The Chief Executive of OFCOM, Ed Richards, gave evidence to the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee last week, in which he reported on progress on the copyright enforcement and web blocking parts of the Digital Economy Act 2010.
An interesting news item from SWITCH, the Swiss NREN and also operator of the .ch and .li TLD registries, on how they are alerting website owners to malware and, if necessary, taking action to protect customers from being infected.
Nominet have published an interesting analysis of the legal issues around any possible process for suspending domains associated with criminal activity. This raises the rather worrying issue that the legal position is not clear if a registry is informed of unlawful conduct somewhere in their domain and decides that the evidence is not strong enough to justify them acting.
Nominet have published an issues paper asking whether there are circumstances in which it might be appropriate to rapidly suspend a DNS domain involved in criminal activity, and the processes that would be needed to ensure such action did not create too great a risk of unfairness.
I had a meeting with Ofcom this morning as part of their review of section 17 of the Digital Economy Act 2010. That section, if enabled by the Secretary of State, would allow courts to order a service provider “to prevent its service being used to gain access to [an Internet] location”.
A number of talks at the FIRST conference this week have mentioned the value of Domain Name Service (DNS) logs for both detecting and investigating various types of computer misuse: from users accessing unauthorised websites to PCs infected with botnets to targeted theft of information (see, for example, Google's talk).
The Digital Economy Bill has been taking up a lot of my time since the start of the new year and I'm pleased to report one result. The Bill gives the Secretary of State powers to intervene in the operations of a DNS registry where a serious failure of the registry is likely to affect the country's or consumers' interest.
