidder.
The registry wants to amend its contract with ICANN to cut the text that limits .jobs domains to the exact match or abbreviation of a company name, and add:

Domain registrations are permitted for other types of names (e.g., occupational and certain geographic identifiers) in addition to the “company name” designation.

Employ Media is basically asking for the right to open the floodgates to a complete relaunch of the .jobs TLD with very few restrictions on who can register and what strings they can register.
Phase One of the relaunch would be an RFP “to invite interested parties to propose specific plans for registration, use and promotion of domains that are not their company name”.
It sounds a little like the current .co Founders Program, or the marketing initiatives Afilias and Neustar asked for to supplement the auction of their single-character domains.
In practice, I expect that this first phase is when the DirectEmployers Association would expect to grab hundreds of thousands of .jobs domains under its universe.jobs business plan, in which it intends to offer job listings tailored to “city, state, geographic region, country, occupation [and] skill”.
Phase Two would see your basic landrush auction of any premium domains left over.
Phase three would be “A first-come, first-served real-time release of any domains not registered through the RFP or auction processes.”
While I have no strong views on the merits of this particular proposal, I do think that the application and ICANN’s response to it could wind up setting the template for how to operate a bait-and-switch in ICANN’s forthcoming round of new TLD applications.
If you say you want to do one thing with your TLD, and later decide you could make more money doing another, how much will ground will ICANN give when it comes to renegotiating your contract? It will be interesting to find out.
Reactions so far from the HR community have not been positive.
Steven Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com wrote that the process by which Employ Media’s sponsor, the Society for Human Resource Management, approved the new proposal “stunk”.
“The only winner here is Employ Media,” he wrote.
Comments posted at ERE.net, which has been on top of this story from the beginning, express what could be easily described as outrage over Employ Media’s plans.
The comment posted by Ted Daywalt of VetJobs.com is especially worth a read.
The Employ Media proposal has been submitted under ICANN’s Registry Services Evaluation Process, which allows comments to be submitted.

1 Comment Tagged: .jobs, directemployer, employ media, ICANN, new TLDs, society for human resource management

WSJ reporting bogus Indian domain name market info?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that India “passed an Internet milestone of sorts” in the first quarter, when the number of .com domains registered in the country broke through 1 million.
Did it?
This is what the WSJ says:

[India] now has more than one million registered web sites using the suffixes .com or .net, according to data released today by VeriSign Inc., the U.S. company that tracks this sort of thing.
In its Domain Name Industry Brief, it reported that India now has a registered total of 1.037 million .com and .net domain names, up from about 800,000 in the same period the year before.

The number 1.037 million is terribly specific, considering that VeriSign’s Domain Name Industry Brief doesn’t say anything of the sort.
There’s nothing in the DNIB to suggest that anybody in India has ever registered a single .com domain.
The DNIB has never broken down .com registrations by location, and the Q1 report, released on Monday, doesn’t use the word “India” once.
If the WSJ numbers are accurate – the paper does appear to have interviewed a VeriSign India executive – I’m wondering how they were calculated.
It can’t be a case of tallying the number of .com domains managed by Indian registrars. Mumbai-based Directi alone has had more than a million .com names under its belt for a long time.
Could VeriSign be mining Whois records for location data?
It runs a thin registry, so it would have to reference Whois data acquired from its registrars in order to compute the numbers.
Or did the WSJ hit on unreliable sources? It seems possible.

Comment Tagged: cctlds. gtlds, domain name industry brief, ICANN, india, verisign, wall street jounral, wsj

More WordPress attacks at Go Daddy

The Kneber gang has continued its attacks on Go Daddy this week, again targeting hosting customers running self-managed WordPress installations.
Go Daddy said that several hundred accounts were compromised in order to inject malicious code into the PHP scripts.
“The attack injects websites with a fake-antivirus pop-up ad, claiming the visitor’s computer is infected,” Go Daddy security manager Scott Gerlach blogged.
According to the alarmists-in-chief over at WPSecurityLock, the attacks place a link to a script hosted on cloudisthebestnow.com, a domain registered by “Hilary Kneber”.
The script attempts to install bot software on visitors’ machines.
As I’ve written before, the Kneber botnet has been running since at least December 2009. It generally hosts its malware on domains registered with ICANN-accredited BizCN.com, a Chinese registrar.
Go Daddy said it has contacted the registrar to get the domain yanked. It may have been successfully killed already, but I’m too much of a little girl to check manually.
I must confess, as somebody with a number of WordPress installations on Go Daddy servers, it makes me a little nervous that these attacks are now well into their second month and I still don’t know whether I should be worried or not.

Comment Tagged: bizcn.com, go daddy, hilary kneber, ICANN, kneber botnet, security, wordpress, wpsecuritylock

Twitter registers t.co for URL shortener

Twitter has registered the domain name t.co, to use as a secure URL shortener.
Just minutes ago, t.co started resolving to a page containing this text:

Twitter uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting tweets.

The page links to a FAQ describing its current URL shortener, twt.tl.
Whois.co shows it’s registered as part of .CO Internet’s Founders’ Program, the scheme the Colombian registry put in place to plug its upcoming launch.
Under this program, companies can partner with .CO to get a free premium .co domain if they commit to promote it.
TechCrunch was previously the highest-profile site to join the program, when it registered disrupt.co.
I would say getting Twitter on board definitely beats that deal.
.CO Internet is also currently auctioning e.co for charity. Bids have already reached $24,000.
UPDATE: Twitter published a blog post on the launch. I guess they beat me by about three minutes.
“When this is rolled out more broadly to users this summer, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL,” the firm says.
Probably too soon to say for sure, but it looks like Bit.ly is kinda screwed.

3 Comments Tagged: .co, .co internet, colombia, t.co, twitter

ICANN staff need to get their pee tested

I imagine it’s a pretty hard job, largely thankless, working at ICANN. No matter what you do, there’s always somebody on the internet bitching at you for one reason or another.
The job may be about to get even more irksome for some staffers, if ICANN decides to implement new security recommendations made by risk management firm JAS Communications.
In a report published yesterday, JAS suggests that senior IANA staff – basically anyone with critical responsibilities over the DNS root zone – should be made to agree to personal credit checks, drug screening and even psych evaluations.
To anyone now trying to shake mental images of Rod Beckstrom peeing into a cup for the sake of the internet, I can only apologise.
This is what the report says:

JAS recommends a formal program to vet potential new hires, and to periodically re‐vet employees over time. Such a vetting program would include screening for illegal drugs, evaluation of consumer credit, and psychiatric evaluation, which are all established risk factors for unreliable and/or malicious insider activity and are routinely a part of employee screening in government and critical infrastructure providers.

I’ve gone for the cheap headline here, obviously, but there’s plenty in this report to take seriously, if you can penetrate the management consultant yadda yadda.
There are eight other recommendations not related to stoners running the root, covering contingencies such as IANA accidentally unplugging the internet and Los Angeles sinking into the Pacific.
Probably most interesting of all is the bit explaining how ICANN’s custom Root Zone Management System software, intended to reduce the possibility of errors creeping into the root after hundreds of new TLDs are added, apparently isn’t being built with security in mind.
“No formal requirements exist regarding the security and resiliency of these systems, making it impossible to know whether the system has been built to specification,” the report says.
It also notes that ICANN lacks a proper risk management strategy, and suggests that it improve communications both internally and with VeriSign.
It discloses that “nearly all critical resources are physically located in the greater Los Angeles area”, which puts the IANA function at risk of earthquake damage, if nothing else.
JAS recommends spreading the risk geographically, which should give those opposed to ICANN bloat something new to moan about.
There’s a public comment forum over here.
UPDATE (2010-06-13): As Michael Palage points out over at CircleID, ICANN has pulled the PDF from its web site for reasons unknown.
On the off-chance that there’s a good security reason for this, I shall resist the temptation to cause mischief by uploading it here. This post, however, remains unedited.

1 Comment Tagged: iana, ICANN, jas communications, rod beckstrom, root servers, rzms, security

Domain name industry growth slowed by China crackdown

The massive slump in Chinese domain name registrations appears to have hit the overall domain name market significantly in the first quarter 2010, slowing its growth.
According to the latest VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief, only one million net new domains were registered across all TLDs in the period, a paltry 0.6% increase.
There were about 193 million domains active at the end of March, up from 192 million at the start of the year.
A million might seem like a lot, until you consider that the market grew by 11 million domains in the fourth quarter and by three million in the first quarter of 2009.
The slump is certainly due to the rapid decline in .cn domains.
China’s ccTLD had about 13.4 million names at the end of last year, and only 8.8 million at the end of March. April’s numbers show the decline continued, with 8.5 million names registered.
The China drag has been caused by a combination of pricing and the Draconian new identification requirements the communist government placed on the registry, CNNIC.
Chinese registrants now have to present photo ID before they can register a domain.
VeriSign’s own .com/.net business did a decent trade in the quarter, up 7% compared to the same quarter last and 2.7% on December to 99.3 million names in total.
With registrations growing by 2.7 million per month, this means VeriSign already has more than 100 million names in its com/net database.

3 Comments Tagged: .cn, .com, .net, china, cnnic, ctlds, domain name industry brief, verisign

Red Bull wins court case but loses UDRP

Energy drink maker Red Bull has somehow managed to lose a UDRP complaint over the domain name taurusrubens.com, despite having already won a lawsuit against its current registrant.
“Taurus Rubens” was the name of an air show slash performance art piece sponsored by Red Bull, performed at Salzburg airport in August 2003. There’s a clip here on YouTube.
The day before the show, an Austrian man named Reinhard Birnhuber registered taurusrubens.com and rubenstaurus.com and parked them with his ISP.
Two years later, when Red Bull got wise to the registrations, it offered Birnhuber €500 for them. He countered with a demand for a whopping €1 million.
That was in March 2005. One month later, Red Bull secured an Austrian trademark on the term “Taurus Rubens”. It then filed a UDRP complaint with WIPO.
Judging from that WIPO decision, it’s pretty clear that Birnhuber’s registrations were not entirely innocent.
Not only did he ask a ludicrous price for the domains, he also admitted to knowing about the air show when he registered them, he already owned redbullbag.com, and he gave a bunch of reasons about his plans for developing the domains that WIPO didn’t buy.
Nevertheless, because Red Bull had acquired its trademark rights years after the registrations, apparently just so it had standing under the UDRP rules, WIPO dismissed the complaint.
So Red Bull sued in an Austrian commercial court instead, and won.
Birnhuber appealed, and lost.
The court ruled that he had registered the domains in bad faith and that he should turn them over to Red Bull.
But he has apparently so far refused to do so. So Red Bull this year filed a second UDRP complaint with WIPO, asking for the domains to be transferred to it.
And, bizarrely, Red Bull lost.
WIPO this week denied the company’s complaint on the grounds that the the Austrian court’s ruling is irrelevant under UDRP rules, and that the 2005 WIPO decision should stand.
Here’s a Google translation of the relevant bits:

The panel can see in the above circumstances, no new facts or actions that would warrant a new assessment of the case. In this respect, the complainant fails to recognize that not only “new actions” to the resumption of proceedings are necessary, but this also has to be relevant.
…
The correct legal result is more than the enforcement of that ruling in Austria, especially as the present legal request (transfer of the domain name) covers with the sentencing order of the Austrian court. Since both parties are domiciled in Austria, is likely a priori, no specific enforcement problems arise. WIPO panels can so far do not replace the state authorities.

So, does Birnhuber get his €1 million? I doubt it. But right now he still owns taurusrubens.com.

5 Comments Tagged: austria, red bull, reinhard birnhuber, tarusrubens.com, taurus rubens, udrp, wipo

US government requests root DNSSEC go-ahead

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the US Department of Commerce, has formally announced its intent to allow the domain name system’s root servers to be digitally signed with DNSSEC.
Largely, I expect, a formality, a public comment period has been opened (pdf) that will run for two weeks, concluding on the first day of ICANN’s Brussels meeting.
NTIA said:

NTIA and NIST have reviewed the testing and evaluation report and conclude that DNSSEC is ready for the final stages of deployment at the authoritative root zone.

DNSSEC is a standard for signing DNS traffic using cryptographic keys, making it much more difficult to spoof domain names.
ICANN is expected to get the next stage of DNSSEC deployment underway next week, when it generates the first set of keys during a six-hour “ceremony” at a secure facility in Culpeper, Virginia.
The signed, validatable root zone is expected to go live July 15.

1 Comment Tagged: brussels, DNSSEC, ICANN, ntia

Charity e.co auction kicks off with $10k bid

The four-day auction of the domain name e.co started less than an hour ago at Sedo, and it has already attracted a five-figure bid.
.CO Internet, the Colombian firm behind the newly liberalized .co ccTLD namespace, is using the auction to plug its upcoming landrush, which kicks off June 20.
Juan Diego Calle, CEO of the registry, previously said e.co is “perhaps the shortest, most memorable digital brand in the world”.
Proceeds from the sale will be donated to the charity of the winning bidder’s choosing.
Due to the high-profile nature of the auction, wannabe bidders have to fill out an application form before posting their bids.
The bidding will conclude during a live event at the Internet Week show in New York this Thursday.

Comment Tagged: .co, .co internet, e.co, sedo