After the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) had canceled the first RFP for a new IANA contractor because they “received no proposals that met the requirements“, the RFP was opened again for bids two days ago. ICANN had submitted a bid, which was not accepted by  NITA. The deadline for bids to the new RFP, which doesn’t seem to deviate from the previous one by much, is May 31st, 2012.

The current contract was to expire on March 31st of this year, but was extended by six months just before ICANN’s 43rd meeting.

As reported by DomainIncite, ICANN is to report on a debriefing as to why their previous bid was not accepted:

Over a month ago, at an ICANN press conference in Costa Rica, CEO Rod Beckstrom said: “We were invited to have a debriefing with [the NTIA] to learn more about this. Following that discussion we will share any information we are allowed to share.”

Earlier today IANA added the .XXX Top Level Domain to the root nameservers. While the registry operator Afilias is still in their setup process for ICM registry, the zone is currently propagating. While a number of registrars have already been taking pre-registrations, the actual timeline for the launch has not yet been published. The Sunrise launch is a three phased approach. After much back and forth and protests against the sTLD the ICANN board had approved the application for the new TLD at their meeting on March 18th of this year.

[Update] As Kevin over at DomainIncite points out in his post on the same topic, the registry website, sex.xxx and porn.xxx (both placeholder pages, safe for work) are now resolving under the new TLD. xxx.xxx is resolving as well.

The delegation record for the new TLD can now also be found on the IANA website.

Below the output of the dig query:

dig ns xxx.

;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 22036
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;xxx.				IN	NS

;; ANSWER SECTION:
xxx.			300	IN	NS	a2.xxx.afilias-nst.info.
xxx.			300	IN	NS	a0.xxx.afilias-nst.info.
xxx.			300	IN	NS	b2.xxx.afilias-nst.org.
xxx.			300	IN	NS	b0.xxx.afilias-nst.org.
xxx.			300	IN	NS	c0.xxx.afilias-nst.info.
xxx.			300	IN	NS	d0.xxx.afilias-nst.org.

See the IANA record after the jump
(more…)

After several of ICANN‘s domain names were hacked in June, ICANN has blamed the attack on Register.com.

Although ICANN didn’t name the registrar explicitly, a WHOIS search shows that all the temporarily hacked domains – icann.com, icann.net, iana.com and iana-servers.com – were registered with Register.com.

“The DNS redirect was a result of an attack on ICANN’s registrar’s systems,” said ICANN today in an article by The New York Times. “A full, confidential, security report from that registrar has since been provided to ICANN with respect to this attack.”

[via The New York Times]

According to website Zone-H, a group of Turkish hackers hijacked ICANN and IANA domain names on Thursday morning. All of the domain names are registered at Register.com. The group took over control of the domain names, including icann.com, icann.net, iana.com and iana-servers.com. The DNS records were changed and redirected to the hackers site with the following message :

You think that you control the domains but you don’t! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN!

Don’t you believe us?

haha :)

(Lovable Turkish hackers group)

This is the second major group to have their domain names hijacked in the last 30 days.  Previously Comcast.net domain names were hijacked at Network Solutions. So much for “preserving and enhancing the operational stability, reliability, security, and global interoperability of the Internet” eh ?