German Regulators Look To Block Teens From Porn Sites

German authorities are trying to force internet service providers to block major porn sites that don’t implement age verification systems. Gizmodo reports: Currently, German law requires porn sites to restrict access to individuals 18 or older. What’s changed is that German authorities, like the British before them, have now dubbed it a good use of their time to actually pursue porn…

Microsoft Warns of a 17-Year-Old ‘Wormable’ Bug

Since WannaCry and NotPetya struck the internet just over three years ago, the security industry has scrutinized every new Windows bug that could be used to create a similar world-shaking worm. Now one potentially “wormable” vulnerability — meaning an attack can spread from one machine to another with no human interaction — has appeared in Microsoft’s implementation of the domain name…

ICANN Delays .Org Sale After Scathing Letter from California’s Attorney General

Ars Technica reports:
ICANN, the nonprofit that oversees the Internet’s domain name system, has given itself another two weeks to decide whether to allow control of the .org domain to be sold to private equity firm Ethos Capital. The decision comes after ICANN received a blizzard of letters from people opposed to the transaction, including California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. Becerra’s letter…

Opera To Support Sites Using the .Crypto Top-Level Domain

Opera has updated its lightweight browser for Android so that it can access unofficial .crypto domains, primarily to exchange cryptocurrency. The Register reports: Support for .crypto in Opera will “bring the blockchain-browsing experience to a new level,” the Norwegian software maker gushed on Monday. Crucially, dot-crypto simply doesn’t exist in the global domain name system, and is not recognized by DNS…

The World’s Internet Registries Demand ICANN’s Records on .org Registry Transfer

The world’s five regional Internet registry have an unincorporated organization called the Number Resource Organization, and they also all have representatives on a supporting organization affiliated with ICANN called the Address Supporting Organization (ASO). This week the ASO “submitted correspondence” to ICANN about the proposed transfer for the .org registry to Ethos Capital, reports CircleID: This is a historic step as…

The Ambitious Plan To Reinvent How Websites Get Their Names

When you type in a URL to your browser and press “enter,” your browser sends that name to a network of computers called the Domain Name System (DNS), which converts it into IP addresses. These numbers are what allow your browser to find the right server on the internet and connect to it. When you navigate to a website, you are…

Cyberspies Hijacked the Internet Domains of Entire Countries

Trailrunner7 shares a report: The discovery of a new, sophisticated team of hackers spying on dozens of government targets is never good news. But one team of cyberspies has pulled off that scale of espionage with a rare and troubling trick, exploiting a weak link in the internet’s cybersecurity that experts have warned about for years: DNS hijacking, a technique…