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


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20 Nov 2018

DOHA and ZIPPO make forty five ICANN
Forty five what? Forty five abandoned top level domains. On November 7, ICANN received
a notice from the Communication Regulatory Authority of the State of Qatar that they are terminating the registration agreement for .DOHA. Two weeks before that, the Zadco company terminated .ZIPPO.

See more ...


  posted at: 11:34 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/dead45.html

22 Oct 2018

M3AAWG and APWG do the best survey yet on WHOIS redaction ICANN
M3AAWG, the Messaging, Malware, and Mobile, Anti-Abuse Working Group and APWG, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, surveyed their members about recent WHOIS changes. With over 300 results from security researchers, it's the broadest report yet on WHOIS use.

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  posted at: 07:18 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/m3apsurvey.html

05 Sep 2018

GDPR didn't affect spam? Not so fast. Internet

I have recently become aware of a blog post from Recorded Future that attempts to analyse the effects of the GDPR on online security. Unfortunately, it starts by asking an irrelevant question, and then goes on to use irrelevant metrics to come to a meaningless answer.

The premise of Recorded Future's article -- that spammers would send more spam and register more domains because GDPR came into effect -- tells us nothing useful about how GDPR affects anything. It's the wrong question, it's not a question most security people are concerned with, and it ignores how spam and spammers work.

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  posted at: 11:11 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/recorded-future.html

13 Aug 2018

How big is the domain business? ICANN
When you're standing close to ICANN, the domain business may seem pretty big, but when you stand farther away, not so much.

See more ...


  posted at: 11:00 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/dombiz.html

22 Jul 2018

When Public Laws Use Private Standards Copyright Law

Carl Malamud's Public.Resource.Org has for over 20 years been putting public documents online so they are easier to find and use. He's been quite successful in getting documents online that were formerly available only on paper, or only by paid subscription.

One project involves putting US laws online. In a lot of cases, laws refer to standards maintained by private organizations. For example, most state building codes require new construction to comply with the National Electrical Code published by the private National Fire Protection Association. There are thousands of standards used in laws around the US, and in many cases the only way to find out what the standard says, and hence what the law says, is to buy a copy from the publisher, or at best to go to a library and read a paper copy.

PRO has been scanning and publishing standards on the theory that in the US, laws are not copyrighted, so if a standard's part of the law, it's not copyrighted either. Unsurprisingly, the standards publishers disagreed.

See more ...


  posted at: 23:12 :: permanent link to this entry :: 3 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/publicstandard.html

21 May 2018

Schneier and Kerr on Encryption Workarounds Security
Bruce Schneier is a famous cryptography expert and Orin Kerr a famous cyberlaw professor. Together they've published a law journal article on
Encryption Workarounds. It's intended for lawyers so it's quite accessible to non-technical readers.

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  posted at: 15:27 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Security/encwork.html

20 May 2018

GDPR, ICANN, and Registrar WHOIS ICANN
On Friday I was on a surprisingly interesting session at
Rightscon 2018 in Toronto about GDPR and WHOIS. The panel consisted of Eleeza Agoopian from ICANN staff; Avri Doria who was recently appointed to the ICANN board; Elliot Noss who runs large registrar Tucows; Stephanie Perrin who has done a lot of privacy work for the Canadian government and as an ICANN volunteer, and me; Milt Mueller, who is now at Georgia Tech, moderated. There was a lot of overlap of roles on the panel. For example, I was there as a security researcher, but I've also resold Tucows' service for almost 20 years.

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  posted at: 22:42 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/reggdpr.html

06 May 2018

Our Woke Domain Registries ICANN

Hmmn.

$ whois -h whois.donuts.co women.forsale
Domain not found.
This premium domain is available for purchase. If you would like to make an offer, please contact platinums@donuts.email.
$ whois -h whois.donuts.co girls.forsale
Domain not found.
This premium domain is available for purchase. If you would like to make an offer, please contact platinums@donuts.email.
$ whois -h whois.donuts.co teens.forsale
Domain not found.
This premium domain is available for purchase. If you would like to make an offer, please contact platinums@donuts.email.

  posted at: 17:10 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/wokereg.html

05 May 2018

Blockchain's two-flavored appeal Money

A recent story in Medium describes yet again quite well why blockchains don't solve any real problems: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future.

So what is their irresistable appeal?

Bitcoins remind me of a story from the late chair of the Princeton University astronomy department. In 1950 Immanuel Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision, a controversial best selling book that claimed that 3500 years ago Venus and Mars swooped near the earth, causing catastrophes that were passed down in religions and mythologies.

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  posted at: 23:00 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bccrud.html

03 May 2018

Choosing Internationalized E-mail addresses Email

Recently I've been working on EAI mail, looking at what software is available (Gmail and Outlook/Hotmail both handle it now) and what work remains to be done. A surprisingly tricky part is assigning EAI addresses to users.

In traditional ASCII mail, the local part of the address, what goes before the @ sign, can be any printable ASCII characters. Although an address like %i()/;~f@examp1e.com is valid, and mail systems will handle it, users don't want addresses like that. A good address is one that is easy to remember, easy to tell someone over the phone, and easy to type.

Mail systems all give senders some help when interpreting addresses. If an address is Bob@example, they'll accept bob@ or BOB@. If the address is joe.smith@, they'll accept Joe.Smith@ and often variations in punctuation like joesmith@ without the dots.

The flip side of this is that you don't assign different addresses that are too similar. While it is techincally possible that BOB@ and bob@ could deliver to different mailboxes, nobody does that. Similarly, nobody makes joesmith@ and joe.smith@ different. (They may not both work, but if they do, they're the same mailbox.)

The domain (the part of the address after the @ sign) has to follow the DNS rules, which don't allow any fuzzy matching other than ASCII upper and lower case.

How does all this extend into EAI mail?

See more ...


  posted at: 14:24 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/eaiaddr.html

15 Mar 2018

Paypals vs. Bitcoins Money
I have learned about a dandy new cryptocurrency called Paypals. How does it stack up against Bitcoin and other currencies?

See more ...


  posted at: 14:00 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/bitpal.html

12 Feb 2018

Why is it so hard to run a Bitcoin exchange? Internet
One of the chronic features of the Bitcoin landscape is that Bitcoin exchanges screw up and fail, starting with Mt. Gox. There's nothing conceptually very hard about running an exchange, so what's the problem?

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  posted at: 22:55 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/bithard.html

01 Feb 2018

How many people can you pay with bitcoins? Internet

An aquaintance wrote:

I think it's an open question as to whether that belief can sustain a meaningfully high Bitcoin price. There has never been a currency or asset that has been so easily tradable among every person in the world (even among anonymous people). ...

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  posted at: 13:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/bitsome.html

28 Jan 2018

How do you turn a typesetting language into an identifier system? (Not easily) Internet

Unicode's goal, which it meets quite well, is that whatever text you want to represent in whatever language, dead or alive, Unicode can represesnt the characters or symbols it uses. Any computer with a set of Unicode type faces and suitable layout software can display that text. In effect, Unicode is primarily a typesetting language.

Over in the domain name system, we also use Unicode to represent non-ASCII identifiers. That turns out to be a problem, because an identifier needs a unique form, something that doesn't matter for typesetting.

See more ...


  posted at: 22:59 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/uniid.html

22 Jan 2018

What is Amazon Go really about? Money
Today's papers are full of puffy pieces about the wonderous new Amazon Go (pronounced, I hope, Ama-Zongo) in which you tap your phone as you enter and cameras watch what you do, figure out what you've put in your bag, and charge you for it when you leave. There's certainly no check-out lanes and few visible staff but the whole thing smells to me like a gimmick.

See more ...


  posted at: 15:46 :: permanent link to this entry :: 1 comments
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Money/amazongo.html

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