There’s been lots of interesting news in the domain name world recently. We went a bit quiet here last week (sorry about that), so instead of covering each story individually, here’s a summary of some of the big things that have caught my eye lately:
- It’s been an eventful couple of weeks in the world of banking, and as the BBC reports, even domain name speculators have been getting in on the act, registering domains like lloydstsbhbos.com in anticipation of the Halifax’s acquisition by Lloyds TSB.
- In the same vein, over at Domain Name Wire they reckon that domain names might be a good investment if stock markets keep falling. They explain in another article that “whereas the stock market seems to swing wildly each day, the domain market holds somewhat stable.” At the very least, it’s an interesting way to look at spreading your investment risk.
- Some domain names have been changing hands for big money too. The topical financialaid.com went for $800,000 and LifeInsurancePolicies.com went for $15,000. Oh, and according to the Domainers Gazette, someone paid $69 for possibly the worst domain name ever. Read the rest of this entry »
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Server and networking company Akamai has released the second of its quarterly reports investigating The State of the Internet.
Just like the last edition, it examines security issues (including where attacks on websites come from) and significant news items. It also looks at broadband adoption rates and what it calls significant ‘network events’ - I think this include things like outages and connectivity problems.
The report is a fairly interesting look at the state of things online, though it doesn’t seem to contain any really groundbreaking news. You can get it from the Akamai website. A couple of interesting snippets I noticed:
- In May, hackers used a security hole to gain access to the Epilepsy Foundation website. They posted flashing images designed to cause seizures in site visitors with photosensitive epilepsy. How low can you get?
- Global internet capacity is expanding significantly, with 16 new undersea cables planned for over the next three years. Amongst others, they’ll link India with the Middle East and Cyprus with mainland Europe. The report says this continued growth is necessary as we continue to watch more and more video online.
It’s worth having a look at the full report if you have a few minutes to spare.
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For the last month or so, a bunch of 50 brave (or foolish?) volunteers have opened themselves up to a world of spam. Security company McAfee gave each of them a new laptop and email address, and instructed them to use the internet unprotected for 30 days.
I reckon this experiment would have been quite fun to take part in. Participants were encouraged to click on whatever they liked online, just to see what would happen. As you can imagine, throwing caution to the wind online produces some interesting results.
For instance, you can probably sympathise with that ‘what if…’ feeling which occurs when one of those pop-up windows advertising an unbelievable offer appears.
You know that whatever it says (usually that you’ve won millions of dollars, or something similar), it’s almost certainly a scam. And you daren’t click it because to do so will probably bring your computer to its knees and pass your email address on to purveyors of all sorts of embarrassing wares. Read the rest of this entry »
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I logged into my RSS reader as usual today to check up on the latest industry news and information. And it’s turned out to be one of those days where every site is reporting the same story.
Google is launching its own web browser, to be called Google Chrome.
You can read about it on the BBC, the Register, TechCrunch and Lifehacker. Or you can go straight to the horse’s mouth, and get the official version from the Google blog.
The company let the cat out of the bag earlier than intended when it mailed a comic book to key websites and bloggers. It looks like Google Blogscoped was first with the news.
If you want to check out Google Chrome for yourself, it’s being released in beta (for Windows only) sometime today. I guess it could appear online any time after lunchtime here in the UK. Update: Google Chrome can now be downloaded from www.google.com/chrome.
Main features
Everyone’s got their own take on this, but from a quick flick through the comic, plus a skim of the other websites out there, these seem to be the new browser’s main features: Read the rest of this entry »
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As reported over on the Nominet news pages, the seven millionth .uk domain has recently been registered.
That’s another milestone for the .uk registry, which is still growing at a fairly impressive rate - it only passed six million in July last year.
A good proportion of those domains are registered through 123-reg; back in March we became the first UK registrar to amass over a million domains on a single tag.
This news underlines the fact that .uk domains are still as recognisable as ever, with many UK-based companies and individuals registering them as well as, or in preference to .com addresses. Read the rest of this entry »
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123-reg has been recognised by Hitwise as a Top 10 Award winner for April - June 2008.
During this period, 123-reg was one of the most visited websites in the UK in the category of “Computers and Internet - Hosting and Domain Registrations”.
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The Scottish family at the centre of a dispute over narnia.mobi has lost control of the domain name following a decision by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).
The dispute was between Richard Saville-Smith, who lives with his family in Edinburgh, and CS Lewis Ltd, which controls the rights to the works of CS Lewis. Saville-Smith says he was planning to let his son use the domain for his email address. Check out our previous posting for full background on the story.
The full text of the WIPO ruling can be found over on the organisation’s website. But in short, the panel ordered Saville-Smith to give control of the domain to CS Lewis Ltd. As the decision explains:
“…the Panel cannot envision any plausible, good faith basis upon which the Respondent [Saville-Smith] could have concluded that he was free to appropriate the Complainant’s [CS Lewis Ltd.] distinctive and widely known NARNIA mark for use as a personal email address…”
The decision has recently been covered on the BBC and Telegraph websites. And just before the decision was reached, Scotland on Sunday published an interesting piece by Gillian Fergusson, wife of Saville-Smith.
A fair decision? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.
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It’s taken us a little while to get round to posting on this issue – mainly because we took the blog offline around the time the news broke.
Anyway, you might well have seen by now that ICANN (the organisation responsible for managing the internet’s domain name system) has apparently given the go ahead for the creation of lots of new top level domains (TLDs).
A TLD is the part of a domain name which comes after the final dot. For instance, .com, .uk and .net are all TLDs.
The policy from ICANN suggests that there could be a free market for TLDs – so we could see domain names ending in anything. It mans companies could turn their brands into web addresses, or geographic areas could be given TLDs - .nyc and .london have both been suggested as possibilities. Read the rest of this entry »
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Regular readers will have noticed that this blog disappeared a week or so ago. Visitors to this page would have seen a ‘page not found’ message.
The reason for our absence is simple. We had to take the blog offline double-quick when we discovered it had been hacked.
Someone (probably an automated script) had gained access, adding lots of link spam. These links were promoting the kind of products you often get advertised in spam emails.
When viewing the blog normally, you wouldn’t have noticed any difference. But these hidden links were there, advertising all sorts of questionable items. By the way, if you’re here looking for them, we don’t sell any sort of pharmaceutical products.
How it happened
We use WordPress to power our blog. It’s dead easy to use and very powerful - that’s why loads of other blogs use it too. In this case, it looks like the hackers took advantage of a bug in one of the WordPress extensions we had installed and used it to gain access.
The only safe way forward was to assume the worst - that the blog had been completely compromised, and somebody had access to make whatever changes to it they wanted. This might not have been the case, but we didn’t want to risk any further problems. Read the rest of this entry »
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Over on the Wired website they’re reporting that today marks 25 years since the automated Domain Name System (DNS) was first tested.
The Domain Name System is one of the crucial elements of the internet as we know it today. It’s this system which translates easy-to-remember domain names (like www.bbc.co.uk) into the numerical addresses which computers understand.
It’s a giant address book for the internet. Without it, you’d have to type in 212.58.224.131 instead of bbc.co.uk to find the BBC’s website. As they say in the Wired piece:
“Without the Domain Name System, it’s doubtful the internet could have grown and flourished as it has.”
So it’s not a glamourous-sounding anniversary. But it’s quite an important one, as far as the internet’s concerned. More here.
Related information
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