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

Topics Copyright Law - 9 Email - 136 ICANN - 69 Money - 8 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs Spam resource (Al Iverson) The Spam Diaries (Ed Falk) Word to the Wise (Laura Atkins) Related sites IRTF Anti-Spam Research Group Network Abuse Clearinghouse Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

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