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…)

Please note that the following is a parody intended for April Fools day 2009.

Reports said Conficker C would do damage, but nobody anticipated it would be this bad! The Conficker C virus, which was knowingly scheduled to create havoc on April 1, has wormed its way into VeriSign’s root servers  – erasing hundreds of thousands of .com and .net registration records.

“We have never seen anything like this before,” said a VeriSign Spokesperson. “We have a number of security measures in place to prevent such a thing, but nothing could have prepared us for what Conficker C has done. We are still investigating the situation and confident that we will be able to eventually re-gain the registration data from our backup data facilities on the Cocos Islands and Tuvalu, but there are a number of preventative measures we must first complete to ensure that information does not get corrupted as well.”

If you believe you have lost some of your domains to Conficker C’s attack on VeriSign, click here to contact their emergency center.

[via VeriSign]

Please note that the following is a parody intended for April Fools day 2009.