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

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Home 21 Nov 2011 A serious antitrust challenge to .XXX ICANN Manwin Licensing is a Luxembourg company that turns out to manage a large fraction of the mainstream porn available on the Internet. They run websites including youporn.com (widely agreed to be the most popular porn site on the Net) as well as Playboy's online and TV properties. This week they and Digital Playground, a producer of porn video, sued ICANN and the ICM registry, which runs .XXX, on anti-trust grounds. In theory, .XXX was authorized by ICANN following the same rules as all of the other sponsored TLDs such as the uncontroversial .COOP and .AERO. Do they have a case? See more ... posted at: 23:24 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/manwinsuit.html 19 Nov 2011 J D Falk Email J D Falk, one of the best known people in the e-mail industry, died this week from cancer. Despite his youth (20 years younger than me) he had worked for nearly every important e-mail company, and accomplished as much as anyone. I couldn't possibly write as fine a remembrance as the one that Neil Schwartzman did, so please read it here. posted at: 14:42 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/jdfalk.html 15 Nov 2011 Heavy hitters come out against new GTLDs ICANN In a press release earlier this week, a long list of large US businesses and trade associations announced the formation of the Coalition for Responsible Internet Domain Oversight or CRIDO. It has long been apparent to me that ICANN stopped listening to all of the reasons that a flood of new TLDs is a bad idea, mesmerized by a combination of lobbying by parties that stand to profit from them, and the prospect of a torrent of cash for ICANN itself. It is a complete waste of time to try to use ICANN's own processes to make them stop and reconsider or even slow down a little. Although ICANN fancies itself to be a global-scope bottom-up, multi-stakeholder, consensus-based (is that enough hyphens?) organization, in fact it is a California not-for-profit corporation subject to US law. So the key facts about CRIDO are that a) they're in the US, and b) they represent organizations with a great deal of money and a great deal to lose from new TLDs. CRIDO clearly exists to force ICANN to defend its new TLD plans in US courts, and I look forward to the discovery stage in which we will with any luck learn more about the conflicts of interest by ICANN board and staff. Will we, for example, find out whether former ICANN board chair Peter Dengate Thrush already had a job offer from domain consultants Minds+Machines when he voted to approve new TLDs? Stay tuned. posted at: 10:14 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/crido.html 09 Nov 2011 Greylisting still works Email Greylisting is a hoary technique for rejecting spam sent by botnets and other poorly written spamware. When a mail server receives an attempt to deliver mail from a hitherto unseen sending host IP address, it rejects the message with a "soft fail" error which tells the sender to try again later. Real mail software does try again, at which point you note that the host knows how to retry and you don't greylist mail from that IP again. The theory is that spamware doesn't retry, so you won't get that spam. I wrote a paper on it for the 2005 CEAS conference, and concluded that conservative greylisters worked well. We've now been using greylisting for close to a decade, and some people have argued that it's no longer useful, since the bad guys could easily fix their spamware to retry, or since bots are so cheap, they could just send everything twice. So does it still work? See more ... posted at: 11:11 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/grey11.html

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