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


2025
Months
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.


Subscribe to this blog


RSS feed


Home

12 Feb 2025

Spreadsheet Harder Security

In response to ongoing concerns about the nation's budget deficit, the Treasury department has issued a directive that when calculating deficits, the sum of 2 and 2 will now be 3.

Technical experts in the accounting industry claimed that the results of addition are set by the laws of mathematics and can't be changed. The Treasury pushed back strongly.

See more ...


  posted at: 10:32 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Security/harder.html

23 Nov 2024

Is Verisign a monopoly? Does it matter? ICANN
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jerry Nadler recently wrote a latter complaining that VeriSign overcharges for for .com domains due to its market power and sent it to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA.) While you can make a reasonable case that the claim is true, two more interesting questions are ``Why now?'' and ``Why bother?"

See more ...


  posted at: 20:10 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/vermonop.html

05 Sep 2024

Internet Archive loses their CDL appeal Copyright Law

The Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) lends out scans of physical books, ensuring that each scan is lent to one person at a time. Publishers sued nd the Archive lost thoroughly in April 2023. The Archive appealed the decision to the Second Circuit court in New York. As I said at the time, the appeal seemed like a long shot since that is the same court that said that Google Books was OK, mostly because it didn't provide full copies of the books.

Yesterday the court published its decision and unsurprisingly, the Archive still lost.

See more ...


  posted at: 04:33 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/archappeal.html

15 Apr 2024

Layers and Gateways, a historical view Internet

One of the major issues in building the Internet or any large network is internetworking. If you have two networks built and run by different entities, how do you connect them together? The Internet addressed this problem in two ways. One is by layering, so that consistent upper layers can hide differences in lower layers. (In my office I have devices using wired Ethernet, fiber, wifi, and 5G, all looking the same at the Internet level.) Another is gateways, connecting things togeher and translating the differences, which to some extent is what fiber modems and routers do.

But the Internet is hardly the first time these questions have arisen.

See more ...


  posted at: 17:58 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/gauge.html

23 Mar 2024

You don't need a license to look for spam Email

Jay Fink had an interesting little business. If you lived in California, you could give him access to your email account, he'd look through the spam folder for spam that appeared to violate the state anti-spam law, and give you a spreadsheet and a file of PDFs. You could then sue the spammers, and if you won, you'd give Fink part of the money as his fee.

Last July the state of California told him to get a Private Investigator license or close his business. Since the license requires 6,000 hours of training in fields having nothing to do with looking at spam (e.g., arson investigation), Fink closed his business and sued the state. In January, each side filed motions and last week the judge issued the first significant order in the case. Fink didn't entirely win, but pretty close.

See more ...


  posted at: 21:52 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/finkwin.html

Topics


My other sites

Who is this guy?

Airline ticket info

Taughannock Networks

Other blogs

CAUCE
Online Clairvoyance Platforms Sanctioned for GDPR Violations
78 days ago

A keen grasp of the obvious
Italian Apple Cake
884 days ago

Related sites

Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

Network Abuse Clearinghouse

My Mastodon feed



© 2005-2024 John R. Levine.
CAN SPAM address harvesting notice: the operator of this website will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by this website to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.