Users Don’t Like Forwarded Spam

A message on Dave Farber's Interesting People list complained that Comcast was blocking mail forwarded by DynDNS, a popular provider of DNS and related services for small-scale users... Actually, they're blocking it because a lot of it is spam. This is a problem that every mail forwarder and every mail system encounters; the only unusual thing here is that DynDNS is whining about it. It's yet another way that spammers have broken the mail for the rest of us.

Cluck, Cluck… ICANN and Contract Compliance Enforcement

I've always been a fan of co-ops. In New York, we shop at greenstar.coop and my wife banks at alternatives.coop, in the UK we shop at co-operative.coop. So when the .COOP domain opened, I wondered if I could get my own clever domain name, but found that chicken.coop was taken by a small producer co-op in the southern U.S. Drat.

Are You Getting Your News From Spam? My Mother Does

This is a story about my mother and Obama. My mother: "Have you heard about Obama? Really impressive guy." Me: "What about him?" My mother: "x, y and z." Me: "Where did you hear about this?" My mother: "I read email too, you are not the only one who is into technology." Luckily, my mother bases her opinion on more than just spam messages...

Peering into Fast Flux Botnet Activity

Together with Thorsten Holz, I recently published a paper on fast flux botnet behaviors, "As the Net Churns: Fast-Flux Botnet Observations," based on data we gathered in our ATLAS platform. Fast flux service networks utilize botnets to distribute the web servers to the infected PCs... One of the most well known fast flux botnets has been the Storm Worm botnet, which uses the zombies to spam, send out new enticements to infect users, and to host the malicious website which delivers the malcode.

Email Ad Network Isn’t Liable for Spam: Ferron v. Echostar

John Ferron is one of several "repeat" plaintiffs around the country suing over unsolicited email (perhaps not coincidentally, he's also an attorney). In this case, Ferron sued a variety of defendants associated with unsolicited email promoting dish satellite offerings for violations of Ohio's consumer protection law and the Electronic Mail Advertising Act (EMAA).

The Root of All Email

This week, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published a number of what they call "RFCs," which originally meant "Requests for Comment" - the standards documents which specify the technical underpinnings of the Internet. Two of these, numbered 5321> and 5322, replace earlier documents defining the very core of internet email. On the surface, each of these seem surprisingly simple... Yet without general industry-wide acceptance of (and compliance with) these standards, internet email simply would not exist.

Time for Self Reflection

In case you don't read any of what I have to say below, read this: I have dual citizenship. Along with my homeland citizenship, I am of the Internet, and see it as my personal duty to try and make the Internet safe. Atrivo (also known as Intercage), is a network known to host criminal activity for many years, is no more. Not being sarcastic for once, this is the time for some self reflection.

How Can ICANN Improve Institutional Confidence?

This week ICANN held a public consultation in Washington, D.C., where ICANN's President's Strategy Committee (PSC) solicited remarks from a packed audience of intellectual property (IP) lawyers, domain name registrars and other Internet stakeholders on how the organization can improve institutional confidence. No surprise, ICANN's decision to add new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to the Internet was on many participants' minds.

Skype Messes Up, Badly

The Open Net Initiative's Information Warfare Monitor project has published a stunning report by "Hacktivist" Nart Villeneuve titled: "Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China's TOM-Skype platform." It has been covered by both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal...

Broadband Data Improvement Act Passes Senate, House, A.K.A. Find Why U.S. is on Continuous Decline

In a major win for the public interest, the Broadband Data Improvement Act passed the Senate (on September 26th) and the House (on September 29th). Due to amendments, it now goes back to the Senate for final approval (should be pro-forma) before it lands on George Bush's desk. With the United States falling further and further behind a host of other countries, the question on many people's minds (including the folks over at Point-Topic who created this graphic) is, "Why is this happening?"