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

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Home 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://jl.ly/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://jl.ly/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://jl.ly/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://jl.ly/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://jl.ly/Email/ralsky1.trackback

Topics Copyright Law - 15 Email - 179 ICANN - 81 Internet - 21 Money - 11 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs CAUCE The AARP Are Spamming Again 23 days ago Box of Meat RIP JD Falk 78 days ago A keen grasp of the obvious Tourtière around the world 29 days ago Related sites Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail IRTF Anti-Spam Research Group Network Abuse Clearinghouse

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