"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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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