Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) enable users to enter the URL of the website in a browser in his native language. Earlier this was limited only to Latin characters; however, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) now permits Internationalized Domain Names.

ICANN has also opened its policy to permit new generic Top Level Domain Names (gTLDs), which were earlier limited to .INFO, .MOBI, etc. Soon one can apply for the name of one’s company or a city such as .kolkata or .delhi or .mumbai.

With this in mind, the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Afilias have organized a one-day conference in Hyderabad to explain to the relevant stake holders the concept of the new gTLDs, the application process, the timelines and financial implications of the same.

The conference will also cover iinitiatives undertaken by DIT to ensure that Indian languages find their rightful place in Internationalized Domain Names.

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Alliance designed to help Chinese companies apply for “dot.BRAND” top-level domains

ICANN SINGAPORE – June 20, 2011 – Afilias Limited, a global provider of Internet domain name registry and Managed DNS services, today announced that it has entered into a formal agreement with Chinese Internet services leader HiChina, a subsidiary of Alibaba.com, to help Chinese brands take advantage of ICANN’s New TLD Program.

The agreement recognizes HiChina’s leadership and customer service excellence, and names HiChina as Afilias’ preferred new TLD partner in China. Chinese brands who intend to establish a dot.BRAND presence online will benefit from the combined resources of Afilias, a global leader in new TLD registry services, and HiChina, a trusted Chinese market Internet expert.

“With the world’s largest Internet population, China also represents one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Brands based in China need unique marketing approaches to reach this large, diverse pool of consumers. One approach is a ‘dot.BRAND’ name, meaning the use of a brand name instead of a .com or .net,” said Roland LaPlante, Senior Vice President of Afilias. “A dot.BRAND TLD lets major companies control how customers experience their brand online and helps break through the noise and clutter online.”

LaPlante added, “With the tremendous rise of Chinese language on the Internet, our partnership will enable Chinese brands to present their domains in Chinese script rather than in English alone.”

“Chinese consumers want domain names and websites in their own language. The combined experience of Afilias and HiChina will provide a great user experience for the Chinese market,” said Bridge Song, Vice President of HiChina.

HiChina is the leading Internet services provider in China, and provides comprehensive Web services to Chinese enterprises, including domain registration, hosting, email systems and website creation & management.

“With HiChina’s reach and influence in the Chinese enterprise market, and Afilias’ successful history of supporting more TLDs than any other company, this partnership helps ensure that Chinese brands are on equal footing with Western brands applying for dot.BRAND TLDs,” added Bridge Song.

ICANN approved the new TLD program on June 20, 2011, at the current ICANN global meeting in Singapore.

Brands interested in pursuing a dot.BRAND approach will need to act quickly to develop strong, compelling proposals to ICANN for their desired new TLD string, one of many areas where Afilias is able to assist TLD applicants. Other Afilias TLD registry services include a ”thick” EPP registry, a globally diverse and redundant Anycast DNS network, and 24x7 call-center and technical support.

In addition, Afilias offers other premium solutions to augment its registry offering, including technology to enable mobile phone compatibility for websites and a unique IDN-capable email solution. All Afilias services are DNSSEC and IPv6 ready, and reflect 10 years of experience in supporting gTLDs operating under ICANN contracts.

About Afilias
Afilias is a global provider of Internet infrastructure services that connect people to their data. Afilias’ reliable, secure, scalable, and globally available technology supports a wide range of applications including Internet domain registry services and Managed DNS. For more information on Afilias, visit www.afilias.info.

About HiChina
HiChina, a subsidiary of Alibaba.com, is the leading Internet services provider in China. HiChina provides comprehensive Web services to enterprises, including domain registration, hosting, enterprise email systems, enterprise website creation & management, and e-commerce applications consultation. HiChina is an accredited domain registrar by both ICANN and CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center). Currently, HiChina manages and hosts more than three million English and Chinese domains, and also serves more than 500,000 enterprise users with fast, stable and secure websites and email hosting services. Headquartered in Beijing, HiChina currently has 16 branches and more than 10,000 agents in 31 provinces and cities across China. Visit http://en.hichina.com to learn more.

Internationalized domain names (IDNs) have been available to Internet users for many years, but this year the first fully non-Latin IDN domains have become enabled by ICANN and country-code top-level domain registries. The recent success of the launch of Russia's .рф (.rf) ccTLD shows that there is an enormous demand for domain names in Internet users' native languages.

While speaking and writing in one's own language is of course universal, actually enabling that language in the DNS is an extremely complex problem. Because the ubiquitous, legacy, portions of the DNS can only accept and resolve ASCII labels, non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Cyrillic and Greek need to be encoded into ASCII by applications before they can be used on the Internet to visit websites or exchange emails.

For years, everyone has used an IETF standard called IDNA to map Unicode (which can be used to represent essentially all characters in all languages) into the 37 ASCII characters (Letters, Digits, Hyphen) allowable in DNS. But as Unicode evolved, the old IDNA protocol did not evolve with it. So the IETF is currently developing what it calls IDNABIS, or IDNA2008, to de-couple IDNs from any specific version of Unicode while maintaining an unambiguous one-to-one relationship between IDNs as they appear in applications and as they appear in the DNS. Companies that decide to apply to ICANN to operate new TLDs in IDN languages will have to use the new specification and registries that have implemented the earlier version of IDNA will also have to upgrade to the 2008 version.

Because it is such as complex subject, and because ICANN plans to release new, revised technical guidelines for registries managing IDNs, ICANN hosted an informational session at its December 2010 meeting in Cartagena, Colombia, in which registries including Afilias shared their experiences with launching, managing and transitioning IDNs.

Some languages and scripts, such as Arabic, have multiple ways of expressing the same string of characters that typically represent a word. Therefore, speakers discussed issues with "bundling" domain registrations where two strings would have the same meaning to a native human speaker but are represented differently in Unicode. To give an English example, because the DNS is designed to be authoritative and unambiguous, it is akin to the question of whether color.com and colour.com should resolve to the same address.

At the ICANN session, Marina Nikerova of the .рф registry explained that the new Russian ccTLD did not experience any of these code point problems, as Cyrillic has only one script to work with, but said that usability remains a concern. The .рф domain has achieved broad browser support, she said, but search engines such as Google still frequently return ASCII domains first when users search for Cyrillic. She referenced an example of the word "известия", which means "news" and is the name of a major Russian newspaper.

While the browser problem may be substantially solved for .рф, one problem it and other IDN registries continue to experience is that the current e-mail protocol does not allow for the use of non-ASCII characters as the e-mail address listed as the sender or recipient. IDN email is currently subject to a parallel IETF initiative called EAI, for E-mail Address Internationalization, which expects to publish its final specifications next year. Nikerova said that solving the e-mail problem, which includes enabling IDN characters in the username before the @ symbol, will likely lead to a "next wave" of registrations in the new Russian TLD.

The fact that lack of e-mail support could inhibit the adoption of IDNs is a problem Afilias has addressed with a newly developed IDN E-Mail software. Afilias' VP of product development Michael Young told the ICANN session that the software is a "soup-to-nuts" solution for handling IDN e-mail on desktop and mobile devices, as well as providing the server-side support for IDNs in, for example, Web-based email.

The first demonstration of email transmission using a fully Internationalized address held at the APTLD Members Meeting in Amman, Jordan

AMMAN, JORDAN - 29 October 2010 - Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services, and the National Information Technology Center of Jordan today announced that they have partnered to produce the first public demonstration of an e-mail message between two completely internationalized (or IDN) e-mail addresses in the Arabic language, using Afilias' new IDN e-mail technology and a fully IDN domain name and IDN TLD from the .JO registry.

 "With the 83 percent of the world's population estimated to be non-English speaking, this is an important first step in bringing a useful Internet to the majority of the world's Internet users which were previously shut-out of using the Internet in their native language," said John Kane, Vice President of Corporate Services for Afilias. "The adoption of IDN domain names has been inhibited by the lack of technical support within e-mail programs for internationalized addresses which would still be compatible with the global DNS system. With Afilias' unique and standards-compliant IDN e-mail solution, we are able to finally address this problem and facilitate IDN adoption in any language."

At the APTLD meeting in Amman, Jordan, Afilias and the .JO registry demonstrated sending and receiving e-mail using the fully Internationalized e-mail addresses test@global-email.alordon (View an image of the email address in Arabic) and sales@global-email.alordon (View an image of the email address in Arabic). E-mail was sent from and to these addresses using both a Web-based e-mail client and a mobile application.(1)

"The final link in the conversion of the Web to a truly global audience is to give all users of the Internet their website and e-mail identity in a form that truly represents them, in their own language," added Dr. Nabeel Al-Fayoumi, Government CIO / Director General of the National IT Center / .jo and .الاردن Registry.  "We are pleased to cooperate with Afilias on an historic and important move forward in technology that will empower Arabic and other non-English speaking Internet users around the world to communicate in their own language."

The Jordanian registry officially launched the Arabic version of its ccTLD as .alordon which translates to xn--mgbayh7gpa using the Punycode algorithm and is visible in Arabic as الاردن.  Registration in the new IDN version of the ccTLD was launched on October 11, 2010, beginning with a sunrise period for Governmental Entities and Diplomatic Missions, and shall be followed by a registration period for trademark holders.

 

About Internationalized Domain Names and IDN e-mail

Internet users are familiar with using domains that are written in ASCII (Latin/English characters) - on websites, in e-mail, and in many other Internet applications. Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) were first launched in 2004 based on an IETF standard called IDNA (RFC 5890), which uses the Punycode encoding algorithm to represent non-ASCII characters found in Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hindi and other languages, into ASCII names that the DNS system can resolve. This allows Internet users to type a domain name in their local script using their native language, instead of an English translation. For further information, please visit (http://www.afilias.info/IDN-Backgrounder).

Since 2004, businesses and individual users have been able to register second level IDN domains in many scripts across many top-level domain (TLD) extensions. However, both the user name portion of an e-mail address and the TLD itself has been ASCII-only.  Recently ICANN approved the introduction of IDNs at the top level, so TLDs like .jo can now be visible in a native script like Arabic as .الاردن.

Afilias IDN E-mail is a software package that supports "E-mail Address Internationalization" (EAI), a standard under development by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This standard removes the restriction of English-only alphabets in e-mail addresses. Afilias' IDN e-mail application allows people to use almost any language in their e-mail address. The Afilias implementation follows RFC 4952 and additional draft RFCs that are in the process of being standardized. These changes allow both the username and the domain name of an e-mail address to be in any language/script represented in the Unicode standard.

For more information about Afilias' IDN E-mail solution and how to become a beta partner, please visit www.afilias.info/idnemail.

About the .jo and .الاردن Registry

NITC is the only accredited registrar of domain names under .JO ccTLD and .الاردن IDN ccTLD, was granted this registration privilege by ICANN, a body concerned with the development of Internet technology and management of domain names.

NITC basically aims at efficiently providing the DNS registration service to the public by following the worldwide best practices by maintaining a solid operating environment that secures the customer rights and following a transparency policy of publishing the database of registered domain names under the .JO ccTLD and .الاردن IDN ccTLD.

NITC's policy in domain registration under .JO and .الاردن complies with the worldwide recognized policies and best practices with essential modifications that accommodate the Jordanian culture and the Jordanian Laws to protect the rights of the others.

 

About Afilias

Afilias is a global provider of Internet infrastructure services that connect people to their data. Afilias' reliable, secure, scalable, and globally available technology supports a wide range of applications including Internet domain registry services, Managed DNS, and services in the RFID and supply chain market with its Afilias Discovery Services. For more information on Afilias please visit www.afilias.info.

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(1) Due to the current status of the EAI draft protocol, sending e-mail to these IDN addresses from outside of Afilias' IDN e-mail system is not yet supported.

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Afilias is a sponsor of the upcoming APTLD event in Jordan.  Afilias VP, John Kane will be presenting on Internationalized Domain Names on Oct. 30th at 16:00.

Hosting companies face many challenges today, from differentiating their services in a crowded market with decreasing margins, to an increasing pressure to defend against growing sets of attacks against their infrastructure. As more and more services drift into the cloud, up-time is becoming one of the most critical factors for customers choosing a web host. A hosting company’s record of reliability can often be the deciding factor for a customer to choose one service over another. Recently at HostingCon, Afilias was able to talk to hosting companies about their current DNS problems and why they need to now look at advanced DNS solutions to improve reliability or to seek new revenue with premium DNS offerings.

What we’ve been saying for some time now was confirmed by many of the hosting companies visiting and exhibiting at HostingCon. Over the last year we’ve seen an increase in size and number of attacks against the DNS. Both continue to grow as criminals seek any way to exploit vulnerabilities in networks. DDoS attacks against DNS infrastructure as well as sophisticated DNS hijacking attacks are now top of mind for most hosting companies.

Recent research from Arbor Networks shows that the risk of DDoS attack is by far the most worrying problem facing companies today, with 35% of organizations classifying such attacks as their biggest fear. The same research shows that over a quarter of all DDoS attacks target application-layer protocols such as DNS, with the largest attacks amounting to almost 50 Gigabytes per second (Gbps).

Here are some suggestions we have for hosting companies to not only improve their DNS architecture, but also how they can utilize a more superior and reliable DNS network to expand the services they currently offer today:

Add a secondary DNS provider to shoulder the load

An attack against a single hosting customer can severely impact performance and availability for a hosting company’s entire network, especially when a DDoS flood is large and targets a shared network bottleneck such as DNS resolution. Every customer who puts content online, blogs, or shares links to your hosted sites in social media, creates a target that could put your entire customer base at risk.

The risk of taking out an entire set of customers based on the target of just one popular or controversial customer, presents a greater need for hosting companies to harden their DNS infrastructure from attack. Rather than bearing the added capital expense of building out a bigger DNS network, simply integrating a second DNS provider to serve part of your DNS traffic can alleviate bottlenecks in your current DNS infrastructure and give you an entire second network to rely on incase of a crippling DDoS attack.

Indeed, we’ve even seen some customers reap additional positive outcomes of integrating a secondary DNS provider. This approach allows them to seamlessly take out any or all of their own DNS nodes for planned or unplanned maintenance or even deploying critical patches.

Strengthening your network with Anycast

Of course, the DDoS problem is not confined to DNS alone. DNS is just one piece in the overall architecture of a hosting company. However, DNS is one area that is often not provisioned as well as other, more obvious, pieces of potentially vulnerable infrastructure. The risk of attacks taking down DNS for all hosting customers can be substantially mitigated by building out a robust DNS infrastructure that uses a diverse selection of technology providers and is globally distributed using IP Anycast.

Anycast enables companies to advertise the same IP address from multiple nodes, deployed on different parts of the Internet, simultaneously. In the DNS context, this allows companies to present a more localized way to resolve domain names, reducing latency and increasing performance for end users, while mitigating the impact of one node going down for maintenance or due to attack.

Don’t run a monoculture – integrate diversity

The number of vulnerabilities found in ubiquitous data center hardware and software platforms is forever increasing, and is expected to double this year compared to 2009. Companies that have adopted software monocultures, or failed to incorporate enough vendor diversity in their DNS architectures, could find themselves more at risk from exploitation. By also introducing some of Afilias’ principles of DNS Diversity, where each node is provisioned by more than one connectivity provider, and uses more than one vendor for each of its operating system, name server, server hardware and network infrastructure needs, single points of failure in your DNS are virtually eliminated.

Premium DNS is a selling feature

Advanced DNS not only does not need to be a cost center, it should also be viewed as an opportunity to increase revenues. As your customers’ businesses depends more on their Web services, they are aware of just how critical the availability of their website actually is. Customers that want to safeguard their e-commerce revenue will pay for Service Level Agreements (SLA) and guarantees on their DNS resolution. Even a marginal increase in your per month hosting fee could be just enough to differentiate a premium DNS package, and collectively across your customer base can present an easy added revenue stream to help your bottom line this year.

How can better DNS be easy for hosting companies?

DNS shouldn't have to be a choke-point or vulnerability in a hosting architecture. Nor should it be a headache for network administrators to provision, manage and secure. With Afilias’ new FlexDNS Platform, we're offering hosting companies or other resellers three easy ways (Web portal, AXFR, or an API) to integrate with a massively diverse, flexible and distributed DNS network that guarantees 100% availability. Using Anycast, the Afilias network provides bulletproof DNS resolution from widely dispersed nodes on multiple continents, using multiple backbone providers and a diverse array of technology providers, creating a level of robustness and redundancy that would be prohibitively expensive for many hosting companies to deploy themselves in-house.

Afilias Managed DNS Services will be at Booth #622 at the 2010 Comptia Breakway Conference.  Join us in San Antonio to learn how to ensure 100% up-time reliabililty for your web presence with Afilias' DNS.  Afilias VP, John Kane will be speaking as part of the "Security in the Cloud" Panel to be held on August 12th at 11am.

Over the last three years, the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s semiannual Global Phishing Survey has become a widely cited source of information about the state of phishing and its place in the Internet landscape. Afilias’ Director of Domain Security, Greg Aaron, has been co-authoring these reports with Rod Rasmussen of Internet Identity, with the goal to show the community what phishers are doing and how anti-abuse measures are effective. The newly published edition of the report highlights how criminals have utilized the domain name space, but offers good news about the domain name community has helped diminish the effects of some very dangerous phishing. It’s an encouraging success story.

The new Global Phishing Survey reveals that in the second half of 2009, the Avalanche phishing gang perpetrated two-thirds of all phishing attacks on the Internet! This criminal entity utilizes a botnet comprised of consumer-level computers to host its phishing and malware too. By running its own distributed, illegal hosting, the gang tries to make its phishing “bullet-proof” – resistant to take-down because there’s no traditional hosting provider to call. But such phishing can be stopped by suspending the domain names. Fortunately we saw a number of domain name registrars and registries shut down Avalanche phishing in an increasingly effective fashion, often neutralizing the phishers’ technical advantage.

In the second half of 2009, we saw Avalanche registered 4,141 domain names in various TLDs, and hosted up to 40 separate attacks on each domain. Avalanche prefers to register domains at registrars that react slowly (or not at all) to abuse reports and/or have weak fraud-detection routines. Similarly, Avalanche prefers TLDs where the registry operators do not have effective anti-abuse policies and procedures to help the registrars and provide swift action when needed. Unfortunately, we saw Avalanche victimize certain registrars and TLDs over and over again.

Avalanche and similar threats have prompted many industry members to adopt best practices to fight phishing and other criminal abuses. Afilias adopted its .INFO Anti-Abuse Policy in 2007, defining what constitutes abusive use, and reiterating the registry’s right to take action. Registrars also have terms of service in their registration agreements, and those terms prohibit illegal activities and allow the registrars to suspend domain names at their discretion. In practice, Afilias monitors for phishing and other problems in the .INFO space, and communicates abuse reports and documentation to its registrars. The registrars examine the reports and work on mitigation as they feel appropriate. On occasion Afilias will also suspend domains directly, especially to stop large-scale abuse in a timely fashion. This kind of cooperation and information-sharing is adaptable and effective, allows registrars and registries to install good process, and appropriately manage risk. On a daily basis, it saves thousands of Internet users from becoming victims.

The 2009 data shows that Avalanche phish stayed up for less than half the time as other phish—a great result. How did it happen? First, the entire response community concentrated attention on Avalanche, pushing phishing attack alerts to each other. That response community includes the banks and online services targeted by the phishers, security companies and researchers, registries, and registrars. Second, a number of registrars and registries took quick action, looking for Avalanche domains and killing them through the summer and fall of 2009. Education and data sharing clearly helped. In November 2009, members of the security community shut down Avalanche’s infrastructure for a week. After re-establishing its operations, Avalanche kept registering domains, but launched fewer attacks. Avalanche attacks decreased from 26,411 in October 2009 to just 59 in April 2010. We’ll continue to monitor Avalanche, but it appears that overall, the domain industry may be more prepared for whatever comes next.

The median up-time for all phishing attacks on the Internet has fallen remarkably over the past two years, from 19 hours 30 minutes in early 2008 to 11 hours 44 minutes in the second half of 2009. The falling times point to improved awareness, responsiveness, and detection across the board. Here at Afilias, our policies and procedures have dissuaded phishers like Avalanche from registering .INFO domains, and non-Avalanche phish in .INFO stayed alive for less than half the industry average.

The results above emphasize the effectiveness of best practices and processes. Domain industry players are becoming increasingly sophisticated about e-crime, and can greatly improve the safety of the Internet for everyone.

To see all the details, please read the new APWG report, at: http://www.apwg.org/reports/APWG_GlobalPhishingSurvey_2H2009.pdf

Afilias' Desiree Miloshevic will be chairing this panel discussion entitled 'How long will the Internet remain a level playing field?' on Net neutrality at the University of Surrey, Guildforde. Networking and refreshments at 19.00 with the debate starting at 19.30. Visit the Web link to register for this free event!

On March 24, online encyclopedia giant Wikipedia went offline for more than 2 hours because of an overheating problem in one of their data centers.  Even though they had had a DNS failover procedure, it was broken. The result: millions of users could not access Wikipedia for hours.

This situation is unfortunate for Wikipedia, but it would be even more unfortunate if you were an online business that lost 2 hours of critical revenue. 

It is not enough to simply have a single back-up IP address and a manual switch to flip as a failover process. 

Wikipedia's outage serves to illustrate the need for not just a failover process, but an integrated approach to monitoring and IP failover services that ensures your Web sites will always be up and running as expected.

Our tips for best practices are:

• Have continuous monitoring in place for your DNS and also your Web servers (http and https) to make sure that they are always responding and available.
• Use a service that can automate the monitoring of specific content or images that should be served on these sites so you know they are not just up, but also working properly.
• Have more than one IP address, ideally located in different data centers that are geographically dispersed, where back-up copies of your Web site reside.
• Ensure that you use a failover service that combines the monitoring process with automatically failing over to a list of your back-up IPs to create a seamless failover process that requires no manual intervention.

Of course we also recommend that you ensure that traffic to your Web site is being managed on a reliable DNS network that provides similar monitoring and failover services.  With a professional managed DNS provider, generally you will get the benefits of a globally distributed Anycast network that seamlessly handles load dispersion and failover, with higher capacity than you could reasonably build in house.

Afilias Managed DNS offers SiteCertain as a Web Monitoring & IP failover service that provides you with DNS, monitoring and IP failover all from a single provider.