The .shop new gTLD announced in mid-July it passed the one million registrations mark, one of only six new gTLD’s that has surpassed the milestone. Aimed at online businesses/ecommerce, it launched in late September 2016 and took 15 months to reach the half million milestone and just over 3.5 years to reach the million.
Russian authorities blocked access to jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s website on Monday (26 July) in the run-up to a parliamentary election, their latest attempt to sideline his allies cast by the Kremlin as US-backed trouble-makers.
As a general rule, when a country shuts off some or all of its connections to the global internet, it doesn’t need to announce the news. People in that country notice when they can’t access online services, and people outside that country can quickly figure out that something’s going on when they stop receiving traffic from that country or being able to route traffic to servers and service providers in that country. So it was pretty strange when Russia decided to announce last week that it had successfully run tests between June 15 and July 15 to show it could disconnect itself from the internet.
At the very moment that Russia and China are facing more pressure from Western governments to stop malicious cyberattacks, they’ve announced a pact to work together for new rules to control cyberspace.
Russia is increasingly pressuring Google, Twitter and Facebook to fall in line with Kremlin internet crackdown orders or risk restrictions inside the country, as more governments around the world challenge the companies’ principles on online freedom.
Russia’s campaign to control the Internet isn’t just a secret intelligence gambit any longer. It’s an explicit goal, proclaimed by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key element of the Kremlin’s foreign policy.
Russia has implemented a novel censorship method in an ongoing effort to silence Twitter. Instead of blocking the social media site outright, the country is using previously unseen techniques to slow traffic to a crawl and make the site all but unusable for people inside the country.
China’s top diplomat had an interesting rejoinder to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s call in Anchorage this month to “strengthen the rules-based international order.” Such an order already exists, answered Politburo member Yang Jiechi. It’s called the United Nations.
Russia’s media watchdog has said it is slowing down the speed of Twitter, accusing the US social media company of failing to remove 3,000 posts relating to suicide, drugs and pornography.
The epic SolarWinds hack affecting thousands of government agencies and companies could mark the beginning of the end of the open internet.