The Nation of Tokelau

Tokelau is a self-governing territory of New Zealand consisting of three coral atolls in the southern Pacific Ocean. It lies north of the Samoan Islands, east of Tuvala, south of the Phoenix Islands and northwest of the Cook Islands. It's believed that the islands were first settled approximately 1000 years ago. Tokelau is a free and democratic nation with no political parties, holding elections every 3 years. And Tokelau is the first 100% solar powered nation in the world.

So why the interest in this small group of islands in the Pacific?  Well, it's not the islands, the nation, or even the people per se that interest me, it's their ccTLD, .tk that I have recently become aware of.  Tokelau allows any individual to register a domain under this ccTLD, and with few restrictions (such as sexual, drug, hate and firearms content), users and small businesses may register any number of domains free of charge.  "Special" .tk domains, such as those containing the trademark domain names for most Fortune 500 companies must be purchased. Users may also opt to forward their web and email traffic.

The nation of Tokelau boasts a population of 1,499 as of the October 2016 census, good for 237th in the world.  What makes this small population most remarkable is the fact that more than 28 million domains have been registered under the .tk ccTLD.  According to a McAfee survey in 2006, .tk domains were twice as likely to be used for "unwanted behaviors" when compared to the global average. In 2010, the Anti-Phishing Working Group noted that 21.5% of all worldwide phishing originated from .tk domains.

So what does this mean for you?  Have you ever done legitimate business with a person or organization coming from a .tk domain?  I can't say that I have.  And other than the free domain registration (which hardly matters with what GoDaddy and other registrars are selling domains for these days), why would anyone want to register their domain with such a small, and otherwise unknown nation?  They claim to have rules, but are clearly not enforcing them. And how could they with 28 million domains and counting registered? As of right now, it's probably safe to just blacklist the entire .tk for now.

Hard Code DNS Servers with PowerShell

The following is a PowerShell script to quickly hard code DNS servers for every network interface present on a computer. It will overwrite the existing DNS servers configured on that machines interfaces.  In this example, we'll be using the IP addresses for OpenDNS servers.

# The servers that we want to use
$newDNSServers = "208.67.220.220","208.67.222.222"

# Get all network adapters that already have DNS servers set
$adapters = Get-WmiObject Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration | Where-Object {$_.DNSServerSearchOrder -ne $null}

# Set the DNS server search order for all of the previously-found adapters
$adapters | ForEach-Object {$_.SetDNSServerSearchOrder($newDNSServers)}

Pirate DNS

Some of the main characters in the peer to peer file sharing world, led by former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde have announced their intentions to launch a competitor to the ICANN manged DNS system. ICANN is an independent non-profit organization, however it often complies with the wishes of the U.S. government. The alternative system will feature its own root server followed by a full naming system. The Pirate Bay is an infamous web site known for the coordination of illegal file sharing on the Internet who's servers are constantly on the move across the world while it's operators thumb their noses at law enforcement. The ultimate purpose of the so called “P2P DNS” project is to maintain an Internet free from censorship according to Sunde. The alternative root server can accomplish this by providing an alternative system to map familiar domain names such as google.com to the IP addresses that the Internet uses to route traffic.

The announcement of this alternative DNS system is immediately on the heels of the Department of Homeland Security seizing a number of domain names linked to websites that are linked to illegal files haring.  Sites such as Torrent-finder.com, DVDcollects, and TorrentFreak.com were taken over by the DHS and visitors were greeted by an image explaining the seizure.  In all, more than 70 domain names were seized.  Surprisingly, The Pirate Bay escaped this round of seizures despite them being a high profile target in the past.  Another popular torrent tracking site, Demonoid,com recently announced that it will be changing it's domain name to Demonoid.me.  The U.S. does not have jurisdiction over .me as it does over .com.