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

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Home 25 Dec 2008 Anonymous speech doesn't require forgery Email In September the long strange Jeremy Jaynes spam case took its most recent twist when the Virginia Supreme Court reversed its previous decision and threw out the state's anti-spam law on First Amendment grounds. The state is currently preparing one final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and interested parties are preparing their briefs. I recently reread the decision, and was struck that the court's analysis depends on a severe misunderstanding of the way that e-mail works. See more ... posted at: 17:45 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/polianon.trackback 21 Dec 2008 US Dep't of Commerce doesn't like ICANN's new domain plan ICANN ICANN's authority to manage top level of the DNS comes from a two-year Joint Project Agreement (JPA) signed with the US Department of Commerce in 1997, since extended seven times, most recently until September 2009. Since the DoC can unilaterally cancel the JPA which would put ICANN out of the DNS business, when DoC speaks, ICANN listens. See more ... posted at: 19:10 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/docnewtld.trackback 18 Dec 2008 ICANN sets the schedule to kill domain tasting ICANN Domain tasting, as everyone probably knows by now, is the disreputable practice of registering lots of domains, seeing how much traffic they get, and then using the five day Add Grace Period (AGP) 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. Back in April, the ICANN GNSO (the subgroup that deals with generic TLDs, i.e., all but the two-letter country codes) voted to set a new policy to get rid of domain tasting. And now, eight short months later, it's finally about to become ICANN policy. See more ... posted at: 11:14 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/lasttaste.trackback 07 Dec 2008 How To Do Coreg That Doesn't Stink Email Coreg, short for co-registration, is a popular but problematic method for building mailing lists. When you sign up for mail from someone, if there's a box asking if you'd like Valuable Offers from Our Treasured Marketing Partners, that's coreg. They sell your address to the TMPs who do, well, something with it. In some cases coreg is a sideline, but there are companies that do nothing but coreg, with online sweepstakes and other cheap trinkets as come-ons to get people to sign up. Coreg has earned a dreadful reputation. The classic example is "Nadine", an elderly woman who mistyped her address on a sweepstakes site, instead typing an address at an ISP in Texas which collected all of the mail she got and tracked its passage from one mailer to another. He stopped counting last year at upwards of 90,000 messages, everything from political opinion surveys to horse porn. So a friend asked, is it possible to do coreg that doesn't stink? See more ... posted at: 18:34 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/coreg.trackback 25 Nov 2008 Facebook wins $800M against spammer. So what? Email In a widely reported court case, Facebook won an $800M default judgement and injunction against a Montreal man named Adam Guerbuez, who has a long and sordid history. But it probably won't make any difference. See more ... posted at: 10:03 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/facespam.trackback 15 Nov 2008 More spam from Postini Email A few months ago we had a most interesting colloquy when I posted with some amusement a piece of spam that Postini had sent me, suggesting that a company that claims to be in the spam filtering business should consider using its own product, and a former Postini employee expressed bafflement and outrage that anyone should expect Postini to bear any responsibility for mail sent through their servers. Well, they're back! See more ... posted at: 07:49 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/econospam.trackback 13 Nov 2008 ICANN finally turfs EstDomains ICANN After all the uncomplimentary things I've said about ICANN, in fairness I should acknowledge that they do, finally, seem to have terminated famously sleazy registrar EstDomains, brushing off last ditch attempts by its owner to claim that his conviction for fraud was under appeal and that he wasn't an officer any more. His conviction was nine months ago, and there's well documented evidence of years of involvement in crime ranging from phishing to child porn, but better late than never. I remain interested to see what, if anything, ICANN plans to do about registrar DynamicDolphin, whose owner also has been convicted of a felony. Followup Note: On 24 November, the 281,000 domains registered by EstDomains become available to transfer to any other registrar who wants them. But who'd want a portfolio of domains that are mostly notable for being used for criminal purposes? What if no other registrar wants them? Are they all just deleted? Go into limbo? If they're in limbo, how could a registrant take them out of limbo? Does ICANN have a plan? Stay tuned and in two weeks we'll find out. posted at: 07:36 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/estdead.trackback 08 Nov 2008 Registrar hide and seek ICANN In the past year ICANN has been putting a lot more effort into its compliance activities, which is a good thing, since the previous level was, ah, exiguous. That's the good news. The bad news is that while they're paying more attention to misbehaving registrants, the registrars, gatekeepers to the world of domains, have serious issues that ICANN have yet to address. See more ... posted at: 19:45 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/notreg.trackback 15 Oct 2008 Users don't like forwarded spam Email A message on Dave Farber's Interesting People list complained that Comcast was blocking mail forwarded by Dyndns, a popular provider of DNS and related services for small-scale users. ... Wholesale blocking of all mail intended for customers from a particular intermediate distributor, merely because they route it through an external service that adds value. In reponse, I opined: See more ... posted at: 05:06 :: permanent link to this entry :: 6 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/fwdspam.trackback 11 Oct 2008 Cluck, cluck ICANN I've always been a fan of co-ops. In New York, we shop at greenstar.coop and my wife banks at alternatives.coop, in the UK we shop at co-operative.coop. So when the .COOP domain opened, I wondered if I could get my own clever domain name, but found that chicken.coop was taken by a small producer co-op in the southern U.S. Drat. See more ... posted at: 19:07 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/chicken.trackback 10 Oct 2008 Interview on the Jaynes Reversal Email Podcaster Speaking of Justice talked to me about the Virginia Supreme Court's reversal of the Jeremy Jaynes conviction. Much of it will be familiar if you've read my previous blog entries, but some of it's not so you can listen to it here. posted at: 08:24 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/vainterview.trackback 27 Sep 2008 Kentucky governor: All your gambling sites are belong to us ICANN According to news reports, the governor of Kentucky has filed a suit in state court to seize 141 gambling domain names. His claimed authority is a 1974 law against "gambling devices", on the theory that a domain is a "device", and online gambling is taking money away from in-state horse racing and the lottery. The judge sensibly has said that he doesn't understand all the issues, and has given all sides a week to submit briefs. Two domains, highrollerslounge.com and luckypyramidcasino.com have been reassigned to the state, probably by a registrar who didn't understand the issues either. I have to say that this is a phenomenally bogus case. See more ... posted at: 16:58 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/kygamble.trackback 13 Sep 2008 Virginia court throws out spam law; one spammer gets away with it Email The 2004 criminal spam case against large-scale spammer Jeremy Jaynes, which I've covered in several previous blog entries, appears to have come to an ignominious end with the state supreme court throwing out the law under which he was convicted. The Virginia anti-spam law was one of the first in the country with criminal provisions, but it failed due to the way that First Amendment cases are treated differently from all other cases. See more ... posted at: 18:56 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/jaynesreverse.trackback 10 Aug 2008 ICANN Paints Themselves into a Corner ICANN ICANN recently commissioned a report from a domain auction company to see whether it would be a good idea to auction TLDs that have multiple applicants. Remarkably, the domain auctioneers came to the conclusion that auctions are a great idea, which they surely are for some people. But are they a good idea for ICANN? And if ICANN admits they can't evaluate competing applications on their merits, how can they keep the process from turning into another speculative land grab? See more ... posted at: 20:52 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/icannauction.trackback 30 Jul 2008 Why we'll never replace SMTP Email An acquaintance asked whether there's been any progress in the oft-rumored project to come up with a more secure replacement for SMTP. Answer: no See more ... posted at: 05:49 :: permanent link to this entry :: 5 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/stillsmtp.trackback 08 Jul 2008 Yes, you really have a zombie on your network Email A member of one of the mailing lists I read wrote in saying that one of his client's computers was on the CBL, a well known an extremely reliable list of zombie-controlled computers that send spam. He assumed it was due to bounce blowback, and was asking for copies of the messages that caused the listing. Even though the computer in question was a Windows box running Exchange that was also a NAT gateway to a local network, the Exchange logs didn't show anything, and he didn't believe the problem was zombie, He didn't get a lot of sympathy. Late in the conversation, Steven Champeon of hesketh.com, who heads the Enemieslist anti-spam project, sent a fine summary explaining what you do when you show up on the CBL. It's adapted here with his permission. See more ... posted at: 23:25 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/champ.trackback Why new TLDs don't matter ICANN Lost amid the furor about ICANN's rule change that may (or may not) lead to a flood of TLDs is the uncomfortable fact that almost without exception, the new TLDs created since 2000 have been utter failures. Other than perhaps .cat and .mobi, they've missed their estimates of the number of registrations by orders of magnitude, and they haven't gotten mindshare in the target community. So what went wrong? Users stopped caring about TLDs. See more ... posted at: 00:46 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/notld.trackback 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 :: 2 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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