.secure applicant loses CTO to Yahoo!

Yahoo has reportedly hired a new chief information security officer in the form of Alex Stamos, outspoken CTO of .secure new gTLD applicant Artemis Internet.
The news of Stamos’ departure was first reported by Re/code, citing unnamed sources, a week ago.
Stamos did not respond to a DI request for comment but I gather he’s been flagging up his departure from Artemis on ICANN mailing lists.
According to Re/code, he’s going to be Yahoo’s first CISO for a year.
Stamos’ departure will be a blow for Artemis, which is owned by escrow provide NCC Group. He has been, I think, I pretty good front man for the company over the last couple of years.
I also wonder whether he sensed which way the wind is blowing in the .secure contention set, in which Artemis is in a two-horse race with the much wealthier Amazon.
NCC also recently bought the .trust application from Deutsche Post, which looked a bit to me like a backup plan.

Go Daddy hires CTO from Yahoo

Go Daddy has made its third top-level hire from CEO Blake Irving’s alma mater, Yahoo.
Elissa Murphy, formerly vice president of engineering, will join the registrar as chief technology officer and head of platform, All Things D reports.
Go Daddy has reportedly confirmed the move, saying she’s due to start next month.
The news comes just a few weeks after the company recruited James Carroll from Yahoo to head its international business.
Irving joined Go Daddy in January.

Go Daddy poaches another Yahoo exec

Go Daddy has hired another Yahoo executive to join its senior management.
James Carroll, senior vice president of the consumer and global platform group, is to head Go Daddy’s international business, according to All Things D.
Go Daddy is of course now headed by former Yahoo Blake Irving, who has made international expansion one of his key growth strategies.
Irving hired Carroll at Yahoo too, All Things D reported.
With Yahoo apparently undergoing a shakeup under its new CEO Marrissa Meyer, it’s not impossible we might see more execs winding up at Go Daddy before long.

IEDR admits blame for hack that brought down Google and Yahoo

IEDR, the Irish ccTLD registry, has admitted that an attack on its own web servers was responsible for google.ie and yahoo.ie being hijacked last month.
In a detailed statement, the registry said that hackers spent 25 days probing for weaknesses in its systems, before eventually breaking in through a vulnerability in the Joomla content management software.
This enabled the attackers to upload malicious PHP scripts and access the back-end database, according to the statement. They then redirected yahoo.ie and google.ie to an Indonesian web site.
It’s a reverse of position for IEDR, which had appeared to blame one of its registrars (believed to be Mark Monitor) for the lapse in security when the hack was discovered last month.
IEDR told ZDNet October 11: “an unauthorised change was made to two .ie domains on an independent registrar’s account which resulted in a change of DNS nameservers”.
But today it said instead: “The IEDR investigation also confirmed that neither the Registrar of the affected domains nor its systems had any responsibility for this incident.”
The registry has filed a complaint with the Irish police over the incident, and apologized to its customers for the disruption.
It also said it plans to roll out a Domain Lock service to help prevent hijacking in future, though I doubt such a service would have prevented this specific incident.

Microsoft, Yahoo and others involved in new dot-brand gTLD group

HSBC, Microsoft, Yahoo and jewelry maker Richemont have told ICANN they plan to form a new GNSO stakeholder group just for single-registrant gTLD registries.
The group would comprise dot-brand registries and — potentially — other types of single-user gTLD manager.
A letter (pdf) to ICANN chair Steve Crocker, signed by executives from the four companies, reads in part:

As a completely new type of contracted party, we do not have a home to represent our unique community. In addition, the existence of conflicts with other contracted parties makes it challenging for us to reside within their stakeholder group.

Combined, the companies have applied for about 30 single-registrant gTLDs, mostly corresponding to brands.
Richemont, which is applying for dot-brands including .cartier, is also applying for the keywords .jewelry and .watches as single-user spaces.
The group plans to discuss formalizing itself at the next ICANN meeting, in Toronto this October.
During the just-concluded Prague meeting, the GNSO’s existing registries stakeholder group accepted several new gTLD applicants — I believe mainly conventional registries — into the fold as observers.
How the influx of new gTLD registries will affect the GNSO’s structure was a hot topic for the Governmental Advisory Committee during the meeting too. I guess now it has some of the answers it was looking for.

Google and Facebook to cut off thousands for World IPv6 Day

Some of the internet’s biggest companies are going to deliberately break their web sites for a day, for hundreds of thousands of users, in order to raise awareness of IPv6.
Google, Facebook and Yahoo are among the companies that will go into production with the protocol for 24 hours, starting at midnight UTC, June 8, for World IPv6 Day.
For the day, the companies will make their sites accessible using a dual stack of IPv4 and IPv6. Most users will be unaffected and will be able to access the services as normal.
But Google predicted on its blog that 0.05% of users may “experience connectivity problems, often due to misconfigured or misbehaving home network devices.”
Facebook purportedly has 500 million users, so presumably it’s expecting 250,000 of them to be cut off from its site for the day, with a corresponding dip in ad impressions and revenue.
World IPv6 Day is being overseen by the Internet Society. ICANN/IANA does not appear to have a role, despite it having global responsibility over IP address allocations.
ISOC’s site says:

The goal of the Test Drive Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

The IPv4 pool is estimated to be exhausted next month, when IANA allocates the final five /8 blocks to the Regional Internet Registries. The RIRs are expected to run out of addresses in November.
Not too long after that, IPv6 will be the only choice if you want to obtain IP addresses through official channels. If you want IPv4, you’ll have to head to the gray market.