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

←2009→ Months Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Click the comments link on any story to see comments or add your own. RSS feed Join my blog network on Facebook Blog Networks

Home 02 Jul 2009 What are TLDs good for? ICANN Yesterday I said that the original motivations for adding new TLDs were to break Verisign's monopoly on .COM, and to use domain names as directories. Competitive registrars broke the monopoly more effectively than any new domains, and the new domains that tried to be directories have failed. So what could a new TLD do? See more ... posted at: 21:59 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/whoneeds2.trackback 01 Jul 2009 Who needs more TLDs? ICANN ICANN's Sydney meeting has come and gone, with the promised flood of new top-level domains claimed to be ever closer to reality. Does the world need more TLDs? Well, no. See more ... posted at: 19:58 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/whoneedstlds.trackback 05 Jun 2009 Appeals Court revives the CFIT anti-trust suit agaist Verisign ICANN Back in 2005 an organization called the Coalition for Internet Transparency (CFIT) burst upon the scene at the Vancouver ICANN meeting, and filed an anti-trust suit against Verisign for their monopoly control of the .COM registry and of the market in expiring .COM domains. They didn't do very well in the trial court, which granted Verisign's motion to dismiss the case. But yesterday the Ninth Circuit reversed the trial court and put the suit back on track. See more ... posted at: 18:47 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/cfit.trackback 04 Jun 2009 Fight phishing with branding Email Phishing, the theft of personal information by impersonating a trusted organization, is a big problem that's not going away. Most antiphishing techniques to date have attempted to recognize fake e-mail and fake web sites, but this hasn't been particularly effective. A more promising approach is to brand the real mail and real web sites. See more ... posted at: 20:07 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/phight.trackback 15 May 2009 Don't mess with the Manx ICANN I got a note from a college friend via Facebook yesterday, telling me about the clever 282.im domain. Gee, it looked just like Facebook, like, you know, a phish. Uh oh. See more ... posted at: 07:21 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/manx.trackback 06 May 2009 A "G12" to oversee ICANN? Not likely ICANN Viviane Redding, the Information Society and Media Commissioner for the EC posted a video blog this week noting that the JPA between ICANN and the US Department of Commerce ends this September. In it she proposes that ICANN be overseen by a "G-12 for Internet Governance" with 12 geographically balanced government representatives from around the world. That's such a non-starter that I'm baffled that she would even propose it. See more ... posted at: 17:33 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/redding.trackback 24 Apr 2009 Canadian government finally files an anti-spam law Email Press reports say that the Canadian government introduced an anti-spam bill in the House of Commons today. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but since it's reportedly based on the recommendations in the report from 2005 task force, of which I was a member, signs are encouraging. I'll write more once I've had a change to digest it. posted at: 17:27 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/c27a.trackback 31 Mar 2009 The Jaynes case is finally over Email Last September the Virginia Supreme Court issued a surprise ruling that reversed its previous decision and threw out the state's anti-spam law on First Amendment grounds. The Commonwealth made a last ditch appeal to the US Supreme Court, which I predicted they'd be unlikely to accept. I guessed right, they turned it down yesterday, meaning the case is finally over. Due to the peculiar facts and history of this case, the decision would be unlikely ever to affect anyone other than Jaynes, and he's still in jail on other charges, so in the big picture it's just a blip. I thought the VA legislature had already passed a revised law that fixed the first amendment problem, but apparently not, since the state Attorney General says he's drafting a new law for next year's session. Even that's not all that important, since state laws are tightly constrained by CAN SPAM, and can only make things that are already illegal under CAN SPAM more illegal. The most useful difference a state law can make is to leave out the CAN SPAM language about awarding costs which makes a losing CAN SPAM suit potentially very expensive to the plaintiff. posted at: 11:09 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/jayneslast.trackback 17 Mar 2009 How hard is it to deploy DKIM? Email It's coming up on two years since the DKIM standard was published. While we're seeing a certain amount of signed mail from Google, Paypal, and ESPs, there's still a long way to go. How hard is it to sign your mail with DKIM? See more ... posted at: 08:32 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/dkimdepl.trackback 22 Feb 2009 Does reading software turn a book into an audiobook? Copyright Law Amazon recently released a new version of their popular Kindle e-book device. One of the improvements is that it includes text-to-speech software that can read an e-book aloud in a robotic voice. The Authors Guild, the main trade association of book authors, immediately claimed infringes the author's copyright, by making an audiobook version of the book it's reading aloud. That's ridiculous. See more ... posted at: 12:32 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Copyright_Law/kindle2.trackback 03 Feb 2009 ICANN blows $4.6 million in the stock market ICANN If you visit the new dashboard on ICANN's web site, you see some nice bar charts, including one rather large negative number of $4,462,000. If you click the little arrow at the top of the Financial Performance chart, a footnote window pops open where the last sentence is: The large variance to budget is due to investment losses of $4.6 mil. Investment losses? Yup, ICANN's been speculating in the stock market, and has lost $4.6 million, or to put it in concrete terms, the 20 cent fee from 23 million domain registrations. See more ... posted at: 18:44 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/icannspec.trackback 24 Jan 2009 What is a Workout? Money A friend asked: Apparently the mortgage holders today are not the loan originators and therefore have little incentive to deal, or should I say workout, one-one with consumers. Can [someone] provide some comments on workout to help clarify the concept? Workouts are a normal part of bank lending, because foreclosing (or the equivalent) is very expensive, and the bank is often better off agreeing to a smaller or longer loan and actually getting paid. See more ... posted at: 13:40 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Money/workout.trackback 02 Jan 2009 Who pays for e-mail ? Email An acquaintance wondered why the people who run the systems that receive mail get to make all the rules about what gets delivered. After all, he noted: The sender pays for bandwidth and agrees to abide by the bandwidth provider's rules. See more ... posted at: 22:21 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com/Email/whopays.trackback

Topics Copyright Law - 9 Email - 128 ICANN - 63 Money - 1 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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