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

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Home 13 Dec 2007 Defendants respond to Dell suit ICANN The defendants in Dell's domain tasting suit responded last Friday. It looks like a pretty feeble response to me. See more ... posted at: 14:33 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/dell2.trackback 02 Dec 2007 Dell's Anti-Tasting Suit ICANN Dell filed a suit in Florida in early October against a nest of domain tasters in Miami, widely reported in the press last week. The suit was just unsealed, after giving the court time to approve a restraining order and serve it on the defendants. The primary defendant is a Miami resident named Juan Vasquez, doing business as several registrars called BelgiumDomains, CapitolDomains, and DomainDoorman, as well as a whole bunch of tiny companies of unknown authenticity in the Bahamas, various small Caribbean islands, Panama, Argentina, and even Indian Ocean tax haven Mauritius. See more ... posted at: 16:23 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/dellkite.trackback 30 Nov 2007 Well, It's About Time ICANN 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. posted at: 23:30 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/ironmountain.trackback 24 Nov 2007 USA Today: Spam Is Bad Email 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 ... posted at: 19:38 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/usabad.trackback 19 Nov 2007 It's not spam if it looks sort of personal Email 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 ... posted at: 23:33 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/nicespam.trackback 23 Oct 2007 How big is the Storm botnet? Email 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 ... posted at: 23:39 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/storm.trackback 19 Oct 2007 Thank heavens for class action lawyers Email 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 ... posted at: 22:41 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/lemstuff.trackback 03 Oct 2007 Domain privacy podcast ICANN I recorded an interview at vtalkradio.com about the interminable WHOIS privacy debate. Here's a link to the recording and a transcript: with Expert John R. Levine Read Transcript Play Show posted at: 16:09 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/tvlint.trackback 17 Sep 2007 Catch me on Court TV this week Email 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 ... posted at: 11:29 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/spamtv.trackback 10 Sep 2007 Zango verdict is good news for spam filters and blacklists Email 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 ... posted at: 23:29 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/zango.trackback 03 Sep 2007 More on WHOIS privacy ICANN 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 ... posted at: 22:03 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/whoispriv2.trackback Spamhaus Appeal: They Win on Substance Email 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 ... posted at: 18:28 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/shappeal.trackback 28 Aug 2007 If WHOIS privacy is a good idea, why is it going nowhere? ICANN 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 ... posted at: 22:07 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/whoispriv.trackback 19 Aug 2007 Spamford Wallace gets sued yet again Email 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 ... posted at: 22:32 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/spamford.trackback 08 Aug 2007 America's Worst CAN-SPAM Suit Ends Email This post has been withdrawn due to objections from Virtumundo's lawyers. Other comments on this order: Mickey Chandler's Spam Suite Al Iverson's Spam Resource You can find a copy of the judge's order at: http://www.spamsuite.com/webfm_send/126 posted at: 00:06 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/gordonpays.trackback 27 Jul 2007 What's worth putting on the net 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 ... posted at: 10:43 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./afr.trackback 03 Jul 2007 Comments on ICANN's registry failure plans ICANN On June 1st, ICANN publised a short report on what they plan to do about registry failure. (It's not a failure plan, it's a plan to develop a plan.) They invited me to comment on it, so here's what I said. You can see all the comments on ICANN's web site; the only other substantial one is the one from Chuck Gomes, although Ed Hasbrouck's questions about the secret amendments to the .AERO registry are interesting, too. Most of the report is pretty good. The first three sections give a good overview of the software and data involved in running a registry. I agree with the taxonomy of failure scenarios in section 5. Section 4 tells us that voluntary transitions have consistently worked well, so there is little reason to spend much time and effort worrying about them or setting rules for them. Sections 6 and 7 are less good. I realize that they're just guidelines for future work, but they have some problematic implicit assumptions, and do not, in my opinion, set out an adequate task list to prepare for many likely failure scenarios. See more ... posted at: 00:08 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/regfail.trackback 23 Jun 2007 Squeegee domains ICANN 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 ... posted at: 16:32 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/squeegee.trackback 20 Jun 2007 CAN SPAM applies even within a single provider Email 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 ... posted at: 23:35 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/globespam.trackback 02 Jun 2007 .travel gets a last minute reprieve ICANN 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 ... posted at: 18:12 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/travelnotdead.trackback 29 May 2007 It's Godaddy for Registerfly's domains ICANN 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. posted at: 11:04 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/rfgodaddy.trackback The .travel registry is likely to go out of business ICANN 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 ... posted at: 00:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/travelcroak.trackback 25 May 2007 ICANN says Registerfly domains moving to another registrar ICANN 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.) posted at: 02:32 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/rfmove.trackback 09 May 2007 Stop! Don't Forward That E-mail! Copyright Law 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 ... posted at: 17:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Copyright_Law/snow.trackback 29 Apr 2007 Oklahoma Spammer Fighter Loses Even Worse Email 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. posted at: 23:01 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/mumma2.trackback Better not have any of these e-mail addresses Email 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@ posted at: 22:13 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/notaddrs.trackback 18 Apr 2007 ICANN to Registerfly: we really REALLY mean it this time ICANN 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. posted at: 17:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/rforelse.trackback 06 Apr 2007 Splitting the root -- it's too late ICANN One of the consistent chants we've always heard from ICANN is that there has to be a single DNS root, so everyone sees the same set of names on the net, a sentiment with which I agree. Unfortunately, I discovered at this week's ICANN meeting that due to ICANN's inaction, it's already too late. See more ... posted at: 08:41 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/rootsplit.trackback 28 Mar 2007 Registerfly victims are really stuck now ICANN 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. posted at: 13:33 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/rfuhoh.trackback 17 Mar 2007 ICANN terminates Registerfly. Now what? ICANN 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 ... posted at: 14:23 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/nowwhat.trackback 10 Mar 2007 So much for stability and security ICANN 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 ... posted at: 21:31 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/stablehuh.trackback 05 Mar 2007 Why I left the ICANN At Large Advisory Committee ICANN 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 ... posted at: 20:07 :: permanent link to this entry :: 4 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./ICANN/offalac.trackback 06 Feb 2007 Is it too hard to get e-mail delivered? Email 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 ... posted at: 11:52 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/toohard.trackback 05 Feb 2007 Postini sends out Paypal phishes Email 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 ... posted at: 14:16 :: permanent link to this entry :: 20 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/postini.trackback 15 Jan 2007 Spam is way up all over, and what are we doing about it? Email 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. posted at: 13:42 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://weblog.johnlevine.com./Email/tucspam.trackback

Topics Copyright Law - 8 Email - 120 ICANN - 56 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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