Reno, Nev. — No-IP donated enough food for 70 families to Evelyn Mount Community Outreach on Friday, in hopes of helping feed those in need this Thanksgiving. The donation included, 40 large turkeys, 10 hams, 16 cornish game hen, 10 small turkeys and 25 boxes of stuffing.

This small donation is part of a bigger cause, started by Evelyn Mount and her husband Leon in 1979.

“As residents of Reno we consider it a privilege to be able to assist the community in which we live and work,” Heather Eaton, junior product manager said. “ Evelyn Mount has been running a food bank out of her garage for over 30 years, taking donations from the public and putting together food baskets for hundreds of local residents who, without her work, would have no dinner on Thanksgiving.”

The organization located on Cannan Street accepts donations of food and gently used clothing all year long. During the holidays they take donations for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners including turkeys, ham, chicken and the rest of the holiday fixings. Canned goods are also always needed and welcome.

The No-IP team spoke to volunteers at the outreach, who said all the donations they have received are spoken for and more donations are needed. The outreach expects to serve a thousand families and senior citizens this Thanksgiving.

“To give to such a fantastic organization and assist Ms. Mount in helping feed almost 70 families this holiday is an honor,” Eaton said.

Donations of food can be dropped off at Evelyn Mount’s house at 2350 Cannan Street in north Reno.

For more information you can call 359-0807 or 356-2038 Monday through Friday between the hours of 11 am and 4 pm.

Earlier today, we released a joint statement with Microsoft announcing the settlement of the unprecedented and overreaching seizure of 23 of our domains. We are thrilled to announce the settlement of this dispute and are excited to return to work connecting our 18 million users to their website and devices.

How did this happen?
On Monday, June 30, 2014, Microsoft obtained a US court order to take control of our most popular domain names used by both our Free and Enhanced Dynamic DNS services. As a result, nearly 5 million hostnames went dark and 1.8 million customer websites and devices became unreachable.

Why did this happen?
Microsoft suspected some of our customers were abusing our service for malicious purposes. However, instead of reporting the malicious activity to our abuse department or law enforcement, Microsoft decided to secretly sue us in civil court.

By filing an ex parte temporary restraining order (TRO), No-IP was prevented from having any knowledge of the case or offering any support in stopping malicious activity. Had Microsoft submitted evidence of abuse at any time, No-IP would have taken swift action to validate the claims and ban any accounts that were proven to be malicious. Instead, Microsoft wasted many months while malicious activity continued.

To state this as emphatically as possible — this entire situation could have been avoided if only Microsoft had followed industry standards. A quick email or call to the No-IP abuse team would have removed the abusive hostnames from the No-IP network.

Microsoft cited 22,000 hostnames that were abusive. Out of those 22,000 seized hostnames, the No-IP abuse department found only a fraction of the hostnames to still be active, which means that many had already been banned through our existing abuse procedures.

Microsoft promised the judge they would only block the hostnames alleged to be malicious and would forward all the remaining traffic for the non-abusive hostnames on to No-IP. This did not happen. The Microsoft DNS servers were misconfigured and failed to respond to our usual volume of billions of queries a day.

On July 1 at 6:00 AM, Microsoft claimed to resolve this error and reported that all domains were fully operational.

As depicted below, their claim was false.

Domains begin to be restored
On July 2, immediately after being contacted by No-IP and its attorneys, Microsoft agreed to contact the domain registries and have them return control of the domains to us before the court ordered them to do so. On that day, 22 of the domains were returned to No-IP. On July 3rd, the last domain was returned as well. Service returned to normal for our users within 24 hours of the domains being pointed back at our nameservers. The delay was due to the time it takes for DNS to propagate worldwide.

While we are extremely pleased with the settlement terms, we are outraged by Microsoft’s tactics and that we were not able to completely and immediately restore services to the majority of our valuable customers that had been affected.

At No-IP, we are firm believers that the Internet should be free and open. We will continue to fight for the rights of our users and our business. Moving forward, we have provisioned a solution that will reduce the risk of domain seizures. We will talk more in-depth about this in the coming days.

A Million…Actually, Many More…Thank Yous
Since 1999, our users have been spreading the word about No-IP and the helpful services that we offer.
From the entire team at No-IP we would like to send a big THANK YOU from the bottom of our hearts for supporting us throughout this crazy journey. Thank you for sticking with us, tweeting/commenting your support and pledging your support to us in the future. We wouldn’t be here today without you!
We would also like to give a big shout out to our amazing attorneys; Ron Green, our local counsel, from Randazza Legal Group and Mark Del Bianco, our attorney, from the Law Office of Mark Del Bianco. Thank you so much!

We hope that Microsoft learned a lesson from this debacle and that in the future they will not seize other companies domains and will use appropriate channels to report abuse.

#FreeNoIP

On Monday, June 30, Microsoft filed a civil suit in a Nevada federal court to disrupt Bladabindi-Jenxcus, a pervasive family of malware that put millions of customers at risk.

Today, both Microsoft Corporation and Vitalwerks Internet Solutions, LLC announce they have reached a settlement in the matter of Microsoft Corporation  v. Mutairi, et al.

Microsoft has reviewed the evidence provided by Vitalwerks and enters into the settlement confident that Vitalwerks was not knowingly involved with the subdomains used to support malware.  Those spreading the malware abused Vitalwerks’ services.

Microsoft identified malware that had escaped Vitalwerks’ detection.  Upon notification and review of the evidence, Vitalwerks took immediate corrective action allowing Microsoft to identify victims of this malware.  The parties have agreed to permanently disable Vitalwerks subdomains used to control the malware.

In the process of redirecting traffic to its servers for malware detection, Microsoft acknowledges that a number of Vitalwerks customers were impacted by service outages as a result of a technical error. Microsoft regrets any inconvenience these customers may have experienced.

No-IP is very proud to announce our integration into Buffalo routers.

Starting with model WZR-1750DHP Buffalo users will be able to download updated firmware from the Buffalo website:
www.buffalotech.com/support-and-downloads/downloads
Buffalo has not announced the rollout schedule, but the plan is to include No-IP in all of their products beginning this summer.

“Working with Buffalo on the integration was an excellent experience. The speed with which they were able to move through the integration process was quite impressive and they were very responsive to our feedback and suggestions.”

An integrated Dynamic DNS solution is a value add for consumers. Dynamic DNS enables customers to access their computer remotely, run a server, or even monitor a webcam while away from their business or home. Dynamic DNS gives you the advantages of a static IP address even if your IP is dynamic. With No-IP, you create an easy to remember hostname. This hostname is what you type into your browser to connect to your devices remotely.
More Information
Learn more about No-IP integrated dynamic DNS for routers and other devices. Check out the Buffalo WZR-1750DHP router. Learn more about No-IP dynamic DNS or managed DNS services. Also, download our OEM Partners White Paper to learn more.

About No-IP
For over 14 years, No-IP has been offering the best and most affordable Dynamic and Managed DNS solutions. Our robust Anycast Network with points of presence in 18 different world class facilities across the globe guarantees our 100% Uptime, because let’s face it, there are no upsides to downtime. No-IP is the preferred choice for users on the Internet for dynamic DNS compared to smaller, less reliable alternatives. Our DNS Experts will ensure that your website is fast, reliable and always available, guaranteed.

Contact
Natalie Goguen
Marketing Manager
5905 South Virginia Street, Suite 200
Reno, NV 89502
Office: (775)853-1883
ngoguen@no-ip.com