Austria Loves .AT Campaign Builds Awareness of Country’s ccTLD
The Austrian registry nic.at conducted an awareness campaign appealing to the country’s sense of patriotism, and saw the ccTLD’s brand awareness rise among registrants.
At the end of the campaign, market research found 20 percent of respondents indicated that they had a significantly higher opinion of .at compared to prior to the campaign.
When it came to registering domains, almost 85 percent indicated that they would definitely or probably choose .at – up two percent since the start of the campaign.
The report also profiles a few of the successful companies who have put the .at domain at the heart of their marketing activities. These companies were the focus of the inaugural Austrian Darlink’s awards.
While this writer is not able to judge the success or otherwise of a marketing campaign, the results do show that marketing is important in raising awareness of a country’s ccTLD, and that one’s love of their own country is important too.
The final .at report for 2014 also includes a timeline of the registry’s achievement for the year as well as some of the successes for their marketing campaign.
To read the latest .at report, or previous editions, click here for the English version or here for the German version.
VVVV.com Domain Name Sells for $22,100
The domain name VVVV.com was sold for $22,100 via NameJet. The domain name managed to attract a lot of interest with 287 bids placed and 210 bidders.
VVVV.com domain name is a very unique domain name. There are only 26 repeating four letters .COM domain names .
According to whois records, the domain name was first registered in 1997.
Congratulations to both the seller and the buyer.
Minds+Machines Welcomes Parelli Natural Horsemanship as a Pioneer for its .Horse Domain Name
Minds+Machines announced that it is delighted to welcome Parelli Natural Horsemanship as a Pioneer for its .Horse Domain Name.
You can read the press release after the jump :
” Minds + Machines, the owner and operator of the new top level domain for the equine industry, .horse, is delighted to welcome Parelli Natural Horsemanship as a Pioneer for its .horse domain. Parelli Natural Horsemanship is a people-training program focused on the study of horse behavior and horsemanship skills.
As a Pioneer, Parelli has registered parelli.horse and will help promote awareness of .horse both at equine events and online through relevant social media outlets. The .horse Pioneer Program provides domain names to breed registries, businesses, farms, and organizations following the launch of the .horse domain in September 2014.
Pat Parelli, Founder of Parelli Natural Horsemanship, said:
“Parelli Natural Horsemanship’s goal – to raise the level of horsemanship worldwide for the benefit of horses and the people who love them – is proud to partner with the new .horse domain. It’s the perfect website address to further promote Parelli’s dedication to reach those passionate about the horse worldwide. It’s exciting to merge the horse industry, an inherently hands-on industry utilizing applied manual skills, with the cutting-edge of the digital marketplace. I look forward to using parelli.horse.”
The launch of the .horse top-level domain by registry operator Minds + Machines is part of a revolutionary restructuring of the Internet’s naming system by ICANN, the Internet’s governing body, as it looks to create choice, relevance, name availability and affordability to individuals, communities and businesses.
Antony Van Couvering, CEO of Minds + Machines, the registry operator for .horse, commented:
“.horse is part of a massive transformation of the Internet, and Pat Parelli understands the power of naming and wants to be part of it. With new top-level domains being supported by the likes of Amazon, Google, and L’Oréal, we look forward to a natural tipping point when we all will be adopting domain endings that identify us with a particular interest, location, or activity.”
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, there are more than 58 million horses in the world. The United States reports the highest total number of horses by far with over 9.5 million, whereas the number of horses in Europe, which counts up to 6 million, continues to grow at a 5% rate annually. With that in mind, .horse reaches a vast amount of individuals worldwide giving it a wide range of possibilities.”
AFNIC – Multiple Vulnerabilities in Several DNS Products
AFNIC, the company behind .FR extension ,announced that a serious DNS security vulnerability was published on Monday,December 8,2014 by ANSSI.
You can read the announcement after the jump :
“Discovered by Florian Maury, at the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI), it is called “infinite recursion”.
It only affects DNS resolvers (and in certain circumstances, BIND software), even when it is on an authoritative server. It is present in several software systems, at least BIND (CVE-2014-8500), PowerDNS (CVE-2014-8601) and Unbound (CVE-2014-8602).
It does not seem to be present in the Microsoft Windows DNS resolver.
The vulnerability enables easy denial of service, which stops the operation of the resolver without committing extensive resources. It is therefore necessary for all DNS resolver managers to quickly update their software.
For BIND, upgrade to versions 9.9.6-P1 and 9.10.1-P1
<https://kb.isc.org/article/AA-01224/81/BIND-9.9.6-P1-Release-Notes.html>
<https://kb.isc.org/article/AA-01223/81/BIND-9.10.1-P1-Release-Notes.html>
For Unbound, upgrade to 1.5.1 “Fix CVE-2014-8602: denial of service by making resolver chase endless series of delegations”.
<https://unbound.nlnetlabs.nl/pipermail/unbound-users/2014-December/003663.html>
For PowerDNS, upgrade to 3.6.2, which was released several weeks ago.
<http://mailman.powerdns.com/pipermail/pdns-users/2014-December/011009.html>”
Registrations Of .EU Domains Continue To Grow Healthily
The total number of .eu registrations grew by 4.7 percent in the third quarter of 2014 compared with the same quarter last year, according to the progress report released last week by the .eu registry EURid.
The increase for the quarter was 50,132 domain names under management, a net increase of 1.3 percent to 3.88 million. This made .eu the eleventh largest TLD in the world. The largest was .com with 114.576 million registrations followed by .tk (Tokelau) with 26.785m, .de (Germany – 15.794m), .net (15.083m), .cn (China – 1–.907m), .uk (United Kingdom) – 10.514), .org (10.399), .info (5.591m), .nl (Netherlands – 5.506m), .ru (Russian Federation – 4.895m) while .br (Brazil – 3.493m) followed.
“As the new gTLDs continue jostle for position in the changing TLD landscape, our healthy growth rate has further underlined that .eu has a firm foothold in the domain name market,” commented EURid General Manager Marc Van Wesemael.
Indeed, .eu registrations increased in 24 of the 28 EU member states. Malta, Greece and Luxembourg each saw growth of more than 5 percent.
The countries in the top ten list account for 87.6 percent of all .eu registrations. German residents have by far the most .eu domain name registrations, followed by residents of the Netherlands and France.
Residents in the European Economic Area (EEA) countries of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway became eligible to register .eu domain names on 8 January 2014. At the end of the third quarter registrants in Norway had registered 5,685 names, in Iceland 177 and Liechtenstein 78.
The survey also found the Netherlands has the highest density of domains registered of any European country, with 328.2 .nl domains registered per 1,000 people. Denmark was next with 226.2 .dk domains per 1,000 people followed by Germany with 196.1, the United Kingdom with 164.5, Iceland with 154.4 .is domains per 1,000 and Luxembourg with 154.0 .lu domains per 1,000.
The countries with the highest densities of .eu domains were Malta with 35.7 per thousand followed by the Netherlands with 30.2 and Luxembourg with 28.7.
The third quarter also saw EURid launch its new registration system. EURid implemented the new system to increase performance and to better meet RFC standards and so provide an improved service to the .eu registrar community and consequently to .eu domain name holders.
The full report is available for download at link.eurid.eu/reports.
