Pizza.com Name Sells for $2.6M

In 1985, 6 were registered; now, it's 668K a month

(NEWSER) - The .com Internet domain name celebrates its 25^th anniversary today, and despite some rather sluggish early years the Web address has turned into a strapping young suffix indeed. A Cambridge, Mass., tech firm snatched up the first dotcom address in 1985, and was joined by just 5 other companies in the first year. But the Internet boom of the late '90s really got the train rolling, and there are 80 million active addresses today. More»

Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew domains, among others, will have support by 2010: ICANN

(NEWSER) - In the biggest change ever to the system, Web domains will soon be available in the native scripts of Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, and other non-Latin-based languages. A proposal expected to be approved this week means “Internationalized Domain Names” could be up and running as soon as mid-2010. China and Thailand currently offer support for domains in their languages with non-standard workarounds, ZDNet reports. More»

Firms must guard against squatters

(NEWSER) - The decision of an internet oversight body to allow more domain names opens the playing field to cybersquatters—who register domain names in the hopes someone else will have to purchase them later, BusinessWeek reports. No more is it a matter of simply .com or .net: Squatters may now buy up countless addresses, forcing brand names to keep a much wider-ranging eye on the web. More»

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1. Sex.com - $12 million (2005)
2. Porn.com - $9.5 million (2007)
3. Business.com - $7.5 million (1999)
4. Diamond.com - $7.5 million (2006)
5. Beer.com - $7.0 million (1999)

Firm is responsible for delivering people to more than half of all websites

(NEWSER) - Hackers managed to break into the servers of a crucial web company responsible for delivering users to more than half the websites in the world. VeriSign doesn't believe the attackers infiltrated its Domain Name System network—which is responsible for directing traffic to .com, .net, and .gov addresses on the Internet—but it can't rule it out. The attacks occurred in 2010, but only came to light today, when Reuters spotted them in an October SEC filing. More»