General Availability for .Farm, .Viajes and .Codes Started

Dontus entered EAP general availability for three other new gTLDs : .Viajes, .Codes and .Farm.

The following two new gTLDs are out of the EAP and into the real general availability today : .Marketing and .Holiday.

EAP (Early Acces Registrations) are available in the first seven days of a gTLD’s general availability.EAP starts today at 16:00 UTC and ends in a week at 16:00 UTC.

Donuts will open gTLDs almost each week for most of the year.

Organizations, individuals and businesses that are interested in registering a new gTLD can register a domain name on a first-come ,first served non-restricted basis.

Yahoo Wins HackYahooFree.com Domain Name in Arbitration

An arbitrator with the National Arbitration Forum has recently awarded the domain name HackYahooFree.com to Yahoo.The company submitted the complaint on January 30,2014.

According to whois records, the domain name was first registered in 2013.

Yahoo owns many trademark registrations for the “Yahoo” mark all over the world.Therefore,it is more than obvious that the disputed domain name is confusingly similar with its trademark .Moreover,the company contended in the complaint that the respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in the disputed domain name and that the respondent registered and used the disputed domain name in bad faith .

One of the key points of this complaint was when Yahoo managed to demonstrate that the respondent registered and used the disputed domain name in bad faith,by trying to attract,for commercial gain, Internet users by creating likelikhood of confusion with Yahoo’s trademark.

Yahoo managed to establish all three elements required under the ICANN Policy and the Panel ordered the disputed domain name to be transferred from the respondent to the complainant.

You can read the decision here .

ICANN Begins Transition To New Website

[news release] ICANN today (17 April) announced the beginning of a transition to a new ICANN .org website.

Click here to visit the new ICANN website »

“We had three objectives for the new site: improve transparency of ICANN by making information easier to find, make it effortless for people to join the community and engage in the work, and lastly, to continue to support the established community with new tools,” said Chris Gift, Vice President of Online Community Services.

“The new site is intended to allow those new to the organization to discover ICANN , the work being done and our role in the Internet governance ecosystem, as well as to allow those same people the opportunity to get involved in the ICANN community,” said Gift. “With easier navigation, improved access to information, and new tools we can better support the organization’s policy discussions. These new stakeholders and the established community have a site that is easier to navigate with accessible information and tools to support the organization’s policy discussions.”

Over the coming days, a percentage of ICANN .org users will be redirected to the new site and as the next two weeks progress, the number of users redirected will increase until all users are sent directly to the new site.

“We have thought through the process and we’re being cautious in the way we move forward,” said Chris Gift. “We will increase the amount of traffic to the new site roughly every other day until we are fully crossed over.”

The new website was launched in beta relatively early in its development to encourage the ICANN community to become part of the development process. ICANN ‘s development team adopted agile and lean development practices throughout the building stage &ndash where ideas were built then tested by users and their feedback fuelled the next iteration.

Please join Chris Gift and Anil Podduturi, Principal at Neo, on Thursday, 24 April at 18:00 UTC for a demonstration of the new ICANN .org. The public webinar will also include a Q&A session at the end.

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Public Webinar Details

Date/Time: Thursday, 24 April 2014 at 18:00 – 19:00 UTC

Adobe Connect Link: https://icann.adobeconnect.com/communications/

Telephone Access Numbers: International access numbers may be obtained here: www.adigo.com/icann. When asked to enter a Conference ID, please enter: 87324546#

This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-17apr14-en.htm

Verisign’s Preliminary Comments on ICANN’s Name Collisions Phase One Report by Burt Kaliski, Verisign

Verisign posted preliminary public comments on the “Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions” Phase One Report released by ICANN earlier this month. JAS Global Advisors, authors of the report contracted by ICANN, have done solid work putting together a set of recommendations to address the name collisions problem, which is not an easy one, given the uncertainty for how installed systems actually interact with the global DNS. However, there is still much work to be done.

Below, I have outlined the four main observations from ICANN’s “Mitigating the Risk of DNS Namespace Collisions” Phase One Report discussed in Verisign’s public comment along with recommendations:

Name Collision Framework Not Yet Provided. ICANN resolved in October to “to develop a name collision occurrence management framework … to assess both probability and severity of impact resulting from name collision occurrences.” This was intended to have resulted in specific mitigation measures per new gTLD and potentially per SLD. The Phase One Report doesn’t deliver the framework; but suggests a generic (and clever) mitigation measure, “controlled interruption,” to be applied to all new gTLDs (except for three that the JAS report recommends be blocked entirely). Presumably the framework will be included in Phase Two Report, now expected in June. But it would be premature for ICANN to act on the Phase One Report and implement its recommendations, before the actual framework that ICANN resolved to develop is available for public review.
“Controlled Interruption” Untested, May Not Be Effective. The “controlled interruption” technique for notifying users and system administrators that a change to the DNS is about to occur is unprecedented. The technique has never been deployed at the scale proposed, where the DNS responses to potentially hundreds of new gTLDs and hundreds of thousands of SLDs are changed at the same time from “NXDOMAIN” to a novel IP address. There is no operational experience to indicate whether users and system administrators will detect that a controlled interruption has occurred, nor how long it may take them, after the detection, to remediate their systems.Furthermore, there are at least two scenarios where it appears plausible that users and system administrators might not actually get notified that a change is forthcoming.

The second relates to the fact that certain service-discovery protocols that use the DNS are, by design, resilient to interruption. With such protocols, if a DNS response is changed to the controlled interruption IP address as suggested, rather than producing a user-visible error message, the application will go on and try another domain name. As one example, there is evidence that some installed systems running the WPAD protocol to discover a Web proxy may be regularly generating queries involving new gTLDs (this concern was raised by Andrew Simpson in a paper at the recent Name Collisions Workshop). Because the WPAD protocol is resilient, users and systems administrators won’t necessarily detect that an interruption has occurred, and therefore may not remediate, which means that the at-risk queries will continue after the interruption period.

Controlled Interruption May Break Systems that Are Not at Risk. The intent of controlled interruption is to notify users and system administrators that a change to the DNS is about to occur. However, the actual change that is about to occur is not that every possible SLD will be delegated or even that every SLD on a block list will necessarily be, but rather that some SLDs are going to be delegated. This could be a small number or a large number, but in general it won’t involve every possibility.

There is therefore a reasonable case to be made, at least for some new gTLDs and SLDs, that the controlled interruption should be done more selectively — for instance, only to a defined set of SLDs — in effect, an “SLD white list” that would be eligible to be delegated after the controlled interruption period, or to all SLDs except for an “SLD black list” that would not be eligible to be delegated.

Risk Management Requires Feedback. An essential element of any risk management process is a feedback mechanism that provides evidence of whether, in fact, the risk factors of concern have actually been mitigated. The Phase One Report does propose a feedback mechanism, but it’s only to confirm that the new gTLD operator has implemented the “controlled interruption” technique as recommended. It does not confirm that the technique, once implemented, has its intended effect.

If the controlled interruption technique is indeed effective, then the combination of probability and severity of impact should demonstrably decrease over the course of the interruption period as users and system administrators are notified and remediate their systems. It should be possible for a new gTLD operator, using similar techniques as developed for the framework, to measure risk both before and after the mitigation measure is applied, and therefore to understand how the risk has changed. This not only provides assurance that the intervention has been worthwhile, but also gives an indication of the residual risk that may still need to be mitigated (which, one hopes would ideally be close to zero). In addition, the feedback would provide valuable guidance for improving the mitigation measure for future new gTLDs, including guidance on how long the interruption period needs to be.

To submit your own comment on ICANN’s report, or to see Verisign’s comment, as well as comments from several other reviewers, visit the ICANN public comments forum. The full comment period closes this Monday, April 21.

To learn more about what name collisions are, why they occur, and why they matter, as well as how to assess name collisions risks and prepare for mitigations in your installed systems and networks, please join a complimentary webinar titled Name Collisions in the Domain Name System that I will be hosting along with USTelecom tomorrow, Thurs., April 17 at 1:00 pm EDT.

This blog posting by Verisign’s Burt Kaliski was sourced with permission from:
blogs.verisigninc.com/blog/entry/verisign_s_preliminary_comments_on

Gab.com Wins Weekly Sales List at $200,002

Gab.com,sold for $200,002,topped Domain Name Journal sales list of reported domain names for the last week,ending April 13,2014.

Sedo had a great week in the sales chart,taking 10 of the top 20 positions .Correspondingly,GoDaddy/Afternic took 5 of the top 20 positions .

.COM dominated once again the list,with 16 of the top 20 positions.

Here are the top 40 positions for the two week ending April 13,2014:

1. Gab.com     $200,002
2. YouPay.com     $200,000
3. SAT.cn     $108,800
4. Blow.com     $80,000
5.tie     NGSN.com     $20,000
5.tie     SpongeBath.com     $20,000
7. Flavour.ca     $17,650
8. AnyView.com     $17,000
9. 3ET.com     $15,708
10. Mobile.com.co     $15,000
11. Sa3at.com     $14,000
12. Ethos.co.uk     $13,800
13. QLIC.com     $13,500
14. Greats.com     $13,000
15. RMail.com     $12,500
16. Conejo.com     $12,000
17. GamingApps.com     $11,500
18. Depose.com     $11,000
19.tie     Coinify.com     $10,000
19.tie     RMX.com     $10,000
19.tie     Xiaomi.de     $10,000