It’s been in the news, but there is no secret to Romanian IT professionals that ROTLD (the manager for Romanian internet domains) is behind its times in security and management (and even in communication skills, since the Tuesday incident has not been addressed in any way by ROTLD officials and not even mentioned on their website).

Meanwhile, Romanians and foreigners have paid ROTLD 18 million euros for 640.000 domains and that money is nowhere to be found. .ro DNS is weak and slow, domains are not managed via an account, but individually, domain passwords are stored in the clear in their database, there is no credit card option (to pay via credit card one must fax ROTLD a copy of the credit card) and many more.

Eugeniu Stăicuţ, the engineer running ROTLD since its inception, is silent. His last public stand was two years ago,  and before that he was speaking through friends and rumors. He knows his place is secure, even after the algerian hacker copied 640.000 .ro domains information and poisoned sites like google.ro and yahoo.ro. The 18 million euros have gone, people say, to political protectors, who cared less when last year the Romanian Internet was paralysed by another ROTLD malfunction nobody bothered to explain.

And it goes on and on.