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


2015
Months
Nov

Click the comments link on any story to see comments or add your own.


Subscribe to this blog


RSS feed


Home

19 Nov 2015

Another day, another two million dollars ICANN

ICANN just published the results of the auction for .HOTELS and .HOTEIS. The high bidder (I'm not sure "winner" really applies here) was Booking.com, who will use .HOTELS.

The $2.2M they paid, along with the prior results, notably the $25 million Google paid for .APP, brings the total in ICANN's auction pot to about $60.5 million.

See more ...


  posted at: 16:08 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/60mil.html

27 Oct 2015

What's ARC? Email

DMARC is an anti-phishing technique that AOL and Yahoo repurposed last year to help them deal with the consequences of spam to (and apparently from) addresses in stolen address books. Since DMARC cannot tell mail sent through complex paths like mailing lists from phishes, this had the unfortunate side effect of screwing up nearly every discussion list on the planet.

Last week the DMARC group published a proposal called ARC, for Authenticated Received Chain, that is intended to mitigate the damage. What is it, and how likely is it to work?

See more ...


  posted at: 23:43 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/arc1.html

11 Oct 2015

That was quick ICANN
ICANN recently placed a new page on their web site that
tracks gTLD registries that are shutting down. It already has an entry, .DOOSAN.

See more ...


  posted at: 12:22 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/nodoosan.html

10 Oct 2015

An alternative to CCWG Overreach ICANN
ICANN is in the midst (I wouldn't yet say the middle) of its transition from oversight by the US Department of Commerce to oversight by something else. A Cross Community Working Group on Accountability delivered
a long report in August that proposes a new oversight structure for ICANN. But it has the practical problem that the ICANN board really, really hates it. Having looked at it, I can't entirely blame them.

See more ...


  posted at: 01:03 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/blobplus.html

07 Sep 2015

Bitcoin Ponzi spam? Money

I just got this most peculiar spam, sent from mostly email provider Sendgrid. It sure looks like a Bitcoin Ponzi scheme to me.

See more ...


  posted at: 17:27 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/pantera.html

05 Sep 2015

Why is ICANN tax exempt? ICANN
ICANN, as we all know, is a California non-profit that is tax exempt in the US as a charity, under section 501(c)(3) of the US tax code. But it's a rather unusual charity. Typical charities support the arts, or education, or sports, or relief for the poor. ICANN doesn't do anything like that. So what's the basis for its tax exemption? We don't have to guess, it's all in the application they filed in 1999.

See more ...


  posted at: 12:47 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/501c3.html

04 Aug 2015

ICANN wins a very weak TLD lawsuit ICANN

Back in the 1990s as the Internet was starting to become visible to the world, several people had the bright idea of setting up their own top level domains and selling names in competition with what was then the monopoly registrar Network Solutions (NSI). For these new TLDs to be usable, either the TLD operators had to persuade people to use their root servers rather than the IANA servers, or else get their TLDs into the IANA root.

Attempts to get people to use other roots never were very successful, particularly after Eugene Kashpureff, the operator of alternate root AlterNIC made an ill-advised attempt to use DNS cache poisoning to hijack web traffic from the InterNIC website and pled guilty to wire fraud.

Some of the alternate root TLDs are still around, with operators who are under the impression that they have a right to have their TLDs in the IANA root. One of them is name.space.

See more ...


  posted at: 00:35 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/namespace.html

26 Jul 2015

Are apps a passing phase? Internet
At
NetHui last week one of the most interesting sessions was Is there an app for that?. The issue was that while apps can be easy to use, they are little walled gardens within an app store which is another level of walled garden.

See more ...


  posted at: 09:57 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/appfad.html

A visit to NetHui 2015 Internet

Last week I was in Auckland NZ for the Internet Society board meeting and the impressively successful InterCommunity 2015 online event. Immediately after that (in the same room, even) was NetHui 2015, an annual event about the Internet by and for New Zealanders.

NZ is an unusual place. It has the population of Louisiana spread out over an area the size of California, with about 1/3 of them in and near Auckland and the south island still very sparsely settled, with a population still small enough that it feels like everyone knows everyone else. It is as developed as any other first world country, but is a long way from other similarly developed countries. (Australia is 3 1/2 hours away by air.) It has close connections to many small Pacific islands, and has a significant number of Maori, who have gained considerable economic influence in recent decades.

See more ...


  posted at: 09:57 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/nethui.html

24 Jul 2015

Dot SUCKS: the ultimate vanity domain ICANN

When last we wrote, trademark lawyers had written an outraged letter to ICANN about the $2500 price to preregister trademark.sucks names, and ICANN, reliably panicking in the face of legal threats, wrote to the US Federal Trade Commission and Canadian Office of Consumer Affairs saying please tell us that's illegal so we can shut down this registry with whom we just signed a long-term contract. (The mysterious $1 surcharge turned out to be a weak attempt by ICANN to collect debts that affiliates of registry owner Momentous defaulted on long ago.)

Now they're back in the news, with a poorly researched Boston Globe article prompted by a NewYork.sucks billboard near Fenway Park. The FTC wrote back in May and the OCA wrote in June, the former expressing a total lack of sympathy at great length, the latter with a two paragraph form letter.

See more ...


  posted at: 15:32 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/ultvanity.html

16 Jun 2015

The cycle of e-mail security Email

Stepping back from the DMARC arguments, it occurs to me that there is a predictable cycle with every new e-mail security technology.

1. Invention and enthusiasm

Someone invents a new way to make e-mail more secure, call it SPF or DKIM or DMARC or (this month's mini-fiasco) PGP in DANE. Each scheme has a model of the way that mail works. For some subset of e-mail, the model works great, for other mail it works less great.

See more ...


  posted at: 14:08 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/cycle.html

10 Jun 2015

Rodney Joffe wins a well-deserved Mary Litynski award Internet

Every year M3AAWG gives an award for lifetime work in fighting abuse and making the Internet a better place. Yesterday at its Dublin meeting they awarded it to Rodney Joffe, who has been quietly working for over 20 years. I can't imagine anyone who deserves it more.

Since he wasn't able to attend in person, they made a video of an informal interview in which he recounts a lot of what he's done, with a few comments from his friends.

Also see Laura Atkins' story about how Rodney got her into the anti-abuse world.


  posted at: 05:47 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/rodney.html

29 May 2015

Another German court says Adblock can keep blocking ads Internet
Adblock Plus is a very popular little program that plugs into your web browser. As its name suggests, it keeps ads from appearing in your web browser. While users love it, advertisers and some webmasters hate it. Its authors, Eyeo, are a small German company that has been sued in German courts several times, and won every time. This week a Munich court ruled in its favor again.

See more ...


  posted at: 18:03 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/adblock.html

11 May 2015

The theory of e-mail reputation Email
The IETF is once again wrestling with e-mail authentication and reputation, this time in the context of
DMARC, particularly the long running issue of DMARC vs. mailing lists. We have a bunch of proposals with various techniques of signing messages, asking various parties who is authorized to send what. Some of them seem workable, but a lot aren't. I have found that a few basic rules that apply to any reputation scheme make it a lot easier to evaluate whether a proposal can work.

See more ...


  posted at: 00:06 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/theoryrep.html

14 Apr 2015

How much money is there in complaining? ICANN
Although I
don't have a lot of sympathy for the trademark lawyers' argument that trademark holders need to register .sucks domains cheaply before anyone else can, there is one point at the end of their letter that's worth a look.

See more ...


  posted at: 23:21 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/sucksbucks.html

13 Apr 2015

ICANN and a lot of other people outsmart themselves with .SUCKS ICANN
Good taste has never been a criterion in ICANN's new domains program, and domains including .fail and the remarkably vulgar .wtf have become part of the DNS with little comment. Now we have .sucks, which is intended to empower consumers, but does so in a way so clumsy that ICANN is
asking regulators in the U.S. and Canada for an excuse to shut it down.

See more ...


  posted at: 16:36 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/suckage.html

06 Mar 2015

Sign of the times: Apple in the Dow, at&t out
Bloomberg (and everyone else) are reporting that Apple has finally been added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. No surprise about that, it was inevitable once their stock split last year, but I was somewhat surprised to see that they kicked out at&t to make room for it.

See more ...


  posted at: 12:30 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/djaapl.html

05 Mar 2015

The DNS still isn't a directory ICANN
Back in the mid 1990s, before ICANN was invented, a lot of people assumed that the way you would find stuff on the Internet would be through the Domain Name System. It wasn't a ridiculous idea at the time. The most popular way to look for stuff was through manually managed directories like Yahoo's, but they couldn't keep up with the rapidly growing World Wide Web. Search engines had been around since 1994, but they were either underpowered and missed a lot of stuff, or else produced a blizzard of marginally relevant results. (Brin and Page wouldn't publish their billion dollar PageRank idea until 1998.) Moreover, web browsers had started to do domain guessing, so if you entered, say, pickles in your browser's address bar, it would take you to http://pickles.com.

See more ...


  posted at: 12:55 :: permanent link to this entry :: 6 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/notdir.html

27 Feb 2015

With .APP, ICANN's auction piggy bank just got even bigger ICANN
ICANN
reports that Google paid over $25 million for .APP in the February 25 domain auction. They were willing to bid $30M, but it's a second bid auction so that was just enough to beat out whoever the second highest bidder was. The auction proceeds piggy bank just nearly doubled from $34M to about $59M dollars, and ICANN still has no idea what to do with it. Since there are still a lot more domain conflicts yet to be resolved, some for likely high bid names like .SEARCH and .WEB, it still seems possible that the final haul could be as much as $100M.

See more ...


  posted at: 16:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/59mil.html

24 Jan 2015

A busy week for Bitcoin Money
The Silk Road trial got under way, with the defense trying to argue that defendant Ross Ulbricht wasn't really the Dread Pirate Roberts, but instead it was Mark Karpeles, of MtGox fame. That approach
didn't go so well, but it certainly provided a lot of amusement to reporters and spectators.

See more ...


  posted at: 20:06 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bcweek.html

13 Jan 2015

When DNSBLs go bad Email
I have often remarked that any fool can run a DNSBL and many fools do so. Since approximately nobody uses the incompetently run BLs, they don't matter. Unfortunately, using a DNSBL requires equally little expertise, which becomes a problem when an operator wants to shut down a list.

See more ...


  posted at: 23:47 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/deadbls.html

Topics


My other sites

Who is this guy?

Airline ticket info

Taughannock Networks

Other blogs

CAUCE
Spam trends update for Sep-Nov 2023
55 days ago

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

Related sites

Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

Network Abuse Clearinghouse

My Mastodon feed



© 2005-2020 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.