Another 706 Domains Selling Counterfeit Merchandise Seized By International Law Enforcement Agencies
Another 706 domain names selling counterfeit merchandise was seized in an operation with eleven international law enforcement bodies, led by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
The 706 domain names seized were set up to dupe consumers into unknowingly buying counterfeit goods as part of the holiday shopping season. The operations were coordinated by the HSI-led National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) in Washington, D.C.
An iteration of Operation In Our Sites, Project Cyber Monday IV resulted in the seizure of 297 domain names from undercover operations conducted by HSI offices around the country. This is the fourth year that the IPR Center has targeted websites selling counterfeit products online in conjunction with Cyber Monday. Due to the global nature of Internet crime, the IPR Center partnered with Europol who, through its member countries, seized 393 foreign-based TLDs as part of Project Transatlantic III. Additionally, Hong Kong Customs coordinated the seizure of 16 foreign-based TLDs hosted in Hong Kong, enlisting the assistance of the web-hosting companies to suspend the service of related websites.
“Working with our international partners on operations like this shows the true global impact of IP crime,” said ICE Acting Director John Sandweg. “Counterfeiters take advantage of the holiday season and sell cheap fakes to unsuspecting consumers everywhere. Consumers need to protect themselves, their families, and their personal financial information from the criminal networks operating these bogus sites.”
During the weeks leading up to the end of the year, the market is flooded with counterfeit products being sold at stores, on street corners, and online, according to law enforcement officials, not only ripping off the consumer with shoddy products, but also putting their personal financial information at risk. The most popular counterfeit products seized each year include headphones, sports jerseys, personal care products, shoes, toys, luxury goods, cell phones and electronic accessories, according to the IPR Center.
“This operation is another good example of how transatlantic law enforcement cooperation works. It sends a signal to criminals that they should not feel safe anywhere,” said Rob Wainwright, director of Europol. “Unfortunately the economic downturn has meant that disposable income has gone down, which may tempt more people to buy products for prices that are too good to be true. Consumers should realise that, by buying these products, they risk supporting organised crime.”
During the last few weeks, the IPR Center and its international partners received leads from trademark holders regarding the infringing websites. Those leads were disseminated to HSI offices in Denver, Dallas, El Paso, Houston and Salt Lake City as well as the Belgium Economic Inspection, Belgium Customs, Denmark Police, Hungarian Customs, French Gendarmerie, French Customs, Romanian Police, Spanish Guardia Civil, City of London Police, and Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department.
The domain names seized are now in the custody of the governments involved in these operations. Visitors typing those domain names into their Web browsers will now find a banner that notifies them of the seizure and educates them about the federal crime of wilful copyright infringement.
During this operation, federal law enforcement officers made undercover purchases of a host of products including professional sports jerseys and equipment, DVD sets and a variety of clothing, jewellery and luxury goods from online retailers who were suspected of selling counterfeit products. Upon confirmation by the trademark or copyright holders that the purchased products were counterfeit or otherwise illegal, law enforcement officers obtained seizure orders for the domain names of the websites that sold these goods.
Operation In Our Sites is a sustained law enforcement initiative that began more than three years ago to protect consumers by targeting the sale of counterfeit merchandise on the Internet. The 297 domain names seized under Project Cyber Monday IV bring the total number of In Our Sites domain names seized to 2,550 since the operation began in June 2010. In that time, the seizure banner has received more than 122 million individual views.
U.S. Attorney’s Offices in the District of Utah, Western District of Texas, Southern District of Texas, Northern District of Texas, and the District of Colorado issued the warrants for U.S. seizures. Significant assistance was provided by the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.
The HSI-led IPR Center is one of the U.S. government’s key weapons in the fight against criminal counterfeiting and piracy. Working in close coordination with the Department of Justice Task Force on Intellectual Property, the IPR Center uses the expertise of its 21-member agencies to share information, develop initiatives, coordinate enforcement actions and conduct investigations related to intellectual property theft. Through this strategic interagency partnership, the IPR Center protects the public’s health and safety and the U.S. economy.
Why website accessibility makes business sense by Maggie Whitnall, AusRegistry
With 18% of the Australian population living with some form of a disability, eliminating barriers to website accessibility remains a challenge. In this blog, AusRegistry’s Maggie Whitnall explores this important topic with the support of Gunela Astbrink from the Internet Society of Australia.
Today marks an important day in the calendar for people living with a disability, their families and carers.
International Day of People with Disability (IDPwD) is celebrated each year on 3rd December as a United Nations sanctioned day aimed at increasing public awareness, understanding and acceptance of people with a disability, while also encouraging greater inclusion and accessibility.
In recognition of this day, I thought it was timely to pose the following question: What can Australia’s domain name and website hosting industries do to support equal web access for all?
The issue
Around the world, people with a disability face physical, social, economic and attitudinal barriers that exclude them from participating fully and effectively as equal members of society.
Unfortunately, these barriers are also prevalent within our own industry and the topic of website accessibility is an issue that affects the lives of many people living with a disability.
The scale and importance of this issue was best articulated to me by Gunela Astbrink, a vocal advocate for the rights of people with a disability and a Director of the Internet Society of Australia. Ms Astbrink was an ambassador for the recently held Australian Internet Governance Forum (auIGF) where she led a panel discussion on the accessibility of online services.
Access to information and communication technologies creates opportunities to everyone in society, but perhaps no-more so than for people with a disability. As the Australian Human Rights Commission notes, companies need to actively think about this issue because they have an obligation to remove discrimination and promote equal participation.
Despite advances in recent times – especially with the Australian Government mandating the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 for all government websites – many people with a disability remain unable to take full advantage of the Internet due to poor website accessibility.
Following auIGF, I sat down with Ms Astbrink to discuss website accessibility.
“I am delighted that AusRegistry is spreading awareness in the sector. Thank you for taking this initiative. Designing for accessibility means designing for the whole community. Websites can be exciting and accessible. In fact, innovative, intuitive and adaptive websites can go hand in hand with accessibility,” Ms Astbrink said.
“Embedding accessibility in your communications policy and creating awareness among your marketing, content development and technical teams means that accessibility isn’t compromised when a site is updated or redesigned.”
The business case
Making information technologies available to people with a disability is not only a matter of basic human rights, it also makes good business sense.
Incredibly, the UN estimate more than one billion people around the world live with some form of disability. Locally, Ms Astbrink told me the Australian Bureau of Statistics say over 18% of the population report they have a disability.
In terms of direct relevance to website accessibility, Ms Astbrink explains that this is difficult to estimate. Common conditions such as colour blindness affects 10% of the population but may not be included in disability statistics. A person with a leg amputation would not be affected by web accessibility but someone with limited hand movement would be. There are some people who do not reveal their disability and therefore are not counted in disability statistics.
Clearly, there is a large online consumer base being overlooked. Any company would be foolish to neglect this group – both from an equity and commercial perspective.
Furthermore, the UN cite a recent British study which showed UK companies were forfeiting £80 billion in lost revenue with around three-quarters of company websites not achieving basic levels of accessibility.
This is not to mention the intuitive benefits that best-practice web accessibility design brings. According to Ms Astbrink, research suggests that accessible websites achieve higher SEO rankings than those that do not conform to web accessibility standards. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and WebAIM have both explored this topic in depth.
What can we do?
Obviously, our industry – particularly Registrars and website development companies – are uniquely positioned to be able to encourage and practice accessible web design within the community.
If we as an industry are able to create greater awareness about why website accessibility options are important, we might be able to make a small but positive impact on this issue.
Greater awareness is the first step. For instance, Ms Astbrink alerted me to the fact that the AusRegistry website could improve accessibility in a number of areas. Admittedly, without Ms Astbrink bringing this to my attention, we would not have known about these issues.
Most of the changes are all relatively straightforward and we are now in the process of addressing them (A big thanks to Ms Astbrink for raising this with me!).
See, that’s the crux of this issue. With greater awareness and understanding of website accessibility, I suspect most companies would be more than receptive to this important issue.
In an attempt to create greater awareness and encourage change, I asked Ms Astbrink to provide us with her top 10 tips for website accessibility. We’ll be encouraging our .au Accredited Registrars to be mindful of these tips for their own websites and those of their clients. Perhaps others will follow suit.
Gunela Astbrink’s top 10 website accessibility tips
(These tips are a good starting point. For full information, please go to W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
- Use the alt attribute to meaningfully describe images – not ‘image 1’ (adds context to content for blind people using screen reading software)
SEO = search engines mainly index on text
- Use section headings with H1 to H6 elements to organise content
- for people with reading difficulties and for blind people using assistive technology to more easily understand the structure of the content
SEO = used by search engines
- Use form labels
- essential for a blind user with screen reading software to understand the context of the form. Also important for people with reading difficulties using assistive technology
- Use colours carefully
- If colour differences convey information (ie stop/go), also include text for the 10% of people who are colour blind
- have sufficient colour contrast between text and background
- Allow keyboard control
- for people with physical disability who cannot use a mouse
- Use valid HTML
- enables assistive technologies to work properly on websites
- Caption videos
- important for people with hearing impairments and for people with English as a second language
SEO = search engines mainly index on text
- Provide HTML, rtf or doc version of PDF documents
- screen reading software for blind people cannot access some PDFs
- refer to Government PDF guidelines
- Make links descriptive – not ‘read more’
- makes links meaningful to users of screen reading software especially if tabbing through links
- Use a text-only browser to check your site
SEO = equates to the action of a search engine bot
This article by Maggie Whitnall, Client Services Manager – .au, AusRegistry, was sourced with permission from:
ausregistry.com.au/why-website-accessibility-makes-business-sense
ICANN Delegates Another Two gTLDs Taking Total To 34
ICANN delegated another two gTLD strings, taking the total to 34 the organisation has added to the internet’s Root Zone as of 30 November. The strings delegated were .menu and .uno, which followed the addition of みんな (xn--q9jyb4c – Japanese for “everyone”) on 23 November.
Already the domains nic.menu and nic.uno are resolving to pages promoting registrations. Currently GoDaddy is the only accredited registrar for .menu, whose applicant also applied for .wedding, while 
there are five accredited registrars for .uno including again GoDaddy.
SWITCH Cuts Wholesale Price Of .CH Domains
The wholesale price of .CH domains, the price charged to registrars, is being cut to CHF15.50 as of 1 February 2014.
The reduction is a result of continued steady growth in the number of domain names registered, which grew by 81,878 domains under management in the 12 months to 30 September 2013 to 1,816,048.
As a partner of the universities, SWITCH brought the Internet to Switzerland more than 25 years ago. Today, the non-profit organisation with 100 employees at its headquarters in Zurich develops internet services for lecturers, researchers and students, as well as for commercial customers. It acts as the registry for all .ch and .li domain names, ensuring the security and stability of the Swiss Internet.
Protecting the Internet in Switzerland is SWITCH’s top priority. In 2010, for example, it became the first national registry to start successfully combating malware (harmful software) on its country’s websites. Thanks to these measures, domain names ending in .ch and .li are among the most secure in the world.
Mega.co.nz Acquires Mega.co Domain Name for $60,000
A couple of weeks ago, we reported that JustCloud.com has acquired the domain name Mega.co for $60,000.However, we didn’t know who the buyer was up until today, when Mega.co is being forwarded to Mega.co.nz cloud service.
The sale was brokered by Rocket Name and according to whois records was owned by InterNetworX Ltc. & Co.KG.The sale is the sixth biggest .CO sale to date, with O.CO on th first place at $350,000,Business.co sold for $80,000, e.co at $81,000, Cruises.co at $82,500 and Mesothelioma.co at $76,000.
Congratulations to both the seller and the buyer.
