Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

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Home 28 Jun 2008 ICANN to add new top level domains, World to come to an end ICANN The biggest buzz from the Paris ICANN meeting was that the board accepted last fall's proposal for a streamlined process to add new TLDs. A variety of articles in the mainstream press, many featuring inflammatory but poorly informed quotes (from people who probably got a phone call saying "We go to press in five minutes, what do you think about ICANN's plan to add a million new domains?") didn't help. When can we expect the flood of TLDs? Don't hold your breath. See more ... posted at: 19:23 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/newtlds.trackback 12 Jun 2008 Domain Registration, a Simple Introduction ICANN I recently gave a talk about the way that domain registrations work. To illustrate it I made a slide that illustrates the process. Any questions? posted at: 05:12 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/simple.trackback 02 Jun 2008 Fourteen thousand messages Email A guy I know went away on a trip for a month and a half. When he got back, his inbox had 14,000 messages waiting for him, real ones, since his mail system has pretty good spam filtering. How can anyone deal with that much mail? More importantly, if there are tools to sort, filter, combine, and so forth to get the mail under control, how can people who aren't technoweenies like me manage the tools? See more ... posted at: 00:13 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/fourteenk.trackback 29 May 2008 Dot travel still isn't dead yet ICANN I've writen several blog entries about the continued downward swirling motion of Tralliance, the company that runs the registry for .TRAVEL. In this month's installment, as told in their quarterly 10-Q SEC filing, they flirt with bankruptcy but may well end up more stable than before. One of the more eye-catching paragraphs says: Based upon the Company's current financial condition, as discussed above, and without the infusion of additional capital, management does not believe that the Company will be able to fund its operations beyond the end of May 2008. See more ... posted at: 23:19 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/travelstillnotdead.trackback 18 May 2008 CAN SPAM and Affiliate Mailer Opt-Out Email Many online businesses use affiliates to drum up business. The affiliate finds a lead somewhere, passes it to the business, and gets a commission if the lead turns into a sale. Web based affiliates are relatively uncontroversial, but affiliates who advertise by e-mail are a chronic problem due to their propensity to send spam, both spam as normally defined and as defined by CAN SPAM. Is it possible to do legitimate e-mail affiliate marketing? Maybe. See more ... posted at: 23:08 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/affwash.trackback 16 May 2008 Wow, Sanford Wallace Owes a Lot of Money Email Last September MySpace sued ur-spammers Sanford "Spamford" Wallace and Walt "Pickle Jar" Rines for egregious violations of CAN SPAM. After some early skirmishes involving an expert for Wallace so unqualified that the judge threw out his testimony, Wallace and Rines stopped responding, so as was widely reported, earlier this week the court granted a default judgement. Since they sent a lot of spam, the statutory damages came to an enormous $235 million. Even for Spamford, that's a lot of money. See more ... posted at: 01:58 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/spamford2.trackback 08 May 2008 Dismaying ruling in ASIS vs. Azoogle Email ASIS is a small ISP in northern California. Azoogle is an online lead broker with a history of extremely poor e-mail practices, although they have cleaned up their act enough in recent years to get off the Spamhaus blacklists. ASIS sued Azoogle under CAN SPAM, Azoogle moved for summary judgement, which was granted. Although I can't tell whether Azoogle was responsible for the specific spam in the suit, the reasoning the judge used to throw out the suit is just plain wrong, and the suit should have been allowed to continue. See more ... posted at: 22:32 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/asisazoogle.trackback 03 May 2008 Jeremy Jaynes gets one more chance Email In 2004 Jaynes became the country's first convicted spam felon under the Virginia anti-spam law. He's been appealing his conviction ever since, most recently losing an appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court by a 4-3 decision in February. As I discussed in more detail at the time the key questions were a) whether the Virginia law had First Amendment problems and b) whether Jaynes had standing to challenge it. The court answered No to b), thereby avoiding the need to answer a), the dissent answered Yes to both. See more ... posted at: 23:49 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/jaynesrehear.trackback Happy Birthday Spam on the BBC World Service Email I was interviewed this afternoon on the BBC World Service newshour program, about the 30th anniversary of the first spam. To listen in, visit the program's web site. Click the "Listen again" link and, although it was recorded and broadcast on Saturday the 3rd, it is the Sunday 2000 GMT link. The interview is with Lyse Doucette and starts about at about 13:45 into the hour long program. posted at: 18:20 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/spam30.trackback 30 Apr 2008 Colorado has a new spam law Email The governor of Colorado recently signed a new anti-spam law into effect. Since CAN SPAM draws a tight line around what states can do, this law is mostly interesting for the way that it pushes as firmly against that line as it can. See more ... posted at: 09:57 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/cololaw.trackback 19 Apr 2008 ICANN GNSO Votes to Kill Domain Tasting ICANN Domain tasting is the disreputable practice of registering lots of domains, seeing how much traffic they get, and then using the five day Add Grace Period to refund the 99.9% of them that aren't worth paying for. A related abuse is front running, registrars speculatively grabbing domains that people inquire about to prevent them from using a different registrar. See more ... posted at: 14:38 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/realnotaste.trackback 11 Apr 2008 Comcast 1, E360 0 Email The judge in E360 vs. Comcast filed his order yesterday, and to put it mildly, he agreed with Comcast. It starts: Plaintiff e360Insight, LLC is a marketer. It refers to itself as an Internet marketing company. Some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it a spammer. and from E360's viewpoint, goes downhill from there. See more ... posted at: 11:52 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/e3comcast4.trackback 06 Apr 2008 Sender Address Verification -- still a bad idea Email A lot of spam uses fake return addresses. So back around 2000 it occurred to someone that if there were a way to validate the return addresses in mail, they could reject the stuff with bad return addresses. A straightforward way to do that is a callout, doing a partial mail transaction to see if the putative sender's mail server accepts mail to that address. This approach was popular for a few years, but due to its combination of ineffectiveness and abusiveness, it's now used only by small mail systems whose managers don't know any better. What's wrong with it? See more ... posted at: 17:54 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/callout.trackback 26 Mar 2008 A third, more interesting round in E360 vs. Comcast Email In the past week, Comcast filed an answer, denying all of E360's charges, and attached to it a motion to file a most impressive counterclaim. The court granted the motion on Monday so the counterclaim has been filed. At about the same time, E360 filed its response to Comcast's previous motion to dismiss the suit due to its utter lack of legal merit. See more ... posted at: 09:55 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/e3comcast3.trackback 19 Mar 2008 More on the Soloway case Email I've now read Soloway's plea agreement. Despite some claims from his lawyers that it's some kind of victory that he only pleaded to three of the 40 charges, with the rest being dismissed, it's clear from the agreement that he indeed did just about everything that the government charged. See more ... posted at: 23:35 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/solplead2.trackback 14 Mar 2008 Robert Soloway pleads guilty Email Large scale spammer Robert Soloway, whose criminal trial was scheduled to start in a week and a half, pled guilty to most of the charges against him. See more ... posted at: 23:50 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/solplead.trackback 05 Mar 2008 Comcast fires back at E360 Email Back in January, bulk mailer E360 filed a suit against giant cable ISP Comcast. This week Comcast responded with a withering response. (Copies available at spamsuite.com.) Their memorandum of law wastes no time getting down to business: Plaintiff is a spammer who refers to itself as a "internet marketing company," and is in the business of sending email solicitations and advertisements to millions of Internet users, including many of Comcast's subscribers. See more ... posted at: 23:28 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/e3comcast2.trackback 03 Mar 2008 The Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008 Email Last week Sen. Snowe filed bill S.2661, the Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008, or APCPA. While its goals are laudable, I have my doubts about some of the details. See more ... posted at: 22:31 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/s2661.trackback 29 Feb 2008 Virginia Supreme Court Narrowly Upholds Jaynes' Conviction Email Way back in 2004 the country's first criminal spam case, Commonwealth of Virginia v. Jaynes, convicted large scale spammer Jeremy Jaynes under the Virginia anti-spam law, and sentenced him to nine years in jail. I was the Commonwealth's technical expert and wrote about my experience. Since then he's been working his way through the appeals process, losing at each stage. Today the Virginia Supreme Court handed down its decision. They upheld the conviction, but only by a single vote, 4-3. See more ... posted at: 23:53 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/jaynesappeal.trackback 27 Feb 2008 More on the Front Running Class Action Suit ICANN Several people pointed out that although the suit still hasn't appeared in PACER, copies of the complaint are available online, including this one at Lextext. Having read it, I'm rather underwhelmed. See more ... posted at: 22:16 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/front2.trackback The Front Running Class Action Suit ICANN In a recent press release, Los Angeles law firm Kabateck Brown Kellner says it's filed a class action suit against Network Solutions and ICANN for front running. (If you tuned in late, NetSol admits that if you query a domain name on their web site, they will speculatively register it so that it's only available through NetSol for five days, at their above market price.) This is a very peculiar suit. See more ... posted at: 00:26 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/frontrunsuit.trackback 16 Feb 2008 We're CAN SPAM compliant! Whoopee. Email Recently, several of my friends have been writing about mailers who boast that they're compliant with CAN SPAM. Here's our distilled advice in one handy word: don't. See more ... posted at: 14:06 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/compliant.trackback 15 Feb 2008 Dot travel continues to head down the tubes ICANN Last year I wrote two blog entries on the dire state of Tralliance, owner of the .travel registry, which was bailed out at the last minute by a large loan from the registry's controlling shareholder, Michael Egan. Since then they've taken some decisive steps on the road to irrelevance. Originally, they had strict rules about who was allowed to register, basically only members of a list of well known industry associations. As of December 21, they have new rules that seem to limit registrants to anyone who shows the faintest interest, with a preference to bulk registrations. (If you followed the history of .aero, the deja vú is intense.) In September, they sold their search.travel search engine for about $300K to a company controlled by Egan, stating they needed the cash to stay in business. Then, according to an SEC filing, Labigroup, another company controlled by Egan, has agreed to buy at least 25,000 .travel domains, producing over $250,000 of simulated revenue which looks an awful lot like taking money out of one pocket, waving it around, and then putting it back in one's other pocket, particularly since another SEC filing two weeks ago reveals that current owner theglobe.com is selling Tralliance to yet another LLC owned directly by Egan. See more ... posted at: 23:49 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/traveldrain.trackback 06 Feb 2008 Neustar and Afilias jump on the No Tasting bandwagon ICANN In a message posted to the ICANN GNSO list, Avri Doria forwarded along a most interesting document from Neustar, who runs the .biz domain. See more ... posted at: 09:30 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/biztaste.trackback 03 Feb 2008 There's a lot of money in domain tasting ICANN Dell's anti-tasting suit that I wrote about in December has been heating up, according to court documents filed in January. There's been a lot of predictable legal skirmishing in which the defendant registrars deny that they're also the registrants, claim that they're really outside the US so they haven't been served, argue about some server disks that the allegedly non-US defendant has at a data center in Florida, and so forth, but what really jumps out are the arguments about how much money this suit is (again allegedly) costing the defendants. See more ... posted at: 21:32 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/tastebucks.trackback 29 Jan 2008 Domain tasting to go away for real this time. ICANN At last week's meeting, the ICANN board uncharacteristially did something and voted to make their fee of 20 cents per domain-year nonrefundable. They expect this to stop both domain tasting and NSI's frontrunning, which it certainly will. It's not clear when this change will go into effect, but it might be within a month. It's items 5 and 6 in the draft minutes on ICANN's web site. (The ICANN staff uncharacteristically published the minutes soon after the meeting, another refreshing change.) I wonder if Google will now undo their new rule about no ads on domains less than five days old. posted at: 09:28 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/notaste.trackback 22 Jan 2008 Comcast sued, sort of, by E360 Email E360 Insight is a small bulk emailing house near Chicago run by David Linhardt with a chronic spam problem. He gained fame last year due to a meretricious suit against Spamhaus involving strange twists and turns, mostly due to Spamhaus getting some dreadful legal advice. My September blog entry described the current status of this case. Last Tuesday he filed a remarkable suit against giant cable ISP Comcast. I have just read a PDF copy of the complaint (courtesy of spamsuite.com) and each page is more amazing than the last. See more ... posted at: 23:04 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/e3comcast.trackback 13 Jan 2008 Ralsky Indicted, CAN SPAM is still useless Email Well, I read the indictment (available here from Spamhaus.) It's a long litany of criminal behavior, primarily pump and dump stock fraud of a long list of penny stocks from the US and China. Ralsky is described as the "chief executive officer and overall leader" of the scheme, and it goes on to list fifteen others, including "mailer 2", an unindicted co-conspirator in Seattle who is presumably Robert Soloway. The thing that strikes me about this indictment is that although it includes a lot of CAN SPAM charges, everything Ralsky and Co. did was already illegal under conventional fraud and computer tampering laws. Lying about who you are to tout worthless stock is already illegal, hijacking other people's computers is illegal, and collecting the money for fraudulent actions is illegal, too. Sure, they're throwing the book at them for CAN SPAM violations about fraudulent mail headers and domain registrations, but by my reading, they'd have just as strong a case without CAN SPAM, and the conventional charges will be a lot easier to explain to a judge and a jury. So it's a relief that Ralsky, who spent the better part of a decade as the country's highest profile spammer, is finally headed back to jail. (He's been there before, for insurance fraud.) But it's yet another reminder that the US needs effective anti-spam laws, and CAN SPAM isn't one. posted at: 02:38 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/ralsky2.trackback 09 Jan 2008 The Internet Archive Really Is Reliable A recent message in the Risks Digest called Risks of believing what you see on the WayBack Machine (archive.org) claims that: I have now encountered 2 legal cases in 3 months in which a plaintiff saw images on the WayBack Machine (www.archive.org) and believed that they indicated events in the past that never happened. This is a big deal in legal circles, since archive.org is widely used in court cases to show the state of a web site at a given time, which can be critical in, for example, cases where the site shows prior art for a patent or infringing copies of copyrighted material. If the archive entries aren't reliable, all of these cases are thrown into doubt. Needless to say, it would be many defendants' dream come true if courts were to stop accepting archived copies. I have analyzed the material cited in the article and find that the archive is fine, and his claims to the contrary are somewhere between disengenuous and deliberately misleading. Here's why. See more ... posted at: 10:00 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/iarchive.trackback 04 Jan 2008 Mega-spammer Alan Ralsky indicted Email Alan Ralsky, widely believed to be one of the world's most prolific spammers, was indicted by the US Federal government along with ten other people according to a press release the government sent out yesterday. I'll write more on this in a few days after I get back from Japan and have a chance to look at case documents. posted at: 07:21 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/ralsky1.trackback

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