.WEB Auction Rakes in Record Breaking $135M, What Will ICANN Do With All This Money?

ICANN now has over $230 million in its coffers, the proceeds from New gTLD program auctions. The latest record breaking price is of $135 million to operate the .WEB gTLD. On 27 July 2016, Power Auctions LLC, ICANN’s authorized auction service provider, conducted a New Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) Program auction to resolve contention for …

Bastille: Wireless Keyboards are vulnerable to Hackers

Batille, the first cybersecurity company to detect and mitigate threats from the Internet of Things (IoT), today unveiled a massive vulnerability affecting the vast majority of low-cost wireless keyboards. Using a new attack that the Bastille Research Team has named “KeySniffer,” hackers can remotely “sniff” ALL the keystrokes of wireless keyboards from eight manufacturers from …

File-sharing site Kickass Torrents (KAT) Seized and shut down by FEDs

According to TorrentFreak, Artem Vaulin, 30, of Poland, was arrested in the Ukraine on a number of charges, including conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of criminal copyright infringement. According to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago, the copyrighted material over on the site …

UN Online freedom resolution passes despite opposition from Russia, China et al

The United Nations officially condemned the practice of countries shutting down access to the internet at a meeting of the Human Rights Council on Friday. A resolution [PDF] entitled The promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet effectively extends human rights held offline to the internet. It was passed by consensus, but …

Cybersquatting complaints against .com names are reducing

.COM registrations are at an all-time high. Yet the fact remains: Overall, .COM domains feature in UDRPs less and less. That wasn’t the headline of WIPO’s March article. Instead, their press release bore the provocative title, “Cybersquatting Cases Up in 2015, Driven by New gTLDs”. WIPO – for those just joining the party – stands for the World Intellectual Property Organization. …

How Brexit May affect Tech Industry

British withdrawal from the European Union, also shortened to Brexit (a portmanteau of “British” or “Britain” and “exit”), happened last week. The result of this referendum was 51.9% in support of an exit (17,410,742 votes) and 48.1% (16,141,241 votes) to remain with a turnout of 72.2% and 26,033 rejected ballots. The European Union – often …

.Africa: Defendant ZACR Dismissed, DCA claims against ICANN will result in relief sought

The Judge presiding over the .Africa new gTLD Case No. 16-CV-00862 RGK (JCx), DotConnectAfrica Trust (DCA Trust) v. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) & ZA Central Registry (ZACR), has granted ZACR’s Motion to Dismiss the Complaint (as to defendant ZACR only), concluding, along with other reasons (see embed below): “… the Court …