Blogs

Congratulations to marketing specialist – and our WhyIChose.ORG partner – David Meerman Scott on the launch of his new book, Real-Time Marketing & PR. Only on shelves for a matter of hours, and it’s already ranked No. 14 on Amazon’s bestseller list!

Inside Real-Time, David explores the proven steps to adapt your business to this increasingly fast-based and viral environment. Among the tips? Register a .ORG if you are looking to disseminate messages quickly and get the word out fast. “A ‘dot-org’ domain name is an excellent option…because it has an inherent reputation of trust, integrity, and credibility,” he writes. “The key here is to get the new site up very quickly, right at the time that people are eager to locate credible information on a breaking issue. This requires that a crisis plan is in place so that it can be implemented when appropriate. Part of that plan should include when and how to establish a stand-alone site and if a .org registration makes sense.”

Today kicks-off the first day of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, which is a national public awareness campaign to encourage everyone – from consumers and schools to businesses and government agencies -- to better protect themselves and stay safe online. Too often we hear of instances where customers’ financial information is stolen via an online banking feature, or online donations to non-profits are swiped. These situations can be controlled, and this campaign is just one of many reminders of how important it is to strengthen Internet security and to protect against threats such as pharming, cache poisoning, and DNS redirection – all of which have been used to commit fraud, distribute malware, or steal personal or confidential information.

The results are in! According to .ORG’s second bi-annual "The Dashboard" report, the .ORG domain has experienced unparalleled growth during the first half of 2010 in comparison to 2009’s half-year report. Case in point, in the first six months of 2010, the .ORG domain grew by 7.6 percent—more than doubling last year’s first half gain of 3.2 percent. Not to mention that this increase in registrations has brought .ORG’s total domains under management to an astounding 8.5 million. That’s 500,000 more .ORG communities than 6 months ago!

On July 28th DNSSEC took center stage at the 2010 Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas.  Two years ago, at the same conference, Dan Kaminsky unveiled the infamous DNS bug that many believe became a major catalyst for DNSSEC implementation.  To kick things off, Jeff Moss -founder of Black Hat - in his opening speech called out the fact that "we have not solved any fundamental problems” and noted that the technical community must catch up. Providing countless band-aids for major issues is not acceptable when working towards a safe and secure internet for all.  Roughly four hours later Rod Beckstrom declared to a packed room of reporters that “DNSSEC is the biggest structural improvement in the Internet in 20 years, specifically, since the introduction of the world wide web.”  Clearly, DNSSEC is not a band-aid fix.  

As the world’s third largest domain, Internet security takes utmost precedence at .ORG, The Public Interest Registry (PIR).  On June 23, we reinforced our commitment by announcing at ICANN Brussels that .ORG is now the first generic top-level domain (TLD) to offer full DNSSEC deployment.  Coming off the heels of this momentous launch, we are pleased that three leading registrars - GoDaddy, DynDNS and NamesBeyond – now support Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) for .ORG domain names, adding an extra layer of security of all .ORG domain name holders. Simply put, registrars like GoDaddy, who handles more than 30% of web registrations worldwide, are now a critical player and influence in widespread DNSSEC deployment.