It seems that there is a large DDoS attack targeting Time Warner's DNS servers in Southern California. JeffTWC's latest statement. A solution for those affected? [more inside]
posted by wayofthedodo on Feb 28, 2009 - 46 comments

"There is no saving the internet. There is only postponing the inevitable." Wired Magazine looks at the history of DNS and the Kaminsky attack. [more inside]
posted by Glibpaxman on Dec 1, 2008 - 79 comments

A major flaw in the DNS system is promised to be revealed at the next Black Hat conference. Convinced it was too important to wait, security researcher Dan Kaminsky (video, autoplays) convinced several software vendors to issue emergency patches today, before publicizing details of the attack. It can't be that serious though, can it? Oh yes it can.
posted by Skorgu on Jul 9, 2008 - 59 comments

The popular online trading site eBay is one of the many companies that wants to have its own domain name. [more inside]
posted by finite on Jun 26, 2008 - 69 comments

OpenDNS is an interesting idea -- take the basics of DNS, add a bunch of features like caching servers, a phishing blacklist, and search engine fired off for misspelled domain names. Pretty handy and nice to see a service pop up where I thought browsers would someday fix (like typos). No software to install, just point your DNS at their IPs.
posted by mathowie on Jul 19, 2006 - 53 comments

Dotster has its wicked way with Cory Doctorow. Any more horror stories involving them, or is he just unlucky?
posted by PinkStainlessTail on Aug 12, 2004 - 31 comments

Akamai is having some issues. It turns out a lot of really large companies use Akamai as their DNS host and apparently most of their DNS servers are no longer responding. And it's not like this is the first time. Geeks are in a tizzy. Whither the decentralized network?
posted by bshort on Jun 15, 2004 - 19 comments

On Saturday owners of .org domains will have a new registry, the Public Interest Registry. After winning the .org registry away from Verisign, PIR (a creation of the Internet Society (ISOC)) promises to be more responsive to the non-commercial needs of Internet users, which is ostensibly what the .org is all about. Info from ISOC on the bid and other related items here, some grumbling about ISOC's methods by the losing bidders here. Will .org return to its roots with this change, or business as usual?
posted by WolfDaddy on Jan 22, 2003 - 16 comments

youaremyfriend.com presents an entertaining way of using dynamic DNS and shockwave put together! Turn your sound on and Enjoy!
posted by pooldemon on Dec 10, 2002 - 15 comments

I generally give little thought to how the Internet works, as long as it does work. Well, on Monday, 9 of the 13 "root servers" that manage traffic on the Internet were hit with a denial of service attack for about an hour. You can see the spike in traffic on one of the servers in this graph. All this made me think about the fragility of the Internet and what I would do with myself if the Internet got knocked out, say, for a matter of days. Maybe I would finally learn to cook something besides pasta... What would you do?
posted by epimorph on Oct 23, 2002 - 37 comments

ICANN disses the the dot. The guy who runs the Internet Multicasting Service teamed up with the guy who runs the Internet Software Consortium and submitted a proposal to mange the .ORG registry. ICANN's conslutants [sic] dumped on the proposal (300KB PDF) claiming it is among the worst proposals from a technical standpoint. Mind you, ISC produces the software that runs the DNS and actually operates root and top-level servers. And ICANN thinks they lack the technical mojo? Wow! Are we all ready to admit that ICANN is completely corrupt and beyond saving? More info here. (via IP)
posted by chipr on Aug 31, 2002 - 12 comments

Verisign (aka Satan) is set to relinquish the management of the .org domain pool this week, after agreeing to drop both the .org and .net registries to keep the .com one until 2007. ICANN is meeting on it this week (webcast). The list of all interested parties with competing applications is here, but personally I'm pulling for Carl from media.org's proposal for a public trust. For anyone that owns a .org domain, this is one to watch.
posted by mathowie on Jun 26, 2002 - 8 comments

The hoopla gets deeper. Upon learning that "Sarah Hubert" was a non-person, registrar AITDomains simply canceled the registration to hoopla.com, releasing it into the wild, where it was picked up by someone from Taiwan. They gave no notice to Leslie or anyone else that I can tell, so that she had no opportunity to grab the name back for herself.
posted by mikewas on Jun 11, 2002 - 7 comments

The ThreeRing Web Mapping project adds a dot to a blank canvas showing your geographic location (or that of your ISP, as best it can guess based on your IP address). They've also got a code snippet to put on your own site that automagically adds your visitors to the map. The US is already clearly defined, Europe is getting there, and Oceania is coming into view. (They've also got one of them Tag-Board thingies, which is painful to read for any length of time.)
posted by gleuschk on Apr 5, 2002 - 26 comments

While you might want to think so none of the stories on this site are jokes. Ever since Network Solutions was assimilated by Verisign ("Trust is the foundation of every human relationship"), their tactics to obtain (or retain) your business have gotten sneakier. Be warned, non-Verisign domain registrants, you may get an invoice from Verisign that looks like this. Ethical? Hardly. Try as I might, I can't find anyone trying to stop Verisign from these practices. I'm beginning to think Verisign is really run by these folks. By the way, this is my first post. Please be gentle.
posted by WolfDaddy on Apr 1, 2002 - 15 comments

Register International Domain Names such as "http://www.nërd.com", which is actually available. (Note the umlaut on the e.) If you've been looking for an interesting domain name, only to find that they've all been registered, this may be just the ticket.
posted by fnirt on Jan 4, 2002 - 11 comments

Apparently wildcard DNS is a trademark violation now. Yahoo is suing the owner of the sex.com domain, because the latter uses wildcard DNS. This means that if you type "yahoo.sex.com" (or "anything.sex.com", for that matter) in your browser, you get taken to sex.com's main site. Yahoo is suing because that it could cause the public to mistakenly believe that the sex site "is connected with, sponsored by, or approved in some way by Yahoo," and therefore constitutes trademark infringement.
posted by RylandDotNet on Aug 24, 2001 - 19 comments

An inventive way to get cybersquatter off your domain. [page 3 & 4] Anyone have any great domain theft/squatting stories? My office just won a domain battle, and was served papers for another soon after. Life Goes on...[also tidbits on the motivations of congress in passing domain-use laws.]
posted by th3ph17 on Aug 1, 2001 - 7 comments

Zeldman's seemingly constant problems with Network Solutions continue. It raises two questions for me. 1. Why wouldn't he change the domain and/or name rather cease publication of one of the best independant publications on the web? and 2. How come they haven't overhauled the domain registration system to have other methods for verification? At the company where I work we have over 50 domains and we're constantly having problems with peoples' names who are long since gone being on the registration and not being able to remove them. Hope it works out for him, I couldn't live without my ALA fix.
posted by abosio on Jun 27, 2001 - 37 comments

Following the earlier post regarding cheap domain names, does anyone know anything about .eu.com domains? I've found one site offering them, but are they actually available yet? What's the story?
posted by Cobbler on Mar 6, 2001 - 5 comments

New.net lauched today, with their attempt to create their own TLD registrar that seems like a bastardization of DNS. Most people will need to download a plugin, is there any chance this could be successful? Is ICANN doing anything to stop them or will they just die on their own?
posted by mathowie on Mar 5, 2001 - 8 comments

Microsoft properties down again. This time due to DNS routing. How embarrassing for them.
posted by quirked on Jan 24, 2001 - 15 comments

Eco-celebri-conscious cybersquatting?
Elizabeth-Taylor.com, anybody?
PopeJohnPaulI.com? [dead, alas]
JonasSalk.com? Sure, we got that…
Margaret Mead, Jerry Brown, Noam Chomsky? No problem.
Danny Thomas??Jerry Lewis???
…and don't miss the popups. (Warning: annoying and pointless.)
posted by rodii on Jan 21, 2001 - 4 comments

Who are these guys? And why have they registered a thousand or more domains, only to have them all point at the same generic portal? I bumped into them three times today while doing searches for DHTML, Budd Uggly, and boxing. No banners, no logo, no company info, and search results are a framed page from goto.com. Strange.
posted by nikzhowz on Nov 18, 2000 - 12 comments

johnsmith.name and many more silly new suffixes. Do we need this many? I have yet to see anything good with the previous additions, it all looks a bit like those http://take.me.to/, http://fly.to redirectional services.
posted by tiaka on Nov 17, 2000 - 2 comments

whois microsoft.com? You might be surprised. or maybe not.
posted by quonsar on Oct 22, 2000 - 5 comments

All of this talk about madonna.com and string.com seems to me to be just a mad scramble to grab a 'scarce' resource (ie. the .com TLD). The only problem is that the scarcity is completely artificial. Networking expert and lawyer Karl Auerbach has just been elected to ICANN as the US at-large rep on a platform of reducing ICANN's role from it current one as a overreaching international law making body. He says that the DNS system is capable of handling far more than just a few top-level domains like .com, .org, .net, .uk, .au etc. He says it could handle millions.
posted by lagado on Oct 17, 2000 - 5 comments

Divas Defeat Goliath! The Digital Divas have been successful in their effort to get Microsoft to cease and desist use of the Digital Diva name.
posted by netbros on Oct 2, 2000 - 4 comments

Read the letter to Jeff Bezos here.
posted by DragonBoy on Aug 8, 2000 - 5 comments

So, how big did you say that app needed to be? Radsoft Labs knocks a Windows DNS client down from 3.5MB to 7*KB*. [Via RISKS Digest.]
posted by baylink on Jun 11, 2000 - 3 comments

Today I was once again reminded why I hate domain squatters so much. I wanted to find the website for Scream 3, but scream3.com is some half-assed hacked site. Every domain with "scream3" in it seems to be taken (some by Miramax), but none of them resolve to a movie site. The only one that looks halfway official is in french. Here it is, opening weekend, and there doesn't seem to be an official site up that I can use.
posted by mathowie on Feb 6, 2000 - 3 comments