In yet another domain dispute victory for Google, the WIPO has ruled against a cybersquatter and in favour of theMountain View company in a case involving the domain googlenetbiz.com.

As is generally the norm, Google contended that the domain violated its trademark and that it was being used in bad faith. The registrant, an Indian national by the name of Racha Ravinder, might have been able to put up some form of defense. He put the nail in the coffin with his response to the complaint, however, stating, “I will sell my domain googlenetbiz.com for USD 50,000 only, do you buy it.”

By submitting this statement, Ravinder unknowing committed cybersquatting. If the WIPO didn’t have a reason to hand the name over before his response, it did after.

Source | Express India
Photo | Flickr

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Data collected from a number of arbitration panels, including the WIPO and National Arbitration Forum, show that cybersquatting may be on the decline. Last year saw a 9% decline in the number of cybersquatting cases filed overall, a three-year low.

Unfortunately, this decrease does not necessarily mean the number of cybersquatters has gone down. Instead, complainants are saving money by filing for multiple domains at once. The actual number of domains disputed before panels has actually increased.

According to the WIPO and NAF, 90% of cases last year were decided in favour of the complainant.

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Millions from around the world have donated to help earthquake victims in Haiti. With people so readily giving money, it’s no surprise that domain scammers are trying to take advantage of the situation. As is the norm after all disasters in the Internet age, unscrupulous con artists are registering domains and setting up fake donation sites.

The FBI sent out an alert today warning Americans of this danger. It said to watch out for spam emails and verify the legitimacy of non-profits before donating. According to the Associated Press, more than 400 domains related to the disaster have been registered since Monday. Most of them will likely be used for illegitimate purposes. Unfortunately, most of these scammers will probably never be tracked down and caught.

Photo | Flickr

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Yesterday evening, Chinese web portal IT168.com and a similar social networking site, 51.com, both went offline. This is not normal downtime, however. Rather, the registrar of the two .coms is claiming the names were “rendered unable to resolve” at the request of the Chinese government.

China has a long history of Internet censorship and has just recently started going after domains. Last month, it deleted some 775 adult domains.

The country’s government is able to take domains offline only when the registrar is located in China. The .com TLD itself is operated by an American company. I find it odd that even though a person from China can obtain the go-ahead from the American registry to register an available .com (an automatic process), the Chinese government can remove a registration, even though it has no right to interfere with the transaction whatsoever.

Photo | Flickr

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IDNs have been hailed as a milestone in web accessibility, but unfortunately, this new technology could make it easier for phishers and other cyber criminals to target victims.

This is because while certain letters in two different scripts might look exactly alike, they have different meanings in their respective language. Cyrillic, for example, shares letters with the Latin script. Each language also uses a different encoding, meaning that browsers will respond differently according to the encoding they are set to display.

This is a problem because someone could theoretically register an IDN that looks like a legitimate domain but really isn’t. An individual in Ukraine, for instance, could register the domain “raural.com.” However, the unicode encoding used in North America and much of Europe would display “raural.com” as “paypal.com.” See the problem here? Both users of Latin scripts and anti-phishing software alike would be unable to distinguish the Cyrillic “paypal.com” from the real one.

The creation of IDNs is long past due, but as is the case with the adoption of any new technology, there are always a few bumps along the way.

Photo | kilokilo

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In an effort to grab increasingly scarce IPv4 addresses, malware makers are now grabbing blocks of IPs. By colocating servers and requesting IPs under a fake business name, cyber criminals are snatching some of the last remaining addresses.

Unfortunately, this practice is hard to track down given the shear size of the Internet. Thousands of requests are made for IPs daily, but there is no system in place to verify them. Who should get the last few remaining IPs? Is a request a true need or merely a convenience?
In the coming year, expect to see more attention given to questions like these.

Personally, I think more effort should be put into verifying IP requests. Anything that cuts down on cyber crime and frees up precious IPv4 addresses is a good thing.

Source | Ars Technica
Photo | clix

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In an effort to put a stop to online pornography, the Chinese government has shut down 775 pornographic domains in the last three days. This swift action is the result of the country’s new domain name complaint center, where concerned citizens can rat out adult websites.

The center is operated by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) and is staffed 24/7. The CNNIC has also introduced a new requirement for .cn domain registration. As of December 14, all newly registered domains must be accompanied by a written application. New registrations will not become active until the application is approved by the government.

While China sees the need to rid itself of adult websites, will it really stop people from viewing this sort of content? After all, it can only control the web within its borders. With a simple proxy, anyone can get around the country’s content filter and view objectionable content from any other part of the world.

Source | People’s Daily Online

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The Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) announced today that it, in conjunction with the .uk registry, has shut down more than 1200 .co.uk domains.

The domains in question were used by organised criminal networks for scamming. Many contained fake online stores where consumers could order designer goods for low prices, but these people ended getting conned out of their money instead. The names are thought to have generated millions of pounds in revenue.

It’s great to see something being done about Internet fraud. Cyber criminals are often times very difficult to prosecute, but in this case the PCeU found a way it could take action with minimal effort.

Photo | Flickr

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In its yearly Mapping the Mal Web report, computer security firm McAfee rated Cameroon’s .cm domain as the “Most Dangerous Country Domain.” How could what was once a relatively unknown extension obtain such a ranking?

A year ago, very few domainers cared about .cm because the government restricted public registration to citizens only. This changed several months ago, however, when Cameroon started accepting global public registrations.

Because of its close resemblance to .com, .cm quickly grew in popularity. A name on the ccTLD can gain a great deal of type-in traffic from poor spellers trying to get to a .com. Thus cyber criminals can register a popular .com domain as a .cm and take advantage of unsuspecting users.

Last year, the most dangerous country domain was .hk.

Source | Domain Name News

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It’s become common for DNS providers to redirect users to third-party pages upon entering an incorrect URL. Called NXDOMAIN substitution, many ISPs practice this to make money. ICANN is calling out against this practice, however, citing its harmful effects:

1. If an email is accidentally sent to an incorrect domain and redirected, a failed-delivery message might take days to arrive.
2. Users experience greater wait times because of redirects.
3. Hackers can exploit third party redirect sites.
4. There are legal issues, as well. What if a user attempts to visit a certain site, but types it in wrong and is redirected to a website containing content illegal in his or her jurisdiction?

ICANN is considering banning NXDOMAIN substitution on new gTLDs. As far as I’m concerned, it shouldn’t be allowed at all.

Source | PC World
Photo | shadowspel

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