First Comcast now ICANN themself. It appears as tho ICANN had a couple of there domain names stolen from them. Whats next?

“CBC picked up an AP story about ICANN recently losing control over two of their domain names on Thursday, June 26. A domain registrar run by the group transferred the domains to someone else. ICANN’s press release had this to say: ‘As has been widely reported, a number of domain names, including icann.com and iana.com were recently redirected to different DNS servers, allowing a group to provide visitors to those domains with their own website. It would appear the attack was sophisticated, combining both social and technological techniques, but was also limited and focused.’ Comcast has had similar troubles lately as well.”

ICANN (The big cheese of domain names if you will) approved customized top level domain names!

Via The Register

“ICANN, the organization that oversees internet addresses, will soon allow anyone to apply for his very own generic top-level domain (gTLD). In other words, you’ll soon have the power to put almost anything at the end of your url, eschewing existing top-level domains such as “.com” or “.edu.”

“This is a historic resolution,” said ICANN chairman Peter Dungate Thrush, during a conference call with reporters, just after the organization’s annual meeting in Paris. “You should see this as being as significant as Margaret Thatcher’s decision to liberalize the telecoms market in the UK. This is a decision to fully liberalize the TLD space.”

ICANN estimates it will begin taking applications in April or May of next year. The fee for each application will be “in the low six figures in American dollars,” and the first customized gTLDs will likely arrive in the fourth quarter of 2009.”

Anyone want to buy .sc before Daniel (ServerComplete Owner) snags it?

[Source - The Register]

Well I have been inactive for a while I know. But that is because there has not been any real good news. But I am heare to report this to the happy blog readers out there.

Ian Lamont writes

“Anti-spam service Knujon has released reports highlighting how certain registrars in the US and abroad have consistently failed to live up to certain WHOIS-related obligations under ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) — specifically, the requirement that people or company registering domains provide valid contact information. Now the firm is requesting that ICANN shut down the worst alleged offender, Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. According to Knujon, none of the WHOIS records in a sample of 11,000 alleged spam sites registered through Xinnet and reported by Knujon to ICANN’s Whois Data Problem Report System were corrected in a six-month period ending in May 2008 — and the Chinese registrar continues to register about 100 spam sites per day. In many cases, says the Knujon document (PDF), Xinnet does not have ‘any Whois record data for review while the sites are still active’ and the spam sites further promote ’seal abuse’ by posting bogus BBB, Verisign, and other trusted industry seals. ICANN says it is investigating. ICANN has just posted a draft revised RAA that is open for public comment until August 4. However, the wording of Section 3.7.8, governing registrars’ obligations to check and correct domain owners’ contact information, hasn’t changed.”

Found this intresting and sort of fun game. Its a 2D Driving simulator based on google maps data

http://geoquake.jp/en/webgame/DrivingSimulatorGM/

-Tracker

T-Mobile is suing Starbucks for breech of contract after the coffee giant decided to switch there hotspot service from T-Mobile to AT&T

Quote from cNet News

“T-Mobile USA is suing Starbucks, accusing the coffee behemoth of a breach of contract by allowing AT&T to provide customers with free Wi-Fi access in its cafes.

In a complaint filed Thursday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, T-Mobile says Starbucks “secretly” developed a plan with AT&T to provide Wi-Fi at its cafes, despite an exclusive partnership with T-Mobile. T-Mobile, which is seeking unspecified damages, alleges the companies broke an agreement over how Starbucks should transition the service from T-Mobile to AT&T, according to Reuters.

T-Mobile said that, under the agreement, it had the exclusive right to “sell, market, and promote” its services in Starbucks up until the stores were completely transitioned to AT&T’s system, according to the lawsuit. T-Mobile says it is currently bearing the brunt of the cost of the service because it is providing the technology and equipment in all but two of Starbucks’ U.S. markets–the San Antonio, Texas, and Bakersfield, California, markets.

In February, Starbucks ended its seven-year partnership with T-Mobile in favor of an agreement with AT&T. Under the old partnership with T-Mobile, customers would sign up for Wi-Fi for hourly and daily rates.

Under the new partnership, Starbucks in June began offering two hours of free Wi-Fi Internet service via AT&T to customers who purchase a Starbucks Reward Card with a minimum $5 credit on it. To keep the card active, customers must use their Starbucks Card at least once a month. New members of the service also get a voucher for a free drink.”

Humm…who will win?

Source: News.Com

- Tracker

So if you guys have kept up with the browser wars you would know that Firefox 3 is the fastest Browser around. Or at least it will be when its officially out of the release candidate stage. To top it off when the final is released sometime this month Mozilla would like everyone and their mother to download it for a Guinness world record! Be sure and support the best browser there is!

Source:Mozilla

-Tracker

Check it out if you are looking for a light desktop computer for the kids or if you just want to mess around with linux.

*this does not include keyboard/mouse speakers and monitor

Source: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Build_a_$150_Linux_PC

-Tracker

I stumbled across this today and it was kind of neat. It is a text only shell like google.

Seems kind of neat and is quick to use.

It can do websearches image searches as well as some Wikipedia stuff

So check it out

http://goosh.org

-Tracker

Well on Wednesday night (28 May) two hackers calling themselves KRYOGENIKS Defiant and EBK. Gained access to over 200 of Comcast’s domains. Once they had access to this they directed Comcast.net to other servers and this caused Comcast users to not have access to there email accounts for several hours. How they managed to pull this off is not fully known but it seems to be a flaw with Network Solutions (Comcast’s Registar)

The registar reported

“Normally defacement attacks simply involve the spraying of digital graffiti on a website. However, in the case of the Comcast attack it seems some attempt may have been made to snoop on its users’ login credentials.”

But in an interview on another site (I can not seem to find the link) the hackers said that altho they could have attempted to get passwords but did not.

Source 1: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/29/comcast_hack

Seems everything has been fixed now and all is back online.

-Tracker

As most of you know, The Planet had a massive outage that affected 9,000 servers in the old eV1Servers / RackShack location. This is the second time that this situation has occurred at DC1 of The Planet.

Currently The Planet wholly owns 5 or 6 facilities in the Houston area and only DC1 was affected by this outage.

The explosion / fire erupted on Saturday evening and knocked out three internal walls around the electrical equipment room. The datacenter was evacuated and emergency personnel called to the scene. Once the building and all equipment was inspected by The Planet as well as the respective manufacturers, they were able to begin work on restoring power to Phase 2 of the facility where they have successfully brought many clients back online.

As of right now, I believe they have restored power to the lower level as well and have began the task of rebooting all of the servers.

Each and every piece of equipment had been abruptly powered off by the malfunction and caused many servers to require FSCK’s to be run. Each and every machine was checked over once powered back on to ensure everything is in working order.

Currently the network is still quite shaky as it levels back out and bugs in the networking gear are settled. Not to mention the large number of people that are going to be taking and downloading complete server backups and checking over everything to make sure all is well.

This event will most likely cause severe network degradation over the next week or two as everything is leveled out and recovers from the nearly 72 hours of no power.

Best of luck to all of you who have servers at The Planet’s DC1 I personally do not have any servers there, but I have done quite a lot of research into the situation.

Luckily no servers were damaged in this incident, they only suffered massive downtime.

-Daniel | Server Complete Founder