The cat-and-mouse experience of Proton, a Swiss company, shows what it’s like to be targeted by Russian censors — and what it takes to fight back.
Inside the Face-Off Between Russia and a Small Internet Access Firm
Tag Archives: Russian Federation
Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour From China and Russia
Today, we’re sharing our findings into two covert influence operations — from China and Russia — that we took down for violating our policy against Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB). We shared information with our peers at tech companies, security researchers, governments and law enforcement so they too can take appropriate action. At the end of our full report, we’re also including threat indicators to help the security community detect and counter malicious activity elsewhere on the internet. See the full CIB Report for more information.
Russia Raises Heat on Twitter, Google and Facebook in Online Crackdown
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 Twitter throttling may give censors never-before-seen capabilities
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.
Russia slows down Twitter over ‘banned content’
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.
Microsoft Takes Down a Risk to the Election, and Finds the U.S. Doing the Same
Microsoft and a team of companies and law enforcement groups have disabled — at least temporarily — one of the world’s largest hacking operations, an effort run by Russian-speaking cybercriminals that officials feared could disrupt the presidential election in three weeks.
Russia Is Trying Something New to Isolate Its Internet From the Rest of the World
Another component of internet-browsing is about to become criminal in Russia.
On Sept. 21, Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Communications, and Mass Media (Minkomsvyaz) released a draft law that would criminalize the use of internet protocols that, in its words, encrypt a website name. The specific protocols the law is targeting are a jargony alphabet soup: TLS 1.3, ESNI, DNS over HTTPS (DoH), and DNS over TLS (DoT). But they’re important encryption techniques that are already, to varying degrees, deployed online, including in Russia.
ICANN: The Eastern European DNS Forum Comes to Moscow
Today [19 Nov], ICANN announced that the third Eastern European Domain Name System Forum (EEDNSF) will take place from 4-5 December 2018, in Moscow, Russia, following the success of the first edition in Kiev, Ukraine (2016), and the second one in Minsk, Belarus (2017). The event is jointly organized by ICANN and the Coordination Center for National Domains .RU/.РФ (cctld.ru).
This event is part of ICANN‘s regional outreach efforts to raise awareness on issues related to the Domain Name System (DNS), and collaborate with stakeholders on key areas. It comes as a continuation of the earlier engagement efforts to bring global discussions on the DNS to the regional level, and uncover the contexts surrounding the regional perspectives.
Sessions on the first day will cover technical topics. The second day will be devoted to policy-related discussions. The Forum’s topics include:
- The current state and evolution of the Root Server System
- Universal Acceptance
- Internationalized Domain Names
- Artificial Intelligence and the DNS
- DNS abuse
- Transborder legislative issues affecting the DNS
ICANN‘s Chief Technology Officer David Conrad, and Chief Security, Stability and Resiliency Officer John Crain will be at the event participating in discussions related to the evolution and security of the DNS, and the current challenges faced. Other regional and global actors of the DNS industry will also attend the forum, contributing to the sessions with their experiences and areas of expertise.
Register here and visit the EEDNSF website for more information. You can track the event on social media with the hashtag #EEDNSF.
Remote participation will be available for those interested in participating, but unable to attend in-person.
This ICANN announcement was sourced from:
https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2018-11-19-en
New gTLDs Plummet, .NET Slides, While .COM and ccTLDs Continue To Grow: Verisign DNIB
The growth in domain names was once upon a time not so many years ago on a sharp upward trajectory. But over the last couple of years that growth has slowed dramatically, with registrations growing 1.0% in the year to the end of the first quarter in 2018, or 3.2 million, to approximately 333.8 million domain name registrations across all top level domains, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign for the first quarter of 2018. For the quarter, registrations grew approximately 1.4 million, or 0.4%, compared to the fourth quarter of 2017.
This growth compares to the year to the end of the first quarter of 2010 when domain name registrations grew by 11 million, or 6%, or the year to the end of the first quarter of 2017 when registrations grew 11.8 million, or 3.7%.
Total country-code top level domain (ccTLD) registrations were approximately 146.3 million at the end of the first quarter of 2018, with an increase of approximately 0.2 million domain name registrations, or 0.1%, compared to the fourth quarter of 2017. ccTLDs increased by approximately 3.2 million domain name registrations, or 2.2%, year over year. This is a noticeable improvement on 12 months ago when the growth was 1.7% year over year. In the year to the end of the first quarter 2010 growth was 3.2%.
The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of approximately 148.3 million domain name registrations in the domain name base at the end of the first quarter of 2018, with an increase of approximately 1.9 million domain name registrations, or 1.3%, compared to the fourth quarter of 2017.
The .com and .net TLDs had a combined increase of approximately 4.6 million domain name registrations, or 3.2%, year over year. As of 31 March, the .com domain name base totalled approximately 133.9 million domain name registrations, up from 128.4 million 12 months ago, while the .net domain name base totalled approximately 14.4 , down from 15.2 million 12 months ago.
New .com and .net domain name registrations totalled approximately 9.6 million at the end of the first quarter of 2018, compared to 9.5 million domain name registrations for the first quarter of 2017.
Total new generic top level domain (new gTLD) domain name registrations were approximately 20.2 million at the end of the first quarter of 2018, with a decrease of 0.4 million domain name registrations, or 2.0%, compared to the fourth quarter of 2017. New gTLDs decreased by approximately 5.3 million domain name registrations, or 20.7%, year over year.
Among the top 10 TLDs, the first 7 are the same as one year ago – .com is the largest followed by .cn (China – 21.4 million), .tk (Tokelau – 19.9m), .de (Germany – 16.3m), .net (14.4m), .uk (United Kingdom – 12.0m) and .org (10.3m). In eighth place was .info (6.2m) followed by .ru (Russian Federation – 6.1m) and .nl (Netherlands – 5.8m). In 2017 places 8 to 10 consisted of .ru, .nl and .xyz.
In their report Verisign note that their figures include domain names in the .tk ccTLD. .tk is a free ccTLD that provides free domain names to individuals and businesses. Revenue is generated by monetising expired domain names. Domain names no longer in use by the registrant or expired are taken back by the registry and the residual traffic is sold to advertising networks. As such, there are no deleted .tk domain names.
This article can be read with images at:
http://www.domainpulse.com/2018/06/15/new-gtlds-plummet-net-slides-while-com-and-cctlds-continue-to-grow-verisign-dnib/
Global Domain Registrations Climb Up, But .NET and New gTLDs Slide Down: Verisign
Global domain name registrations continue to rise, with approximately 332.4 million registrations at the end of 2017 across all top level domains, according to the latest Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief out today. The increase for the fourth quarter was approximately 1.7 million domain names, or 0.5%, from the third quarter and 3.1 million, or 0.9%, year over year.
Within this slight increase there are notable declines â that of .net which declined to 14.5 million at the end of December from 15.0 million at the end of the third quarter and 15.3 million at the end of 2016. Five years ago at the end of 2012 there were 14.9 million .net registrations.
There was also a decline in the total number of new generic top level domains (new gTLDs) registrations. Among the new gTLDs there were approximately 20.6 million registrations, or 6.2% of total registrations across all TLDs. This was a decrease of approximately 0.5 million registrations, or 2.4% for the quarter, and approximately 5.0 million registrations (19.5%) year over year. The top 10 ngTLDs represented 48.9% of all new gTLD registrations.
But of course there were increases. The big behemoth, .com, saw registrations rise to 131.9 million at the end of 2017 compared to 130.8 million 3 months earlier, 126.9 million 12 months ago and 106.2 million at the end of 2012.
Total country code top level domain (ccTLD) registrations were approximately 146.1 million, a 1.0% increase over the third quarter of 2017, and a 2.4% increase year over year. Registrations at the end of the third quarter of 2017 were 144.7 million, 142.7 million 12 months ago and 110.2 million 5 years ago when the 12 month growth rate for ccTLDs was 21.6% in 12 months.
Without including .tk, ccTLD registrations increased approximately 0.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2017, a 0.5% increase compared to the third quarter of 2017 and ccTLDs increased by approximately 2.3 million registrations, or 1.8%, year over year.
The top 10 ccTLDs as of 31 December were .cn (China), .tk (Tokelau), .de (Germany), .uk (United Kingdom), .ru (Russian Federation), .nl (Netherlands), .br (Brazil), .eu (European Union), .fr (France) and .au (Australia). As of the end of 2017, there were 302 global ccTLD extensions delegated in the root, including Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), with the top 10 ccTLDs composing 65.5 percent of all ccTLD domain name registrations.
New .com and .net domain name registrations totalled 9.0 million during the fourth quarter of 2017 compared to 8.8 million for the fourth quarter in 2016 and 8.0 million 5 years earlier in 2012.