Day two of Domain Pulse 2008 focussed mainly on online security issues, this gave the techies amongst the attendance details of security issues and the more policy minded in attendance something to chew on in the other presentations. ICANN (Kieren McCarthy) gave some insights in the drama that was the battle for sex.com. Other presentations were the problems of IPv6 amongst other presentations.The problems of phishing, what legal authority does a registry have when it comes to the issue. The main one being of a website or email addresses being used for illegal or illicit activities. The discussion about phishing came about after Spamhaus listed at nic.at “knowingly providing services” to hundreds of spam phishing domains that were run by a Russian cybercrime phishing gang called ‘Rock Phish’ in June 2007. A large Austrian university was affected by these “phishes”

The answer from all three was that a registry has no legal right to delete a domain name; the domain by itself is not the problem. The domain name is not responsible for the phishing and the domain name does not violate any laws nor is any fraud committed by the domain name. It was agreed that the content of the website or email is the problem. If the domain name constitutes an obvious violation of the law, in Austria for example the Supreme Court has said nic.at is not responsible if the domain is used exclusively for explicit content. The content of the domain name is not part of the terms and conditions so phishing is not included. Additionally registries are not law enforcement bodies but private companies.

The saga of sex.com has recently been published in a book by Kieran McCarthy who outlined some of the tales from his book, providing some light entertainment for the Friday afternoon. The stealing of sex.com by Stephen Cohen who could see a use for the domain name however Gary Kremen could not. This created a drama that began in 1995 and is still not settled today and is subject of a ten year court battle. None of the money the courts ordered Cohen to pay Kremen has found their way to Kremen. Cohen has fled to Mexico where he remains in exile to this day. The problems of IPv4 addresses running out and the problems involved with the new IPv6. IPv4 addresses are going to get expensive and very soon as demand are rising and supply is rapidly falling. This running out of addresses has been reported for the last ten years by a number of figures in the industry. Despite the depletion of the number of IPv4 addresses the planning for IPv4 has been poor with no serious considerations for operational transition. As a final issue and rather compounds the problem IPv4 and IPv6 are incompatible so all IPv6 addresses will need a translator

The closing of Domain Pulse 2008 was marked by a presentation to nic,at for their 10th birthday with a birthday cake from SWITCH. This is followed by the traditional passing of the baton to Denic to make the countdown to next year’s Domain Pulse that will be hosted by Denic on February 12 and 13 2009 in Dresden Domain Pulse is a very good conference for the German language domain name industry, but is spreading its influence far and wide, especially throughout Europe.