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25 Dec 2008
In September the long strange Jeremy Jaynes spam case
took its most recent twist when the Virginia Supreme Court
reversed its previous
decision and threw out the state's anti-spam law on First
Amendment grounds.
The state is currently preparing one final appeal to the U.S.
Supreme Court, and interested parties are preparing their briefs.
I recently reread the decision, and was struck that the court's analysis
depends on a severe misunderstanding of the way that e-mail works.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/polianon.html
21 Dec 2008
ICANN's authority to manage top level of the DNS comes from a two-year
Joint Project Agreement (JPA) signed with the US Department of Commerce in 1997,
since extended seven times, most recently until September 2009.
Since the DoC can unilaterally cancel the JPA which would put ICANN out
of the DNS business, when DoC speaks, ICANN listens.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/docnewtld.html
19 Dec 2008
Domain tasting, as everyone probably knows by now, is the disreputable
practice of registering lots of domains, seeing how much traffic they
get, and then using the five day Add Grace Period (AGP) to refund the 99.9%
of them that aren't worth paying for. A related abuse is front
running, registrars speculatively grabbing domains that people inquire
about to prevent them from using a different registrar.
Back in April, the ICANN GNSO (the subgroup that deals with
generic TLDs, i.e., all but the two-letter country codes)
voted to set a new policy
to get rid of domain tasting.
And now, eight short months later, it's finally
about
to become ICANN policy.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/lasttaste.html
07 Dec 2008
Coreg, short for co-registration, is a popular but problematic method for
building mailing lists.
When you sign up for mail from someone, if there's a box asking if you'd
like Valuable Offers from Our Treasured Marketing Partners, that's coreg.
They sell your address to the TMPs who do, well, something with it.
In some cases coreg is a sideline, but there are companies that do nothing
but coreg, with online sweepstakes and other cheap trinkets as come-ons
to get people to sign up.
Coreg has earned a dreadful reputation.
The classic example is "Nadine",
an elderly woman who mistyped her address on a sweepstakes site, instead
typing an address at an ISP in Texas which collected all of the mail she
got and tracked its passage from one mailer to another.
He stopped counting last year at upwards of 90,000 messages,
everything from political opinion surveys to horse porn.
So a friend asked, is it possible to do coreg that doesn't stink?
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/coreg.html
Several proposals for Lightweight MTA Authentication Protocol (LMAP)
have been gathering attention of late.
They all define ways for a domain to specify that some particular IP
addresses are allowed to send mail for that domain, and others aren't.
LMAP has a variety of technical problems because there are surprisingly
many ways that mail can be sent from unexpected places.
Selective Sender, a simpler scheme that has been proposed before under
other names, is much simpler.
... read the mini-paper on-line
... mini-paper printable version
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/ss.html
The biggest buzz from the Paris ICANN meeting was that the board
accepted last fall's proposal for a streamlined process to add new TLDs.
A variety of
articles
in the mainstream press, many featuring inflammatory but poorly informed
quotes
(from people who probably
got a phone call saying "We go to press in five minutes, what do you think
about ICANN's plan to add a million new domains?") didn't help.
When can we expect the flood of TLDs?
Don't hold your breath.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/newtlds.html
I recently gave a talk about the way that domain registrations work.
To illustrate it I made a slide that illustrates the process.
Any questions?
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/simple.html
ICANN recently commissioned
a
report from a domain auction company to see whether it would be a good
idea to auction TLDs that have multiple applicants.
Remarkably, the domain auctioneers came to the conclusion that auctions
are a great idea, which they surely are for some people.
But are they a good idea for ICANN?
And if ICANN admits they can't evaluate competing
applications on their merits, how can they keep the process
from turning into another speculative land grab?
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/icannauction.html
Dell filed a suit in Florida in early October against a nest of domain
tasters in Miami, widely reported in the press last week.
The suit was just unsealed, after giving the court time to approve
a restraining order and serve it on the defendants.
The primary defendant is a Miami resident named Juan Vasquez, doing business
as several registrars called BelgiumDomains, CapitolDomains, and DomainDoorman,
as well as a whole bunch of tiny companies of unknown authenticity in the Bahamas,
various small Caribbean islands, Panama, Argentina, and even Indian Ocean
tax haven Mauritius.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/dellkite.html
On June 1st, ICANN publised a short
report
on what they plan to do about registry failure.
(It's not a failure plan, it's a plan to develop a plan.)
They invited me to comment on it, so here's what I said.
You can see
all the
comments on ICANN's web site; the only other substantial one is the
one from Chuck Gomes, although Ed Hasbrouck's questions about the secret
amendments to the .AERO registry are interesting, too.
Most of the report is pretty good. The first three sections give a good
overview of the software and data involved in running a registry. I
agree with the taxonomy of failure scenarios in section 5.
Section 4 tells us that voluntary transitions have consistently worked
well, so there is little reason to spend much time and effort worrying
about them or setting rules for them.
Sections 6 and 7 are less good. I realize that they're just guidelines
for future work, but they have some problematic implicit assumptions,
and do not, in my opinion, set out an adequate task list to prepare
for many likely failure scenarios.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/ICANN/regfail.html
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