domain

Several of Microsoft's online services suffered an outage last night but are reportedly all back up at this point.

The company's Office 365, Hotmail, SkyDrive, and various Windows Live services were down throughout the world for a period of around three hours. Microsoft acknowledged the outage late yesterday in its Inside Windows Live blog and on its Office 365 Twitter feed and said that it was working to resolve the issue.

After a couple of hours of investigation, the company pinned the cause on a DNS (Domain Name System) issue and said that it was starting to see … Read more

Porn and adult entertainment sites can now officially register under the .xxx domain, the domain's operator, ICM Registry, announced today.

The new .xxx top-level domain is open not just to porn sites but to nonporn sites that want to block the use of their names on the .xxx domain. Located in Florida, ICM is managing and supporting the new domain but will work with 50 individual registrars around the world to handle the actual registrations.

Promoting the advantages of .xxx to potential customers, ICM said that holders of the domain name will be able to tap into global marketing … Read more

The Sri Lankan branch of Anonymous claims to have hacked into the DNS servers of Symantec, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and several other large organizations over the past few days.

Posting the news and records of its exploits on Pastebin, the group is taking credit for launching "DNS Cache Snoop Poisoning" attacks against its victims.

DNS cache snooping is the process whereby hackers can query a DNS server to find out which domain names are being resolved into IP addresses.

DNS cache poisoning is a method through which hackers are able to insert malicious and fake records into the … Read more

OpenDNS, Google, and a few others have built a new technology into their Internet operations that's designed to speed up the delivery of data around the globe.

The technology augments the Domain Name System that provides the numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address needed to get data to an Internet domain such as news.com. Those that developed it include OpenDNS, Google, and VeriSign. Called edns-client-subnet in technical circles, or more ambitiously the "Global Internet Speedup," it uses geographic information associated with IP addresses to help computers fetching data get it from the closest--and therefore fastest--server.

"Anybody … Read more

Cookies are tiny files that are placed on your computer when you're surfing the Internet, letting the sites you visit remember your preferences, log-in information, and more. Although most cookies are benign, they're occasionally the subjects of privacy concerns. If you want to view and manage the cookies you've accumulated while using Internet Explorer, try IECookiesView. This simple utility makes it easy to keep tabs on cookies and ensure that you're only sharing information with sites you trust.

The program's interface is plain and easy to navigate, with menus and buttons across the top. A … Read more

Advertisers and the Internet's overseers seem unable to reconcile a profound disagreement about the future of Internet addresses.

Three prominent groups representing advertisers--the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A)--have come down hard on a program to dramatically expand the number of Internet addresses beyond .com and .net to a new class that could include everything from .berlin and .movie to .plumber and .pepsi. The International Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees Net addresses globally, approved in June the program to expand these so-called generic top-level domains (GTLDs) starting in 2012.

The three groups urged ICANN to reconsider the domain-name expansion program. The strongest terms came from the ANA, which outlined its concerns in an August 4 letter to ICANN that threatens broader and "far more expensive" action than just strongly worded correspondence.

"Should ICANN refuse to reconsider and adopt a program that takes into account the ANA's concerns expressed in this letter, ICANN and the program present the ANA and its members no choice but to do whatever is necessary to prevent implementation of the program and raise the issues in appropriate forums that can consider the wisdom, propriety, and legality of the program," ANA said in its letter. … Read more

The Senate's controversial Protect IP Act, which would significantly expand both public and private enforcement of online copyright and trademark infringement, is returning to center stage.

That was the message yesterday from U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who led a town hall meeting yesterday in Palo Alto, Calif. Goodlatte, a leader in Congress on technology policy, told a crowd of over a hundred that the House is working on its own version of the Senate bill.

Protect IP passed unanimously out of committee in May and now awaits a full floor vote. Goodlatte acknowledged that the Senate version … Read more

A federal court has sanctioned the efforts of U.S. law enforcement to seize domain names belonging to suspected pirate sites.

In February, U.S. customs agents seized the domain names Rojadirecta.com and Rojadirecta.org. In June, Puerto 80, the owners of the domain names, filed a lawsuit and asked that the names be returned.

Yesterday, however, a U.S. district court in Manhattan denied Puerto 80's request. According to court documents, Rojadirecta was being used to publish links that led users to illegal Web broadcasts of live sporting events and other pay-per-view shows, which is a copyright violation.

Managers at Puerto 80 said that the seizing of the domain names would cause a financial hardship and violate First Amendment rights of readers and viewers since many posted comments to the site's forum. Critics of domain-name seizures say that the practice could be used as a form of censorship. Anytime that the government wants to silence dissension on a Web site, all it need do is claim that the site is guilty of copyright violations. … Read more

Lissn, a start-up focusing on online conversations, has picked up and moved to a new Web address after having its own hijacked last week.

Lissn had been hosted at Lissn.com, but now is located at Lissn.in, chief executive Myke Armstrong said in a blog post today.

"We have contacted the authorities and proper parties to get the domain back, but the legal process of reclaiming a domain name can take months and thousands of dollars," he said. That's "too much time and too much money for a learn startup where momentum is key. In … Read more