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13 Dec 2007
The defendants in Dell's domain tasting suit responded last Friday.
It looks like a pretty feeble response to me.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/dell2.html
30 Nov 2007
A press
release from Iron Mountain says that ICANN has now formally chosen
them as the escrow agent for the Registrar Data Escrow program. So now,
only six and a half short years and one highly public registrar collapse
after the mandatory escrow was put into the registrar agreement, ICANN
has finally gotten around to setting it up.
The next question is whether the registrars will actually make the
escrow deposits, and what if anything will ICANN do when they don't.
The big responsible registrars will, of course, but the marginal ones
most likely not to escrow are the ones most likely to collapse. Stay
tuned for the next exciting chapter.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/ironmountain.html
24 Nov 2007
A
reasonably well informed article in Thursday's USA Today reminds us
that in 2004 Bill Gates said the spam problem would be solved in early 2006,
but here at the end of 2007 there's more spam than ever.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/usabad.html
19 Nov 2007
Bennett Haselton writes
in
Slashdot about a case he lost in small claims court in which a
poorly briefed small claims judge decided against him.
The defendant claimed it was indovidual mail,
and although the mail is to us an obvious link exchange spam,
the judge concluded otherwise because it started "Dear Webmaster."
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/nicespam.html
23 Oct 2007
The Storm worm has gotten a lot of press this year, with a lot of the
coverage tending toward the apocalyptic.
There's no question that it's one of the most successful pieces of
malware to date, but just how successful is it?
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/storm.html
20 Oct 2007
If you had an e-mail address any time in the past six years, you've
probably gotten spam for something called VigRX for Men,
with fairly specific promises that it will make you, ah, manlier.
I always wondered how many nitwits could fall for this kind of nonsense.
Thanks to a recent class action settlement, we now know that there have
been quite a lot of them.
A class action suit filed in 2001 in Colorado settled recently, with
some quite amazing info in the documents available at
http://lemsettlement.com.
LEM stands for Leading Edge Marketing, the name used by the defendants
for several companies in the US, Canada, and the Bahamas.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/lemstuff.html
17 Sep 2007
Last year I helped some Canadian film makers
do a TV show called
Spam, the Documentary.
Now US viewers can see it
on Court TV tomorrow Sept 18th at 11pm or the 19th at 3am.
(Well, at least the insomniacs or the ones with TiVo can
see it.)
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/spamtv.html
10 Sep 2007
Zango, a company that used to be called 180 solutions, has a long
history of making and distributing spyware.
(See the Wikipedia article
for their sordid history.)
Not surprisingly, anti-spyware vendors routinely list Zango's software
as what's tactfully called "potentially unwanted".
Zango has tried to sue their way out of the doghouse by filing suit against
anti-spyware vendors.
In a widely reported decision last week, Seattle judge John Coghenour
crisply rejected Zango's case, finding that federal law gives Kaspersky
complete immunity against Zango's complaint.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/zango.html
08 Sep 2007
If there were a lifetime achievement award for losing lawsuits for being
annoying, Sanford Wallace would be a shoo-in.
Fifteen years ago, his junk faxing was a major impetus for the TCPA, the
law outlawing junk faxes.
Later in the 1990s, his Cyber Promotions set important legal precedents
about spam in cases where he lost to Compuserve and AOL.
Two years ago, he lost a suit to FTC who
sued his Smartbot.net for stuffing spyware onto people's computers.
And now, lest anyone think that he's run out of bad ideas, he's back,
on the receiving end of a lawsuit from MySpace.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/spamford.html
03 Sep 2007
Last week I wrote a note the ICANN
WHOIS privacy battle, and why nothing's likely to change any time soon.
Like many of my articles, it is mirrored
at
CircleID, where some of the commenters missed the point.
One person noted that info about car registrations, to which I roughly
likened WHOIS, are usually available only to law enforcement, and that
corporations can often be registered in the name of a proxy, so why
can't WHOIS do the same thing?
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/whoispriv2.html
The Seventh Circuit has issued
its opinion in
the continuing saga of E360 Insight vs. the
Spamhaus Project.
While it is not a complete victory for Spamhaus, they did about as well
as anyone could have hoped for under the circumstances.
E360 won on the procedural issue, while Spamhaus won on the substance.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/shappeal.html
28 Aug 2007
ICANN has been wrangling about WHOIS privacy for years.
Last week, yet another WHOIS working group ended without making
any progress.
What's the problem? Actually, there are two: one is that
WHOIS privacy is not necessarily all it's cracked up to be,
and the other is that so far, nothing in the debate has given
any of the parties any incentive to come to agreement.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/whoispriv.html
09 Aug 2007
This post has been withdrawn due to objections from Virtumundo's lawyers.
Other comments on this order:
You can find a copy of the judge's order at:
http://www.spamsuite.com/webfm_send/126
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/gordonpays.html
27 Jul 2007
Last year I was exchanging e-mail with an aquaintance in Africa about
setting up web sites, who said:
I would be interesting to know what mistakes made in North America
and how they were addressed.
The major mistake was to assume that the most important use of the net was
to distribute content from a relatively small set of sources out to the
masses, and that the masses would pay for the privilege. In fact, people
put a much higher value on one-to-one or one-to-few communication, and the
number of content providers that successfully sell information can be
counted on your fingers.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/afr.html
23 Jun 2007
When I was growing up, one of the annoyances of life in New York City
was squeegee men.
When your car was stopped at a light, these guys would run up, make a few
swipes at your windshield with a squeegee, then look menacing until you
gave them a tip.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/squeegee.html
I recently came across a copy of
a ruling in the
bizarre case of MySpace vs. theglobe.com.
Theglobe.com was the ultimate dot.com bubble
company. It started up here in Ithaca, and went public at the peak of dot.com
hysteria with one of the the greatest one-day price runups ever.
Since then they bought
and sold a variety of busineses, none of which ever made any money,
including the Voiceglo VoIP service which appears to be what the spam was
promoting.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/globespam.html
02 Jun 2007
According to
documents filed with the SEC yesterday, Michael Egan, president
of theglobe.com which owns Tralliance, lent them $250,000 on onerous terms
to keep the company going.
The terms of the loan allow him to increase the amount up to $3,000,000.
It pays 10% interest, assuming theglobe had the cash to pay interest
which is unlikely, and can be converted into stock at one cent per share.
The filings say this loan is to provide working capital while they look
for longer term financing.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/travelnotdead.html
29 May 2007
In a press release
sent out this morning, Godaddy says they're the new registrar for
Registerfly's former domains.
Godaddy has their own issues, but they're one of the few registrars that
could import that many domains quickly.
This should solve the problem for the RF customers whose registration
data is correctly transferred over. But it still leaves in limbo those
whose domains went into redemption or expired due to RF's inability
to process renewals. There also seem to be a fair number of domains
whose contact info is wrong due to incompetence or malice at RF.
There doesn't yet seem to be any plan to clean up the rest of the
mess.
There's nothing about this on the ICANN web site other than a blog
entry on Friday proudly saying that they finally got RF's Kevin Medina
to show up in court. Whoopee. But there's no reason to doubt what
Godaddy has said.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/rfgodaddy.html
A blog entry
from the always interesting Ed Hasbrouck led me to the
latest quarterly 10-Q financial filing
by theglobe.com, which owns
Tralliance, the company that runs the .travel domain. After a most exciting
decade buying and selling a variety of Internet related businesses,
Tralliance and .travel are now theglobe's only activity.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/travelcroak.html
25 May 2007
In an entry in the ICANN
blog, Paul Levins says they've arranged to move Registerfly's domains
to another registrar.
They won't say who the other registrar is beyond "an existing accredited Registrar with a demonstrated record of customer service" which could be just
about anyone other than Registerfly.
They have "most" of the registrant data.
All is to be unveiled next week.
In the meantime, read the comments on the blog entry about domains that
are expired, domains that have gone into the redemption period and eNom
(for whom RF used to be a reseller) wants a large ransom, and other
screwups.
Even if the new registrar is utterly wonderful, there's going to be lots
of pieces to pick up.
(Thanks to Larry Seltzer who noticed the ICANN blog entry. He also noted
that, astonishingly, Registerfly's web site still purports to sell
domains and will take your money, although judging from the blog
complaints, the actual process ends after the take your money part.)
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/rfmove.html
10 May 2007
Forwarding e-mail is so easy that it must be legal, right? Not
everyone thinks so.
Ned Snow at the University of Arkansas recently
wrote
A
Copyright Conundrum: Protecting Email Privacy that argues that
forwarding violates the sender's copyright rights, so it's not.
The article is quite clever and is (as best
I can tell, not being a legal historian) well researched, even if you
agree with me that its conclusions are a bunch of codswallop.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/snow.html
A student at a well-known US university wrote me and asked
whether,
given the huge national interest in getting the industry to unite behind
(at least) one format, did I think that the FTC should've played
a stronger role in pushing the industry to adopt an authentication
format?
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/authpolitics.html
05 May 2007
Last December I wrote about Mark Mumma,
who runs a small web hosting company in Oklahoma City and his battle
with Omega World Travel a/k/a cruise.com.
Mumma lost his CAN SPAM suit agains them in December, but Omega's
countersuit for defamation went to trial last week, and I hear that
the jury awarded Omega $2.5 million in damages, which Mumma is not
likely to be able to pay.
This may be painted in some circles as a huge defeat for anti-spam
activists, but it's not.
Mumma has been what one might call an intemperate litigant, as most
impressively documented in
an
interview with Ken Magill.
Press reports say that Omega would have settled with Mumma for an apology
and no money, which considering Mumma's string of losses was a pretty
good offer.
But he didn't.
There are plenty of real anti-spam lawsuits going on, with real charges
of behavior that is actually prohibited by law.
A good example is the case that
Project
Honeypot filed last week against spammers who'd scraped addresses off
their honeypot web pages.
I look forward to following its progress.
Update: Read Robert Braver's comment on this message which clarifies
the sequence of suits.
Omega sued first in response to threats from Mumma, but the outcome is
indeed a train wreck.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/mumma2.html
29 Apr 2007
From a recent mailing from Performics (soon to be part of Google) about an
affiliate program I just added to my account:
One important point about your ongoing communications with
Performics. We use an industry-leading email communications platform
that has some stringent delivery requirements. Unfortunately the
system does not recognize some common prefixes. ...
List of undeliverable email prefixes:
abuse@, admin@, alerts@, blacklist@, blackhole, bulkmail@, contact@,
devnull@, domain@, domreg@, domtech@, email@, ftp@, help@,
hostmaster@, hr@, info@, information@, it@, jobs@, mailer-daemon@,
maps@, marketing@, news@, noc@, nospam@, postmaster@, privacy@, rbl@,
remarks@, root@, route@, sales@, security@, spam@, spamtrap@,
support@, techsupport@, test@, usenet@, uucp@, webmaster@, webteam@,
www@
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/notaddrs.html
18 Apr 2007
ICANN's web site has
a
press release saying that the were granted a temporary restraining
order on Monday requiring that Registerfly cough up all the info on
their registrants, or else.
My assumption all along has been that the reason that Registerfly hasn't
provided full info is because they don't have it.
ICANN agrees that they got partial data last month, and it's hard to
imagine a reason that Registerfly would have given them some of the
data but deliberately held back the rest.
I guess we'll know soon enough.
By the way, I hear that ICANN plans to implement their registrar escrow
policy, the one that's been in the contracts since 2000, pretty soon.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/rforelse.html
29 Mar 2007
Last week I
noted here
that cutting off collapsed domain Registerfly will leave a huge problem
for registrants. ICANN is supposed to have escrowed copies of each
registrar's registrant data, but has never got around to setting that up.
This means that unless Registerfly can supply the data, there may be no record
of the actual owner of their domains.
According to a story by AP reporter Nick Jesdanun, it looks like that's
the case:
ICANN said it may automatically transfer customers to a competing
registrar, but it said it does not have all the necessary data,
largely because of the use of anonymous proxy services.
I would ask what ICANN thinks they're doing, but what's the point?
Update: ICANN's lawyers sent Registerfly
another
letter saying they better cough up that registrant data pronto Or Else.
At this point it's hard to imagine why Registerfly wouldn't have provided
the data if they had it, so my working assumption continues to be that
they don't.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/rfuhoh.html
17 Mar 2007
ICANN's website headlines
Termination of RegisterFly.com Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
While it is high time that ICANN dealt with this long-standing problem,
simply cutting them off may just make it worse.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/nowwhat.html
12 Mar 2007
The first sentence of the ICANN bylaws states:
The mission of The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
("ICANN") is to coordinate, at the overall level, the global
Internet's systems of unique identifiers, and in particular to ensure
the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier
systems.
That seems like a reasonable goal, doesn't it?
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/stablehuh.html
06 Mar 2007
For about the last two years, I was a member of ICANN's At Large
Advisory Commitee (ALAC), the group charged with representing the
interests of ordinary Internet users within ICANN.
In case anyone is wondering, here's why I'm not on the ALAC any more.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/offalac.html
05 Mar 2007
So-called domain tasting is one of the more unpleasant developments
in the domain business in the past year.
Domain speculators are
registering millions of domains without paying for them,
in a business model not unlike running a condiment business by
visiting every fast food restaurant in town and scooping up all of the
ketchup packets.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/tasting.html
06 Feb 2007
In the latest round of AOL conspiracy nonsense, a friend commented that
getting mail delivered is too hard.
That may be true, but I'm wondering if the problem isn't at least as much
that people's expectations are unrealistic, due as always to the way that
computers seduce us into analogical thinking that doesn't work.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/toohard.html
05 Feb 2007
Yes, that's what I said. And if you don't believe me, here it is, exactly
as received except for snipping out a few locally added headers that
identify the address they sent it to, an often scraped address that gets
a mountain of spam.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/postini.html
15 Jan 2007
In case there were any question, here's a
recent
note on Tucows' blog saying that they've seen a big increase in spam
in recent months.
My friend Neil Schwartzman wrote an elegant manifesto
Trench Warfare in the Age of The Laser-guided Missile
that should be required reading for everyone.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/tucspam.html
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