.org handover successfully completed
The Public Interest Registry (PIR) organisation, this week announced
that it has successfully completed the transition of the .org registry
from former operator VeriSign Inc.. This transition is being hailed
as a significant success since it marks the largest transfer of
data from one registry to another in the history of the Internet,
and it was accomplished with no interruption of service to users
of .org sites and e-mail addresses. PIR officially assumed control
of .org registry operations on January 1 this year, after being
awarded the contract in October 2002.
New VeriSign service criticized by the IAB
The Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently
requested that the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), who oversees
the standards bodies, conduct a review of the new international
domain name service being offered by Verisign Inc. A letter to ICANN,
available from the IAB website, said: "The IAB feels that the
system VeriSign Inc. had deployed for .com and .net contains significant
DNS protocol errors, risks the further development of secure DNS,
and confuses the resolution mechanisms of the DNS with application-based
search systems."
VeriSign has recently started distributing a plug-in that allows
users of languages containing non-ASCII characters to access web
sites in their own character sets. The plug-in, i-Nav, locally encodes
international characters into ASCII, so URLs are compatible with
the DNS before being submitted for resolution.
Over the past few years, there have been numerous attempts to
extend the Internet name space with non-standard technology. While
the extension of the domain name space beyond the current limited
character set is a highly desirable development, it is essential
that solutions conform to internationally agreed standards.
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NetNames 2002. All rights reserved.
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