Posts relating to various aspects of the Domain Name System
The Domain Name Service (DNS) which translates names to IP addresses (among many other things) is critical for humans using the Internet. Research by Slavko Gajin and Petar Bojovic presented at the TERENA Networking Conference indicates that mis-configurations are more common than we might hope. Getting DNS right often requires different organisations to have matching […]
The Digital Economy Bill has been taking up a lot of my time since the start of the new year and I’m pleased to report one result. The Bill gives the Secretary of State powers to intervene in the operations of a DNS registry where a serious failure of the registry is likely to affect […]
I had a meeting with Ofcom this morning as part of their review of section 17 of the Digital Economy Act 2010. That section, if enabled by the Secretary of State, would allow courts to order a service provider “to prevent its service being used to gain access to [an Internet] location”. This power could […]
Nominet have published an interesting analysis of the legal issues around any possible process for suspending domains associated with criminal activity. This raises the rather worrying issue that the legal position is not clear if a registry is informed of unlawful conduct somewhere in their domain and decides that the evidence is not strong enough […]
The Chief Executive of OFCOM, Ed Richards, gave evidence to the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee last week, in which he reported on progress on the copyright enforcement and web blocking parts of the Digital Economy Act 2010. He first confirmed that the Initial Obligations Code was completed and passed to the […]
Nominet’s Issue Group on dealing with domain names used in connection with criminal activity has published its draft recommendations, which seem reassuringly close to the JANET submission to the original request for comments. Expedited suspension of a domain is regarded as a last resort, to be used only where alternative approaches via the registrar or […]
With various Governments looking at the Domain Name Service (DNS) as a tool to implement national policy (for example the USA’s SOPA and PIPA proposals) Rod Rasmussen’s talk at the FIRST conference was a timely reminder of the possible problems with this approach. DNS is a critical part of the Internet, providing the conversion between […]
[This is the approximate text of an internal company talk, which I’ve been asked to make more widely available] One of the odd things about how people talk about the Internet is that you’ll hear it described both as “the Wild West” where there are no rules and unlawful behaviour is rife and as a […]
Ofcom’s 2010 report on “Site Blocking” to reduce online copyright infringement concluded that using IP addresses to block infringing sites “carries a significant risk of over-blocking given that it is common practice for multiple discrete sites to share a single IP address” (page 5). They have now published a report commissioned from CMSG that shows […]
A number of talks at the FIRST conference this week have mentioned the value of Domain Name Service (DNS) logs for both detecting and investigating various types of computer misuse: from users accessing unauthorised websites to PCs infected with botnets to targeted theft of information (see, for example, Google’s talk). DNS is sometimes described as […]