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December 2009

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Nowadays the environment and working in ecological responsible way become more and more important. Also Eurid  (the .eu registry) has decided to play its part to contribute to a “greener” work environment. In the spring of 2010, their mirror site will be hosted by Eurid TeleCity Group in Amsterdam, a data center that strives for maximum efficiency in energy resources.

They use a number of technologies which significantly increase the efficiency of their power supply and the cooling of their data centers. In this way they reduce their CO2 emissions. Furthermore, they give their customers the necessary advice on how to cope with their equiment as energy efficient as possible.

Eurid is very pleased with the decision to become ‘greener’. ‘It’s very satisfying to see we can continue our work, yet have a lesser impact on the environment,’ said Marc Van Wesemael, CEO of Eurid.

cnnic1Yesterday the .cn-registry, rather unexpectedly, announced new rules for the registration of .cn domain names. Firstly, from now on, only companies will be able to register a new .cn domain name. This is no longer possible for individuals. Secondly, for each new .cn-registration from now on paperwork will need to be provided. This includes a signed registration contract and proof of identity. For a company that proof of identity is an extract from the chamber of commerce.

Yesterday the .do registry (Dominican Republic) has released the .do extension. From now on, registrations under the 2nd level .do domain are possible. Everyone who wishes to do so can register a domain name under this extension. The only condition is that names which are registered under this extension need to be registered per 2 years.

People who already have a registered .com.do, .net.do,… domain name are given the chance to register this name under the .do domain. Until March 2010, the .do registry protects these name so the owner of the .com.do or .net.do is gets the chance to register this domain name first. If the owner hasn’t registered this name before March 2010, this domain name is released and everbody gets the chance to register this name.

Earlier today, the .eu-registry EURid opened up the possibility to register IDN domain names under .eu. Such IDN-names are domain names using other characters than only latin characters. The opening up for these extra domain names was done via a large landrush, during which each .eu-registrar was able to send in their domain name requests as soon as possible. The only rule being “first come, first served”.

Different rules where set into place, making sure every registar had equal possibility to got hold of good domain names. This however didn’t go fully as planned. One of those rules as announced in the planning, was that a registrar would get a hitpoint when  incorrectly trying to register a domain name that was not available, but would be able to collect up to 750 of those hitpoints (compared to normally 100) before being blocked. Simply because, during a landrush, there isn’t much time to check availability and there is a good chance of a domain name being available one second and no longer being available a second later, when you try to register it.

On the crucial moment, this however turned out not to be the case, causing registrars to get blocked unexpectedly, reasonably soon. This will most certainly cause some uproar with registrars that where disadvantaged because of this, compared to others who carried out request in a slightly different way and therefore collected less hit points.

However this landrush was a major success. During this landrush, approximately 40,000 .eu IDN domain names were registered.

SIDN, the .nl registry, has announced that they have the intention to introduce DNSSEC for the .nl zone one month after the rootservers for the Internet are ‘signed’. ICANN, the organisation which is responsible for the management of those rootservers, recently said that this would most probably happen in July 2010. This means that SIDN would introduce DNSSEC for the .nl zone in August 2010.

The switch from DNS to DNSSEC is meant to increase safety. In fact DNS is the phone book of the Internet. When you enter a domain name, you surf to a specific site since this domain name is translated to a certain ip-address. DNS realizes this transformation, it’s DNS that translates the name to the ip-address.

The current system is far from perfect. That’s not very suprising since the current DNS system is already 30 years old.  30 years ago, the group of Internet users and – providers was smaller and more based on trust. However, those days are over.

DNSSEC will increase security as it will add digital signatures to DNS requests. With this system, we could get rid of security problems such as the infamous “KAMINSKY leak”. Through his research KAMINSKY showed that through a bug in the security of DNS it is perfectly possible to hijack domain names and Internet applications. This bug would be a goldmine for malicious people, who can divert people to rogue sites,  where for example credit card data could be copied. DNSSEC is the solution to this problem in the longer term.

According to Roelof Meijer, CEO of SIDN, August 2010 is the perfect time to switch to DNSSEC. ‘For us, stability was always a very important issue. We manage 3.6 million domain names, we simply can not afford that something would go wrong. Therefore we have always been reluctant towards a quick implementation of DNSSEC during the last few years,’ says Meijer. ‘By waiting until the rootservers of the Internet are ‘signed’ by DNSSEC, we won’t need to use interim solutions which only benefits the stability,’ explains Roelof.

Last month, in November 2009 the .uk register passed another significant milestone when it reached eight million registrations. The 8 millionth domain name lambethsuperhomes.org.uk was registered by Lambeth Super Homes based in London. So if you make the sum of all registered .co.uk, .org.uk, .net.uk,… names, you reach the amount of 8 million registrations. So the .uk extension is doing a great job.

Moreover Nominet (.uk registry) also announced that since August 2008, 1 million new .uk names were registered despite a small drop in registrations in May 2009. Moreover, reports also show that 70% of the people who register a .uk name also renew this name. Obviously, Nominet is very pleased with this numbers.

The .ru registry has imposed some new rules for both new and already existing registrations. For each registration the identity of the owner needs to be demonstrated.

  • If the owner is a company: an extract of the Chamber of the Commerce is needed
  • If the owner is a natural person: a copy of his/her ID needs to be supplied

For new registrations this proof will be asked automatically from now on. For already existing registrations, the identity of the owner will need to be demonstrated before April 2010.