|
Click the comments link on any
story to see comments or add your own.
Subscribe to this blog
RSS feed
|
Home
20 Dec 2016
I have groused at length
about the damage that anti-phishing technique DMARC does to e-mail discussion lists.
For at least two years list managers and list software developers have been trying to
figure out what to do about it.
The group that brought us DMARC is working on an un-DMARC-ing scheme
called ARC, which will likely help
somewhat, but ARC isn't ready yet, and due to ARC's complexity it's likely
that there will be many medium or small mail systems that enforce DMARC
and can't or won't use ARC.
The Internet Engineering Task Force, which writes technical standards for
the Internet, works primarily through discussion lists, and the pain from
DMARC has gotten to the point where we may do something about it.
So we've been doing some experiments.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/wrapme.html
30 Sep 2016
Unsubscribing from mailing lists is hard.
How many times have you seen a message "please remove me from this list,"
followed by two or three more pointing out that the instructions are in
the footer of every message,
followed by three or four more asking people to not send their replies to
the whole list (all sent to the whole list, of course,)
perhaps with a final message by the list manager saying she's dealt with it?
For marketing broadcast lists, it's even worse because there's no list to write to.
Messages are supposed to have an unsubscribe link (required by law in most places)
which usually works except when it doesn't, or it leads to a web page making
incomprehensible demands ("click here unless you want not to be removed
only from this sender's mail") so for a lot of users it's easier
just to click the junk button until the messages go away.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/oneclick.html
20 Sep 2016
A few days ago I was startled to get an anti-spam challenge from an
Earthlink user, to whom I had not written.
Challenges are a WKBI (well known bad idea) which I thought had been
stamped out, but apparently not.
The plan of challenges seems simple enough; they demand that the
sender does something to prove he's human that a spammer is
unlikely to do.
The simplest ones just ask you to respond to the challenge, the
worse ones like this one have a variety of complicated hoops they
expect you to jump through.
What this does, of course, is to outsource the management of your
mailbox to people who probably do not share your interests.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/badchallenge.html
05 Sep 2016
A friend (really) asked for advice about what to say about mail authorization
to people setting up new mail systems, particularly in parts of the world where
networks are relatively new and staff less experienced.
Phish targets
The first question is are you a phish target?
There's two parts to this question.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/authcheat.html
31 Jul 2016
The latest ICANN domain auction brought the auction proceeds
piggy bank to about $240 million.
The application fees for the new gTLD round were $361 million
of which, at the
end
of March, they'd spent $227 million,
and their very conservative estimate is that at
the end of the process they'll have spent $289 million.
If you add the numbers from the private auctions to the ones for
the ICANN auctions, it's as much or more than the application costs.
These suggest a much better way to pay for the next round.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/cheapauction.html
29 Jul 2016
Domain Name Wire is reporting
that the the winning bid in the auction for .WEB was $135,000,000.
Assuming they're right (which they probably are,) that brings the total
web auction piggy bank to over $230 million, more than twice what it
was two days ago.
At the Helsinki meeting there was already a lot of interest in the process to
decide how the money is distributed, but now there'll be twice as much.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/holypetunias.html
23 Jul 2016
This week ICANN will auction off .WEB or .WEBS.
There are seven live applications for .WEB and one for .WEBS.
The string contention process decided that the two names are so similar that they'll
only assign one of them, so all eight applications are in one auction.
(The same string contention process decided that .ACCOUNTANT and .ACCOUNTANTS are both
allowed, as are .AUTO and .AUTOS and .BM and .BMS and .COUPON and .COUPONS and .FAN and
.FANS and .GIFT and .GIFTS and .LOAN and .LOANS and .ML and .MLS and .NEW and .NEWS and
.REVIEW and .REVIEWS and .SA and .SAS and .SB and .SBS and .TV and .TVS and .WATCH
and .WATCHES and .WORK and .WORKS, but I guess the Web is special.)
There are some deep pocketed bidders in this round including Google, Donuts, web.com which owns
Network Solutions and a lot of other web properties, and Schlund which owns the largest
web hoster 1&1.
Google paid $25 million for .APP and GMO paid $41 million for .SHOP.
It's hard to see how .WEB would be worth less than either of those unless bidder
fatigue sets in.
So stay tuned and we'll shortly know how much more will be added to the $104 million
already in the Giant Pile of Auction Money.
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/webauc.html
10 Jun 2016
A guy I know passed along this e-mail sent to one of his customers.
They assumed it was a phish, since they didn't recognize the domain
name in the link, but couldn't figure out what the
goal of the phish was.
They even checked the list of ICANN registrars, and nope, registrar.eu wasn't on the list.
Nonetheless, this mail was real, and if the recipient had ignored it, his domain would
have been suspended. What's going on?
Dear domain name owner,
*Your action is required to prevent domain suspension*
This verification e-mail is triggered because your e-mail address is used in the owner contact of
a domain registration and this e-mail address was not verified before or we have received
information that this e-mail address might not be in use anymore.
As we did not receive affirmative response on our last e-mail, we send you a final reminder.
Please note that your domain name(s) may be suspended if the e-mail address is not confirmed. The
domain name registration policy of ICANN requires that a valid and working e-mail address is
provided with each domain registration.
To verify this requirement, we kindly request you to confirm the accuracy of your e-mail address
by clicking the link below:
http://icann-verification.registrar.eu/?email=xxx@yyy&authCode=123456
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/regmail.html
02 May 2016
One of the oft-made claims about Bitcoin and its blockchain
transaction ledger is that they make transactions really
cheap, so you can pay someone anywhere in the world for
free, or close to it. But when you look closer, is that
really true? Not by a long shot.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bitexpensive.html
02 Mar 2016
The US government is demanding Apple unlock iPhones in about a dozen
cases beside the San Bernardino one.
In a strikingly similar case, Judge James Orenstein
in Brooklyn rejected the government's request for three separate reasons.
In the decision
the judge refers several times to the San Bernardino case, and it
is clear he expects this decision to be an important precedent for that one.
In June 2014 the government arrested Jun Feng in Queens NY on drug charges and
confiscated his iPhone 5S.
Over a year later, in July 2015 got a warrant to search the phone and found that
it was locked. In October they filed a proposed order under the 1789 All Writs
Act (AWA) to have Apple unlock the phone.
It appears that Apple initially cooperated and suggested some of the language in
the proposed order, but if so they changed their minds and opposed it.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/nyapple.html
28 Jan 2016
ICANN has now published the
results
of the auction for .SHOP, an eye-popping $41,501,000.
This pushes the ICANN's auction pot over $100 million. That's a lot of money.
There are eighteen more name contention sets that are on hold for various reasons,
of which a few such as .WEB look likely to generate even more money once the hold
issues are resolved.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/100mil.html
02 Jan 2016
The Domain Name System is now over 25 years old.
Since the publication of RFCs 1034 and 1035 in 1987, there have been over 100
RFC documents published that extend and clarify the original DNS specs.
Although the basic design of the DNS hasn't changed, its definition is now
extremely complex, enough so that it's a challenging task to tell whether
a DNS package correctly implements the specs.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/dnsconform.html
|
Topics
My other sites
Who is this guy?
Airline ticket info
Taughannock Networks
Other blogs
CAUCE
It turns out you don’t need a license to hunt for spam.
34 days ago
A keen grasp of the obvious
Italian Apple Cake
592 days ago
Related sites
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
Network Abuse Clearinghouse
My
Mastodon feed
|
