TAS

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at this point. But this morning, when we woke up and checked our email to find there had been yet another technical glitch with ICANN, we couldn’t help but groan.

Let’s go back to the New gTLD Applicant Guidebook. In early versions, ICANN requires that the primary and secondary contact for each application provide their home addresses. In the version published in January, just before the TLD Application System (TAS) opened, there was an update that assured applicants that these street addresses would not be made public.

Except that they were made public, by mistake of course. For just under 48 hours after ICANN posted the list of the public portions of new gTLD applications, anyone who cared to click through into an application preview could see the answers to Questions 1 through 30a, including the answers to Questions 6 and 7. For some applications, these questions only displayed the city and country of residence for the primary and secondary contacts. For others, they displayed the full postal address.

In response to discovering this unintended disclosure, ICANN disabled the viewing of applications started at about 6:00 PM EDT and emailed applicants to let them know. As of this morning, it appears that all the private information is no longer on display.

On a related note, many applicants, whose emails are listed as part of the applications, are already receiving ridiculous amounts of spam from gTLD “service” providers of varying legitimacy.

Last night, ICANN posted a new update about the TAS. The organization has met its deadline of May 8 to inform applicants of whether or not their user names or file names were exposed during the glitch that first became public on April 12.

But the real news is that we finally know when the TAS will come back online – mostly.

ICANN says that it is “targeting 22 May 2012 as the intended reopening date for the TLD Application System.” Once it reopens, the TAS will stay open for five business days, closing for good on May 30 (accounting for the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, May 28, here in the U.S.). (more...)

ICANN’s TLD Application System (TAS) remains offline this week as ICANN is continuing to work through the data in order to determine which applicants’ information may have been compromised during the security glitch. ICANN has said that it will likely take until May 8 to notify all of the applicants whether or not their user names or file names were exposed, but this week, the organization did publish some stats about the TAS delay: (more...)

As promised, ICANN posted another update about the TAS closure on Friday night, sneaking in just minutes before the deadline it had set of 23:59 UTC (7:59 PM EDT). Essentially, because of the large volume of data that the organization has to sort through in order to fulfill its promise of alerting all applicants of whether or not their data was compromised during the security glitch, ICANN stated that at the time, it was not prepared to make an announcement about when it would reopen the TAS. Instead, the statement promised another update by Friday, April 27 at 23:59 UTC (7:59 PM EDT). (more...)

Last night, ICANN published a new announcement about the ongoing process to fix the glitch that had exposed certain applicants’ user names and file names to other TAS users.

The message was somewhat mixed: while ICANN believes it has fixed the problem, it needs to continue testing it to be sure. The organization is still in the process of gathering information to inform applicants of whether or not their data was affected. As a result, the TAS will not reopen tonight as ICANN had predicted last Thursday. (more...)

The story around the technical glitch that caused ICANN to temporarily suspend access to the TLD Application System (TAS) on Thursday continues to evolve. First, on Thursday night, ICANN informed applicants that the “technical glitch” amounted to this: certain TAS users were able to view other users’ user names and file names while in the TAS. Regrettably, ICANN had first learned of this problem on March 19, but believed that it had adequately addressed the issue. (more...)

This morning, ICANN announced that, due to a number of technical problems with its TLD Application System (TAS), it will be shutting the system down temporarily.

The TAS will be shut down until Tuesday, April 17 at 23:59 UTC (7:59 PM EDT). At that time, the TAS will reopen and remain open until 23:59 UTC (7:59 PM EDT) on Friday, April 20, 2012.

ICANN posted this announcement shortly before 8:00 AM EDT this morning. (more...)

Perhaps it is because there has been so little information out of ICANN about the field of new gTLD applicants that the media seem to be giving TAS registration numbers so much attention. ICANN has been publishing the number of applicants registered in its TLD Application System, or TAS, at regular intervals during the application period; as of last week, the number had topped 250. Each time this data point is published, certain members of the media tend to jump on it, attempting to extract some insight into how many applications that will ultimately translate to. (more...)

We’ve been hearing some interesting rumors lately. Certain businesses that we have talked to recently are convinced that ICANN will extend the new gTLD application period beyond the allotted three-month window, running from January 12 to April 12 of this year. Their argument is, if enough applicants complain that three months is not enough time to properly prepare the complex new gTLD application, ICANN will have no choice but to push back the deadline. (more...)