Google pushes .zip and .mov domains on to the Net, and the Internet pushes back

Google pushes .zip and .mov domains on to the Net, and the Internet pushes back
Google pushes .zip and .mov domains onto the Internet, and the Internet pushes back

Aurich Lawson | Getty Pictures

A the latest shift by Google to populate the Online with 8 new major-amount domains is prompting concerns that two of the additions could be a boon to on-line scammers who trick individuals into clicking on malicious one-way links.

Frequently abbreviated as TLD, a prime-stage area is the rightmost section of a area name. In the early times of the Web, they aided classify the intent, geographic area, or operator of a given area. The .com TLD, for instance, corresponded to sites run by professional entities, .org was utilised for nonprofit businesses, .web for Web or network entities, .edu for faculties and universities, and so on. There are also country codes, this sort of as .united kingdom for the United Kingdom, .ng for Nigeria, and .fj for Fiji. A person of the earliest Net communities, The Very well, was reachable at www.properly.sf.ca.us.

Since then, the corporations governing World-wide-web domains have rolled out 1000’s of new TLDs. Two months ago, Google included eight new TLDs to the World wide web, bringing the full range of TLDs to 1,480, in accordance to the Web Assigned Figures Authority, the governing overall body that oversees the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Net protocol resources.

Two of Google’s new TLDs—.zip and .mov—have sparked scorn in some safety circles. While Google marketers say the aim is to designate “tying items jointly or relocating truly fast” and “moving pics and what ever moves you,” respectively, these suffixes are by now greatly employed to designate one thing completely distinctive. Especially, .zip is an extension employed in archive documents that use a compression format acknowledged as zip. The structure .mov, in the meantime, appears at the end of video clip data files, ordinarily when they have been made in Apple’s QuickTime structure.

Many security practitioners are warning that these two TLDs will result in confusion when they’re exhibited in email messages, on social media, and somewhere else. The explanation is that a lot of internet sites and computer software quickly convert strings like “arstechnica.com” or “mastodon.social” into a URL that, when clicked, leads a consumer to the corresponding domain. The get worried is that email messages and social media posts that refer to a file this kind of as set up.zip or trip.mov will mechanically transform them into clickable links—and that scammers will seize on the ambiguity.

“Threat actors can effortlessly sign up domain names that are probably to be applied by other people to casually refer to file names,” Randy Pargman, director of menace detection at safety company Proofpoint, wrote in an electronic mail. “They can then use individuals discussions that the danger actor didn’t even have to initiate (or take part in) to lure persons into clicking and downloading destructive content material.”

Undoing decades of anti-phishing and anti-deception awareness

A scammer with manage of the domain pictures.zip, for occasion, could exploit the many years-extended pattern of persons archiving a established of visuals inside of a zip file and then

Read More

Boeing’s move to Arlington pushes ‘tech hub’ vision closer to reality

Boeing’s move to Arlington pushes ‘tech hub’ vision closer to reality
Placeholder while article actions load

When Amazon announced it would be bringing its second headquarters to Arlington, local officials wasted no time pitching it as a chance to build something much bigger: This corner of Northern Virginia, they said, could transform into a dense, urban technology hub — a kind of eastern outpost for Silicon Valley.

More than three years later, that vision seems like it’s no longer just an idea.

For boosters of the area now dubbed “National Landing,” the leaked announcement last week that Boeing would be moving its own headquarters to Arlington shows that a neighborhood once known solely as the home of the Pentagon is well on its way to becoming a regional “innovation district.”

And for economic development experts, the aerospace giant’s move from Chicago also underscores the success of Virginia’s economic development strategy, which has focused on luring companies by growing and diversifying the state’s tech workforce.

But if Boeing’s decision signals that more companies could soon be coming to the area, they say, it’s also a warning sign: All the pain points associated with explosive growth in Seattle or the San Francisco Bay area — sky-high housing prices, chronically congested roads, a widening rift between the rich and the poor — may become even more acute in a wealthy county that already suffers from similar woes.

Boeing to move headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Va.

Boeing’s move to Arlington “puts an even greater premium on the work the region has been trying to do to build its digital talent pipeline,” said Amy Liu, a vice president at the Brookings Institution and director of its Metropolitan Policy Program.

“But we have to be very intentional about the people who will benefit from this growth,” Liu added. “Otherwise, we are going to further widen inequities in this region.”

Besides Amazon’s new offices, the “National Landing” corridor is anchored around a graduate engineering campus that Virginia Tech is building in Alexandria’s Potomac Yard neighborhood. The 3.5-acre facility is being funded in part by $545 million from Virginia state coffers, in addition to $50 million from Boeing.

The weapons and jet manufacturer already has a 400-person office in Arlington’s Crystal City neighborhood, and it said it has no immediate plans to expand its footprint or shift over employees from Chicago aside from a few top executives.

Boeing’s move to Virginia will mean few new jobs in D.C. region

Terry Clower, a public policy professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government and the director of its Center for Regional Analysis, said that Boeing’s decision nonetheless gives National Landing a good set of “bragging rights.”

Boeing has also said it will build a research and technology hub to focus on innovating in cybersecurity, quantum sciences and other fields, though it has so far offered few details on where that hub will go or what it might look like.

“If you put that [Boeing] on top of the Amazon HQ2 announcement and the presence

Read More