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

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Home 01 Sep 2010 ARF is now an IETF standard Email When a user of a large mail system such as AOL, Yahoo, or Hotmail reports a message as junk or spam, one of the things the system does is to look at the source of the message and see if the source is one that has a feedback loop (FBL) agreement with the mail system. If so, it sends a copy of the message back to the source, so they can take appropriate action, for some version of appropriate. For several years, ARF, Abuse Reporting Format, has been the de-facto standard form that large mail systems use to exchange FBL reports about user mail complaints. Until now, the only documentation for ARF was a draft spec originally written Yakov Shafranovich in 2005, and occasionally updated originally by him and later by other people including myself. Earlier this year, the IETF chartered a working group called MARF which took that draft, brought the references up to date, stripped out a lot of options that seemed useful five years ago but in practice nobody ever used, and this week it was finally published as RFC 5965. See more ... posted at: 11:06 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/Email/arfstd.trackback 29 Aug 2010 Truth in spamming Email Here's the body of a phish purporting to tell me about a $386 refund from the Canada Revenue Agency. Even disregarding the signature that says Internal Revenue Service, check out that alt text and file name for the image. After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $386.00 Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it. <br /> <br /> A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons. For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline. <br /> <img height="340" alt="Fake CRA site" src="http://video.itworldcanada.com/ITBUimages/Jan19/fake_cra.jpg" width="450" /><br /> To access the form for your tax refund, please <U><a href="URL of phish site">click here</a></U> <br /> <br /> Regards, <br /> Internal Revenue Service posted at: 18:55 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/Email/truespam.trackback 09 Aug 2010 Google and Verizon offer a gift to spammers Email Earlier today, Google and Verizon offered a widely publicized "Proposal for an Open Internet." There's been extensive comment with lots of reasons not to like it, but one I haven't seen is that the proposal would make it much harder to filter so-called "mainsleaze" spam. See more ... posted at: 23:48 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/Email/googvz.trackback 01 Aug 2010 Even if Do-not-track were a good idea, could it ever work? In a recent article, I read about increasingly intrusive tracking of online users, which has lead to a proposal at the FTC FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said the system would be similar to the Do-Not-Call registry that enables consumers to shield their phone numbers from telemarketers. Maybe I'm dense, but even if this weren't a fundamentally bad idea for policy reasons, I don't see how it could work. See more ... posted at: 19:26 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/donottrack.trackback 27 Jul 2010 It's legal to jailbreak your iPhone, sort of Copyright Law Recent fairly breathless news coverage has said that the US government has said it's legal to jailbreak your iPhone. That's somewhat correct but the reality is, as usual, somewhat more complex. See more ... posted at: 22:58 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Trackback link is http://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/jailbreak.trackback

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