|
Be on the wave or under it™
The News – 09/04/01
In
this Issue:
Cybersquatting
Is Legal – For Some
There’s
nothing like a monopoly. You get to make your own rules and wield power however
you want. So I guess it’s not surprising that, when ICANN gave monopolies to the registrars
for the seven new top level domains (.biz, .name, .pro, .museum, .info, .aero, and
.coop), there’d be opportunities for abuse. Turns out abuse is practically
mandated in the new domain operators' contracts, which entitles them to
register up to 10,000 domains for themselves before allowing anyone else
access. This means that 10,000 of the most valuable, juiciest domain names are
likely to not be available to all comers. Names like business.biz,
museum.museum and the like could be controlled by the domain registrar, who
could auction them to the highest bidders. Afilias, a consortium of 18
companies and domain registrar for the .info domain, has registered
search.info, for example. ICANN argues that a registry operator will need a
wide range of addresses on that registry in order to work effectively. Here’s a list of
names reserved by NeuLevel, the administrator of the .biz gTLD (generic Top
Level Domain).
As
if that’s not bad enough, other registrants have taken many desirable domain
names in the early registration period, which is supposed to be available only
to trademark owners. So if you had your heart set on getting sports.info, computer.info,
bank.info, or finance.info, you can forget it. All have been snapped up
by registrants who did not hold legitimate trademarks. Afilias says they’ll
take action in December, after their review of the early registration period
ends. One study found that of
11,000 .info registrations, between 15 and 25 percent were bogus. My personal
favorite bogus registration was for bible.info, which claimed its trademark
number was “1”. Not according to the USPTO, it’s not. With all this potential
cybersquatting, Afilias has its work cut out for it if it hopes to clear it all
up by yearend.
Domain
registrar NeuLevel, which was awarded the .biz monopoly, has been accused
by Amazon of running an illegal lottery, and has filed suit to defend itself. At
issue is the pre-registration period NeuLevel established in which applicants
pay a small fee to reserve the rights to a name. On September 17, the company will
randomly award contested names. I don’t know about you, but that sounds an
awful lot like a lottery to me. However, I don’t really know how else a
registrar can resolve multiple claims for a single name, unless there’s
trademark or other intellectual property rights at stake (like in
cocacola.biz). Amazon supposedly has said in a letter to the company, “NeuLevel
is deriving enhanced revenues by selling chances to register or to challenge
registration of domain names that incorporate famous trademarks such as
AMAZON.COM.” NeuLevel counters with a
reasonable-sounding point: other firms, such as Amazon Imaging Inc., might
reasonably stake a claim to the address www.amazon.biz. “Because amazon.com and
amazon.biz exist in different top-level domains, they resolve to different and
unique Internet addresses and thus can function and coexist without collision,”
the suit says. Where’s Solomon when we need him?
The
bottom line on all of this is, as I’ve said before, the new domain
names will not provide any relief to the overcrowding of the .com top level
domain. In a random check of .info registrations, the usual suspects held the
domains coke.info, pepsi.info, nike.info, and nbc.info. How exactly is this
better? If Amazon is insisting on getting Amazon.biz, even though they are by
far not the only Amazon in the world, what can we expect of names like “Excel,”
which are applied to various businesses in various industries. Trademark law
allows this because a trademark only applies to a class of trade. The new gTLDs
are not industry-specific, and so chaos will again reign, and the big companies
will scoop up all the good names.
That
being said, businesses need to evaluate the need for representation in the new
gTLDs. Do you want your competition to register your name? Most businesses have
no choice other than registering in all the gTLDs possible. It’s a shame ICANN
has not come up with a better solution. Heck, at this point, we may not ever
see a better solution.
IT Analysis
Briefly
Noted
- Shameless
Self-Promotion Dept.: StratVantage’s P2P4B2B –
Peer to Peer for Business Directory was featured in the July 16th
issue of Network World File Sharing newsletter, along with some nice
mentions of white papers I’ve done. Even more impressive is the fact that
a search for “StratVantage” on Google now gets you two pages of hits!
Hoohoo!
NWFusion
- New Wireless SIG: Geneer has created the Midwest
Wireless Application Developers Special Interest Group (SIG) a
non-commercial group designed to promote discussion of wireless developer
tips and tools. The first meeting is Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2001, and features
Guest Presenter Rod Massie of Motient Corp., provider of eLinkSM
and BlackBerry™ by Motient wireless email services. Rod’s topic is
Developers' Tips & Secrets for Motient's Terrestrial Network and
Motorola's DataTAC Technology. The free meeting runs from 6:00 PM to 8:30
PM at the Marriott Suites, 8535 W. Higgins Road, Chicago, Illinois.
SIG Signup
- I Want This Gadget: In the Cool Tools Department this issue is the
Clever Cam 360, a digital camera, Webcam and camcorder combination that is
the size of a pen. The device captures 45 seconds of streaming video and
can store up to 360 digital stills. Plus, with its USB interface, you can
attach it to your laptop and send the family a live video stream from your
lonely hotel room. Plus, kids, it’s under $90!
TechnoScout
- Fighting Back Against Code Red: Alert SNS Reader Andrew points out
that there are more benign ways to fight back against the Code Red worm.
Some server administrators use a script that “simply exploits the ability
to run an executable to fire up the NT command 'net send' to send a pop-up
message box on every machine in that domain with the text ‘Your Webserver
is infected with the Code Red Virus! Please remove it from the Internet
and apply the Microsoft Hot Fixes to correct this!’ This is not nearly as bad as rebooting
some other person’s server randomly.
Rebooting a CodeRed II infected server does no good as the worm
installs a backdoor allowing a cracker to come in at any time.” This is
indeed a more benign solution, but it still involves running a program on
a server without authorization. However, it could be argued that this
solution is no more invasive than sending an email. Your opinion?
The URL listed below this item
takes you to a page of possible FightBack responses that also includes the
log of attacks on just one Web server. Two things are notable about this
log. First, it represents more than 7,000 attacks since July 19th
from more than 2,500 hosts. That’s amazing. Second, many, if not most, of
these attacks are coming from people with cable modems. In fact, Cox
Cable, Las Vegas, represented more than 4,000 of the attacks compared with
roughly 700 for Excite@Home and 500 for RoadRunner. What makes this
interesting is the fact that most cable modem and DSL companies forbid
their users from running any kind of server.
One
very confusing aspect about all the Code Red coverage involves whether or not
Microsoft’s Personal Web Server is vulnerable. Microsoft requires you to
install PWS when you install FrontPage, their Web authoring tool. Many FrontPage
users probably did the install back when they were still learning about the Web
and have forgotten that they are running a Web server on their computers.
However, neither Microsoft nor CERT nor Information
Warfare thinks PWS is vulnerable.
Some reports
claim PWS is vulnerable to Code Red when run on Windows NT or 2000, but
Information Warfare says it doesn’t even run on 2000, and indeed I couldn’t
install it on my Windows 2000 machine. PWS does run on Windows NT Workstation,
according to the site. Whatever the
real deal is, it just may be possible that some of these attacks are coming
from people who do not know they are running PWS or Internet Information Server
(IIS). However, your machine is not vulnerable unless you are running Windows
NT or 2000.
Regardless of the possible Code Red vulnerability, you should probably not be
unintentionally running a Web server, as they can expose you to threats without
your knowledge. You can check to see if PWS or IIS is running on your machine.
One easy way is to see if you have either of the following directories:
C:/Webshare/Wwwroot or C:/InetPub/Wwwroot. These are the default root
directories of various versions of PWS and IIS. Another way is to go to Control
Panel and see if you have a Personal Web Server icon. If you are running PWS, I
recommend uninstalling it just to be safe. If you are running IIS, a patch is
available on Microsoft’s Code Red page.
By the way, it is important to note that the Microsoft patch that fixes the
vulnerability only prevents future infections. If you are infected, you need to
remove the file /inetpub/scripts/root.exe in order to disable the backdoor
installed by Code Red.
Finally, system administrators can get a scanning tool to identify vulnerable
computers from eEye.
And Microsoft has released Personal Security
Advisor, which takes a look at your NT or 2000 system and finds common
misconfiguration problems.
FightBack Script
- Insurer Charges Premium for Using
Microsoft: Insurance
broker J.S. Wurzler Underwriting Managers has started charging up to 15
percent more in hacker insurance premiums to clients that use Microsoft's
Internet Information Server software. Oddly, they made this decision
before Code Red caused an estimated $2 billion in damage. They based their
action on Wurzler their finding that system administrators working on open
source systems tend to be better trained and stay with their employers
longer than those at firms using Windows software. Thus bug patches are
more likely to be applied.
ZDNet
Return
to Mike’s Take
|
.