The complete .cd zone (country code for the Democratic Republic of the Congo) is off-line since at least yesterday, because the .cd-registry forgot to renew the .net domain name under which all nameservers for .cd are hosted.

The .cd-registry uses 3 nameservers which seem to be correctly located in independent locations. But all are subdomains of the same domain name scpt-network.net. And that domain name expired a couple of days ago.

To complicate things even further, it seems the domain name is registered through a reseller of eNom who doesn’t have an active website.

We reached out to both the current registrar and reseller of this domain name to offer assistance with restoring the .cd zone, but are waiting for their response.

The .cd extension has had a somewhat turbulent history lately. The extension was originally run by a Congolese citizen who moved to South Africa and hosted the registry system on the network of a South African university. Because the Congolese government wanted to keep the .cd extension within Congo, in 2017 they kicked out the foreign administrator. Since that time, no new registrations or even updates were possible. Existing domain names however remained active. A message promising those services to be restored any time soon has been on the registry website for at least 4 year since.

The .cd-registry clearly isn’t very good at renewing their most crucial domain name. Last year they had this exact same issue. At that time, they used scpt-network.com for their nameservers and let that one expire. The .cd zone then didn’t go down completely, because they also had nameservers under a different domain name which they rented from a large African network provider. But scpt-network.com was later re-registered by a white hat hacker who tried to give it back to the .cd-registry. Read more about how Fredrik Nordber Almroth’s “hijacked a top-level domain”

Update: shortly after our post, the .cd-registry renewed the domain name scpt-network.net and .cd domain names started working again.

With the release of the .xxx extension in 2011, the .xxx registry offered the option to block your registered trademark under the .xxx extension for a period of 10 years, the so-called sunriseB for .xxx names.
In this way unpleasant surprises could be avoided. You didn’t have to actively use your name under the .xxx domain and no one else could register your name under .xxx. However, this 10-year period will soon come to an end and unfortunately it isn’t possible to extend this block under .xxx.

If you still want to protect your names under .xxx, you have a number of options:

1) AdultBlock and AdultBlock+
Since the number of extensions related to the adult entertainment industry has expanded somewhat compared to 2011 with the arrival of the .adult, .porn and .sex domains, the registry decided to create these 2 blocks.

The AdultBlock allows owners of an (un)registered brand name, company name and sunriseB .xxx name to protect their name under .xxx, .adult, .porn and .sex (unless someone else has already registered your name under one of these extensions before). has). Celebrities and politicians can also protect their names in this way.

The AdultBlock+ goes a few steps further and allows you to protect your registered trademark or sunriseB .xxx name and numerous variations of it under .xxx, .adult, .porn and .sex. The variations must meet strict conditions. For example, for “bank” you would also get bânk, bänk, bànk,…. Letters in another script (Cyrillic, Greek,…) that resemble letters in Latin script are also protected.

2) Register name under .xxx
If you do not want to activate the AdultBlock or AdultBlock+ for your name, but you still want to protect your name under .xxx, this is also an option. However, you must first cancel your name and then you can register it again under .xxx.
If you do this, your name will become available again for registration, which of course also means that anyone who wishes can register your name based on the first come, first served principle. This option doesn’t guarantee that your name will actually remain yours.

3) Do nothing
Obviously you aren’t obliged to activate an AdultBlock or AdultBlock+ for your names or to register your name under .xxx. You can also just drop your name. It will then become available again for registration and from then on anyone who wishes to do so can register your name under .xxx.

bNamed is happy to help you with the activation of your AdultBlock or AdultBlock+ as well as with your .xxx domain name registration.

As we reported earlier, the rules for validating a certificate will change this year.

From November 22th 2021 onwards it will no longer be possible to validate a wildcard certificate by placing a file on your website. Validation via e-mail or via DNS is still possible.

Other certificates can still be validated via a file on your website, but the file must be placed on the exact subdomain. It is currently possible to validate a subdomain of a multidomain certificate through the root domain. So: *.yourname.be, www.yourname.be, leads.yourname.be,mail.yourname.be – and all possible other subdomains. If yourname.be was validated, all subdomains were also validated.
Also with a PositiveSSL, the www domain is automatically validated with validation of the main domain.

These options will disappear from November 22th 2021 onwards. For each certificate, each subdomain will have to be validated separately, either via email or via DNS.