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29 Dec 2013
In the unlikely event that anyone doesn't
follow Paul Krugman's NY Times blog,
he posted
a
long excerpt from a note I sent him about Bitcoins.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/pkbit.html
23 Dec 2013
Everyone who's been in the e-mail biz long enough knows the term
FUSSP, Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem, as described
in a checklist from Vern
Schryver and a form
response that's been floating around the net for a decade.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/dmfussp.html
23 Nov 2013
Having bought some Bitcoins,
and then bought some coffee with them,
the question was what to do with the rest of them.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bitoops.html
17 Nov 2013
Today the long running Authors Guild vs. Google case ended for
all practical purposes.
Judge Denny Chin, who has been patiently overseeing the case for
nearly a decade, issued a short, clear
summary
judgement ruling in which he agreed that the Guild had no credible
arguments and granted Google's motion to dismiss.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/agloses.html
Having bought some Bitcoins,
I figured I should try to buy something with them.
Fortunately, the coffee shop in which the vending machine is located says you
can pay with them.
But I couldn't just walk over from the machine to the counter.
First I needed to figure out how to use a wallet.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bitcafe.html
10 Nov 2013
I was at
IETF 88 last week in Vancouver.
Probably not by coincidence, a coffee shop a few blocks away had just installed
a Bitcoin vending machine, and since I've said lots of rude things about
Bitcoins (which are still pet rocks only without the rocks) I figured I should
go try it out.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bitvend.html
28 Oct 2013
The Direct Marketing Organization (DMA) is the trade association
for companies that advertise by paper junk mail.
They were the driving force behind the weak opt-out CAN SPAM act, which
kept a much stronger California law from going into effect.
For a while about a decade ago it sponsored a useless do-not-spam database
which was supposed to solve the spam problem.
But yesterday, the DMA reminded us how well they really understand e-mail marketing.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/dmaspam.html
19 Oct 2013
A lot of people (including me) are pretty upset at revelations of
the breadth and scale of NSA spying on the Internet,
which has created a great deal of ill will toward the US
government?
Will this be a turning point in Internet Governance?
No, smoke will continue to be blown and nothing will happen.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/zimmerman.html
15 Oct 2013
Recent press reports say that Silk Road,
an online marketplace for illegal goods, was shut down by the FBI,
who seized the servers and
about 26,000 bitcoins
in multiple wallets.
They also apparently have all of the site's records of transactions among
about 4,000 sellers and 150,000 buyers.
If you're one of these buyers or sellers, now what?
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/btanon.html
19 Sep 2013
ICANN recently updated the
list
of reserved second level domain names.
Those are names that you won't be able to register in any of the 1500 or so new
domains they're planning to add.
There's rather a lot of them, currently 629.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/bipm.html
16 Sep 2013
Spam Arrest is a company that sells an anti-spam service.
They attempted to sue some spammers and, as has been
widely
reported, lost badly.
This case emphasizes three points that litigious antispammers
seem not to grasp:
- Under CAN SPAM, a lot of spam is legal.
- Judges hate plaintiffs who try to be too clever, and hate
sloppy preparation even more.
- Never, ever, file a spam suit in Seattle.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/spamarrest.html
12 Sep 2013
I've been having arguments about Network Neutrality with a lawyer.
My position is that you can't adequately regulate ISPs to be neutral, because
there's no agreement what "neutral" means in practice.
He points out that the courts aren't interested in technical details like what packets
are dropped, it's that all traffic has to be treated the same, and ISPs should just
figure out how to do that.
So I contemplated a city with Plumbing Neutrality with the simple
rule that all people must be treated the same
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/plumbingneutral.html
19 Aug 2013
Here is the entire WHOIS result for the domain 9rasa.net.
No names, no addresses, no phone numbers, just one gmail address.
I know the domain is in use, because an ESP (bulk mail provider) sent
in some updates saying they're a client.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/9rasa.html
12 Aug 2013
The IETF WEIRDS working group is defining a follow-on to WHOIS.
Since this is the IETF, it's working on the technical issues about
which it can deal with, not policy which is up to ICANN and the
country registries.
Somewhat to my surprise, the group is making steady progress. We've
agreed that the basic model is RESTful, with queries via http, and
responses as JSON data structures.
The protocol is named RDAP for Registration Data Access Protocol,
or maybe RESTful Data Access protocol.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/weirds13.html
22 Jul 2013
The other day I got an odd flyer in the mail,
sent from Singapore,
advertising a $1,000 six volume reference set about
wellbeing, which is apparently an academic subject these days.
(Click on the label to see the whole thing.)
This is a rather odd thing to arrive in my mailbox, since it is not a
topic in which I have ever shown the least bit of interest.
But a little squinting at the label reveals what happened.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/ependrl.html
20 Jul 2013
At its meeting in Durban, ICANN signed contracts with the applicants
for four new top level domains.
The new domains are شبكة, which means "web" in Arabic,
онлайн and сайт, which mean "online" and "site" in
Russian, and 游戏, which means "game" in Chinese.
They should give us an interesting hint about the future of the
new TLDs, because all four are utterly, totally, generic.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/newfour.html
18 Jul 2013
Arthur in L.A. asks:
Why do online accounts like the one at my alarm company keep adding extra security questions?
The choices always require either a subjective answer ("What's your
favorite movie?") or, in a two-person household, more than one answer ("In
what city did your parents meet?")
We all know that passwords are a terrible security mechanism. People
forget them, and bad guys are ever better at guessing them. So there are
basically three ways to authenticate a person: something you know, such as
a password, something you have, such as a driver's license, and something
you are, a biometric. Two-factor authentication schemes are much more
secure than single factor.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/cargocult.html
05 Jul 2013
You've probably heard about the Winklevoss twins, who got a great deal of money from
Facebook in a 2008 lawsuit.
Now they have bought up a vast number of bitcoins—reportedly about 1% of all of them—and presumably
want to make bug bucks in the bitcoin market, but to succeed they need some suckers to help them out.
They recently filed
a preliminary
prospectus with the SEC for the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust, which is intended to be an exchange traded
fund (ETF),
Felix Salmon
blogged
about the reasons that it would be a terrible investment if the SEC
allowed it which they probably won't,
but I haven't seen comments on the key fact that this ETF appears primarily a way for the Winklevii
to unload their bitcoins on a large pool of greater fools.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/winklebit.html
01 Jul 2013
The endless lawsuit by the Authors Guild (which purports
to represent authors, no longer including me), against
Google moved another small step toward completion today.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/noclass.html
18 Jun 2013
Scientific American is a well known respectable magazine that's been around forever.
So this is a normal renewal notice, right? Wrong. It's spam from a crooked subscription agent.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/scispam.html
11 Jun 2013
Last week a Utah court issued
a default judgement under CAN SPAM
in Zoobuh vs. Better Broadcasting et al.
I think the court's opinion is pretty good, even though some observers
such as very perceptive
Venkat
Balasubramani have reservations.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/zoobuh.html
10 Jun 2013
Bill Cole had some interesting comments on
my Liberty Reserve post which are worth
following up.
He noted that although all of the bitcoin transactions are in the public log,
the wallets aren't, so if you sell someone your wallet, that's an anonymous
transaction.
While that's quite true, it also breaks one of the fundamental points of bitcoin
which is that users don't have to trust each other.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/libcoin2.html
29 May 2013
The papers have been abuzz with the
shutdown of Liberty Reserve, an online payments system, due to
accusations of large scale money laundering via anonymous transactions.
Many people have noted similarities between LR and Bitcoin and wonder whether Bitcoin is next.
I doubt it, because with Bitcoin, nothing is anonymous.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/libcoin.html
11 May 2013
When I was a small boy and needed clothes, my mother would take me
to the Best's department store, where we'd pick something out, and then
go to pay for it.
The clerk would take the money and the slips, put them in a cylindrical
container, and send them off with a whoosh through a pneumatic tube to
somewhere upstairs.
After a delay of what seemed to me to be about a week and a half, our
change and receipt would whoosh back, and we could go.
Buying things with Bitcoin is a lot like that.
It's really, really slow to use, like ten minutes
to several hours per transaction.
While there are workarounds to speed it up, they all break some
of the aspects of Bitcoin that make it different from normal money.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bcslow.html
07 May 2013
Palau is a tiny country of about 20,000 people with excellent snorkeling in the South Pacific.
Like every country, it has a two-letter country domain .PW.
Back in 2004, Palau leased .PW to Encirca, who tried to brand
it as Personal Web, with approximately no success.
Late last year, DirectI took it over and rebranded it
as Professional Web.
They went through an ICANN-style sunrise and landrush process
and apparently got tens of thousands of defensive registrations.
About a month ago, they opened it up to everyone with very cheap $5 registrations,
and the spam began.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/palau.html
04 May 2013
One of the managers at .PW sent me a note saying that (paraphrased)
now that the world knows their customers are gushing spam, they're
finally starting to set up some of the anti-abuse measures that they
should have done in the first place.
But then I got my first response to an abuse report:
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/pwnope.html
22 Apr 2013
LinkedIn is probably the most successful social network other than Facebook.
They've carefully positioned themselves as the network for professionals.
I've been a LinkedIn member for a long time, and have 735 connections (all
people I actually know at least a little.)
Nonetheless, I am ever closer to closing my account and dumping the whole thing.
Why? Because they are phenomenally annoying.
Consider this message they just sent me:
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/lbjobs.html
15 Apr 2013
Last week I
blogged
about a white paper Verisign sent ICANN called
New gTLD Security and Stability Considerations
in which they listed a bunch of reasons that ICANN isn't
ready to roll out lots of new TLDs.
Among the reasons were that several of the services
the new GTLDs are required to use aren't available yet,
including the Emergency Back End Registry Operators (EBEROs),
who would take over the registry functions for a TLD whose
operator failed.
They were supposed to have been chosen in mid-2012.
By complete coincidence, yesterday
ICANN announced
that they had chosen the three Emergency Back End Registry Operators.
I can't wait to see what happens next week.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/ebero.html
01 Apr 2013
Culminating a year-long policy development process, ICANN today
launched its new Blocking Usage Review Panel (BURP).
The BURP provides long-needed oversight over services that
block Internet traffic.
"While everyone understands that national laws such as
the U.S. CAN SPAM define what traffic is or is not
elegible to block, legal processes can be slow and
cumbersome," said a spokeswoman.
"Since the Internet is global and traffic often
traverses multiple countries, the array of different
laws cause uncertainty."
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/ubrp.html
31 Mar 2013
Yesterday Verisign sent ICANN a most interesting white paper called
New gTLD Security and Stability Considerations.
They also filed
a copy
with the SEC as an 8-K, a document that their stockholders should know about,
It's worth reading the whole thing, but in short, their well-supported opinion is that the net
isn't ready for all the new TLDs, and even if they were, ICANN's processes or lack
thereof will cause other huge problems.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/vznewtld.html
01 Mar 2013
A friend and I were corresponding about the many otherwise legitimate companies
who leak addresses to spammers, such as the Economist and the IEEE.
He was surprised to note that his Dropbox address was now getting spam, I looked
at the logs and what do you know, starting this Tuesday I was too, I just hadn't
noticed because it was all so spammy it got caught by content filters. Tsk, tsk.
Looking at previous mail, I don't see any of it coming from an ESP, so it seems
to have been an internal leak. Double tsk, tsk.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/leak3.html
30 Jan 2013
Last week I
blogged about the way that lots
of otherwise legitimate companies leak e-mail addresses to spammers.
Here's a few more thoughts.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/moreleak.html
20 Jan 2013
Acronis is a company that sells backup software. They have been
around for over a decade, and have lots of big respectable customers.
The Wall Street Journal is the nation's leading business
newspaper.
Equifax is one of the big three national credit bureaus.
Shelfari is a book interest web site owned by Amazon.
The Economist is a globally influential newsweekly.
Airliners.net is a popular photosharing site for airplane
enthusiasts.
What do they have in common?
They all leaked my address to spammers, and none of them
have ever accepted any responsibility.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/leaky.html
07 Jan 2013
In the
previous
installments
we looked at software changes in mail servers, and in
the software that lets user mail programs pick up mail.
What has to change in the user mail programs?
Keeping in mind that I am far from a usability expert
(my ideal interface is a model 33 Teletype), there are
a few things that I can describe without going into the
details of exactly how they would look.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/i18neai3.html
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Having bought some Bitcoins,
and then bought some coffee with them,
the question was what to do with the rest of them.
Having bought some Bitcoins,
I figured I should try to buy something with them.
Fortunately, the coffee shop in which the vending machine is located says you
can pay with them.
But I couldn't just walk over from the machine to the counter.
First I needed to figure out how to use a wallet.
I was at
IETF 88 last week in Vancouver.
Probably not by coincidence, a coffee shop a few blocks away had just installed
a Bitcoin vending machine, and since I've said lots of rude things about
Bitcoins (which are still pet rocks only without the rocks) I figured I should
go try it out.
The Direct Marketing Organization (DMA) is the trade association
for companies that advertise by paper junk mail.
They were the driving force behind the weak opt-out CAN SPAM act, which
kept a much stronger California law from going into effect.
For a while about a decade ago it sponsored a useless do-not-spam database
which was supposed to solve the spam problem.
But yesterday, the DMA reminded us how well they really understand e-mail marketing.
