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France faces lawsuit for seizing France.com
When a country or company seizes a web domain, it's frequently to kick out squatters who do little besides place ads and hope they'll get a giant payout. However, France is taking on someone who was actively using a site -- and it may have crossed a line. The country is facing a federal-level US lawsuit from ex-pat Jean-Noël Frydman after it seized France.com from him in March. Frydman had been using the domain as a "digital kiosk" for France-loving Americans ever since he bought it in 1994 and had even partnered with French government agencies, but his homeland sued in 2015 as part of a bid to take control. While an appeals court ruled in September 2017 that France.com violated French trademark law, there was no warning ahead of the seizure from either France or Frydman's registrar Web.com.
Most White House email domains could be vulnerable to phishing
We can likely all agree that governmental cyber security is an important issue. While the Attorney General has created a task force to deal with election hacking, there have been plenty of digital security fails in the past year. And the FCC doesn't seem to care too much about data privacy, either. Now, according to a report from security firm Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), more than 95 percent of the email domains managed by the Executive Office of the President (EOP) — including WhiteHouse.gov — could be used in a phishing attack due to lax security protocol.
UK citizens might lose .EU domains after Brexit
Europe has formally told UK businesses and individuals that it will revoke .EU domains held in the UK after Brexit unless a new deal is negotiated. "As of the [Brexit] withdrawal date, undertakings and organizations that are established in the UK but not in the EU ... will no longer be eligible to register .EU domain names," the European Commission wrote. Worse, it added that existing .EU domains might be cancelled immediately after Brexit with no possibility of appeal.
Neo-nazi website Daily Stormer briefly resurfaces with Russian domain (updated)
After being rejected by both GoDaddy and Google, neo-Nazi publication The Daily Stormer resurfaced today with a Russian domain extension. As Vox reports, Stormer's efforts to secure a Chinese hosting service (DailyStormer.wang) were cut short, so it turned to the Dark Web and then the mainstream internet. A Whois report states that the hosting company is CloudFlare and the IP location is in Arizona. But, the site isn't online as of publication time.
Trump campaign snaps up ClintonKaine.com
The next step of the 2016 Presidential election? Apparently, domain squatting. Wired reports that after Hillary Clinton's campaign declined to buy a domain consisting of her last name combined with that of her running mate, the owner sold it to her opponent. As noticed earlier today by a reporter for Politico, ClintonKaine.com hosts a Drudge Report-styled collection of negative headlines about its namesakes (and absolutely no bad news about its owner), with a small tag at the bottom indicating who owns the website.
Donald Trump commandeers Jebbush.com
The domain Jebbush.com redirects to the official campaign page for Donald Trump's presidential bid. The URL has been up for grabs since April, at least -- at the time, CNN Money reported it was on sale for $250,000 via hosting service Fabulous.com. Apparently Bush, who's running for the Republican nomination alongside Trump and a (large) handful of other candidates, didn't think it was worthwhile to invest in his own-name dot-com domain. His official website is Jeb2016.com.
