The APWG and M3AAWG recently conducted a survey among their members and the broader infosec community to get an understanding of how WHOIS changes had impacted security investigators. The survey results come from just over 300 participants’ responses. Both organisations have formally written to ICANN and are asking that ICANN make several fundamental changes to […]
ICANN announced Friday that it is pursuing legal action in Germany against Epag. Epag is owned by Tucows, who are one of the largest registrars in the world. So what is going on? Why is ICANN taking legal action against a registrar? According to the announcement from ICANN the action is “to preserve whois data”. […]
Nominet, the registry for .uk, is conducting a consultation on how it will handle whois data once GDPR comes into force. It’s worth noted that the consultation is only related to the *.uk namespace and is not about any of the gTLD registries on the Nominet platform. While that is the main focus of the […]
In what could be viewed as an unprecedented move, ICANN has written to each and every data protection authority in the European Union. Why? ICANN feels that there is uncertainty about how the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) should impact registrars and registries specifically in relation to the collection, processing and retention of domain name […]
Earlier today ICANN held a webinar to provide an update on their data privacy activities in relation to whois and GDPR. Rather than simply talking about the various “models” they produced both a visual mapping as well as a matrix. While some attendees may not agree with how all the models are classified it is […]
There are thousands of sites and services on the ‘net that offer domain name whois lookup services. As of last night many of them may have stopped working. Why? Many of them rely on fairly rudimentary software that parses the whois from Verisign (for .com and .net) and then relays the query to the registrar […]
In common with several other ccTLDs, the .nz ccTLD is split into two bodies. While the registry operator is NZRS, the policies are managed by a different entity The Domain Name Commission. They’ve recently been reviewing their whois related policies and have come up with a proposal which would allow private individuals to opt out […]
Last night Google unveiled their new plans for global domination, which involves the company morphing into something new “Alphabet“. And new TLD types around the globe rejoiced, as the online behemoth chose to use a .xyz domain name for their big reveal (They also made a funny reference to another .xyz in the source code […]
Nominet, the .uk registry, announced today a number of policy changes that impact how they handle whois data. The new policy comes after the registry conducted consultation with stakeholders. So what is changing? Essentially there are two key elements: Criteria and handling of “opt out” requests Introduction of whois privacy / proxy services Under the […]
ICANN comment periods on policy proposals don’t normally garner much attention. In the case of the current comment period on proxy / privacy services, however, things are very different. To date several thousand comments have been filed, while the topic of the policy proposals has received media attention across hundreds of outlets. Today, however, I […]
