ReadWriteWeb

The Protect IP Act is a bill proposed by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont as replacement for the failed Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA). The bill was passed by committee today but blocked by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. Wyden also blocked COICA.

Among the various proposals in the act is one that would use The Domain Name System (DNS) to block blacklisted websites. This element of the proposal has come under fire from several security researchers who have published a paper titled Security and Other Technical Concerns Raised by the DNS Filtering Requirements in the PROTECT IP Bill.

As this week's Amazon Web Services outage demonstrated, Website uptime is not something to be taken for granted.

Whether it's caused by a service provider going down, a DDoS attack or a sudden surge in traffic, having your Website go down can knock the wind out of your business. Most bigger organizations can recover from an outage, but for small and medium-sized businesses, even an hour of downtime can cost you in terms of revenue, not to mention customer patience and loyalty. For smaller operations, a major outage could spell the end of the business.

It's not our normal beat to cover so much breaking news on ReadWriteCloud, but U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman has changed that with his attacks on Wikileaks and the threats he has made to the technology community.

We've seen a cascading series of events culminating tonight with Wikileaks losing its DNS. That means if you are in the United States, you can't access the Wikileaks website. According to EveryDNS.net:

With the news of Pirate Bay convictions upheld in Sweden, website seizures in the U.S., and now threats to "do something" about Wikileaks, it's no surprise that there are now calls for an alternative DNS, one outside the reach of governments and of ICANN.

The DNS, or Domain Name System, is one of the foundational elements of the Internet, responsible for translating the numbers in IP addresses to the more human-friendly names. And ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a nonprofit organization tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet Protocol address spaces, maintaining the registries of IP identifiers, and managing top-level domain names.

While it didn't win TechCrunch's Disrupt conference earlier this week, one of the most interesting startups we saw at the event was CloudFlare. CloudFlare is a distributed DNS and content delivery network that includes some interesting security features. It promises to speed up your website by an average of 30% and dramatically decrease your bandwidth usage and server load by preventing spam bots and other attackers from reaching your site.

Have kids? Have a computer? Then you've likely installed or have at least considered installing some form of Internet protection software, like the parental control software from Net Nanny or CyberPatrol. But in this new era of everything-as-a-service, having to run software on your computer seems passé. And as of today, it is.

Internet navigation and security firm OpenDNS has just launched FamilyShield, a free parental control service that requires no software download or CD to purchase. With two steps, claims the company, parents can protect their kids not only from inappropriate content, but also from malware, phishing sites and other known fraudulent entities on the Web.

Today, Google, along with a group of DNS and content providers, including Neustar/UltraDNS, published a proposal to extend the DNS (domain name server) protocol. DNS is the system that translates URLs for humans (e.g., ReadWriteWeb.com) into numeric IP addresses used by all computers for online communication.

To be perfectly explicit, Google is proposing "to allow Authoritative Nameservers to return varying replies based upon the network address of the client that initiated the query rather than of the client's Recursive Resolver." If that made no sense to you, read on for a plain-English discussion of the issue at hand and what it means for users.

Google just launched the Google Public DNS. Just like OpenDNS, Google Public DNS will allow users to bypass their ISPs Domain Name Servers (DNS). DNS servers are, in many respects, the backbone of the Internet. DNS allows you to type a domain name like www.senate.gov into a browser instead of a machine-readable IP number like http://156.33.195.33/. Google argues that it wants to give consumers an alternative to their ISPs' DNS services in order to make the Internet "faster, safer and more reliable."