WHOIS Redux: Demand Privacy in Domain Name Registration

Doc's post and the impending comments deadline for the next iteration of ICANN's never-ending WHOIS saga finally pushed me to write up my thoughts on the latest iteration of ICANN debate. As Doc points out, much of the current debate is very inside baseball, tied up in acronyms atop bureaucratic layers. Small wonder then that ordinary domain name registrants and Internet users haven't commented much, while the fora are dominated by INTA members turning out responses to an "urgent request" to "let ICANN know that Whois is important to the brand owners I represent"... more

White Space in the Great White North

There is growing interest in the US for the FCC to look at White Space to enable more options for broadband wireless in rural areas. What is White Space? Last weekend, the Sunday NY Times published an article about wireless services that included this description: "In many areas, not all broadcast [television] channels are in use. The unused channels are "white spaces" of high-quality spectrum that could be made available to local Internet service providers. Unlike the much higher frequency of Wi-Fi, television broadcast frequencies can travel for miles and penetrate walls, providing a much broader range for Internet service." There is a coalition of eight technology companies driving the discussion in the US... more

How Big is the Storm Botnet?

The Storm worm has gotten a lot of press this year, with a lot of the coverage tending toward the apocalyptic. There's no question that it's one of the most successful pieces of malware to date, but just how successful is it? Last weekend, Brandon Enright of UC San Diego gave a informal talk at the Toorcon conference in which he reported on his analysis of the Storm botnet. According to his quite informative slides, Storm has evolved quite a lot over the past year... more

Are Domain Name Portfolios Actually Worth What They Are Touted to Be?

According to a recent article in Domain Name Wire, "shares of domain name company Tucows are down over 15% in early trading after announcing earnings." Elliot Noss, President and CEO of Tucows, says: "We delivered solid financial performance in the second quarter, which benefited from the sale of a block of 2,500 domain names from our portfolio." more

In Praise of OpenDNS and a Wii Factoid

If you are not already using OpenDNS on your home network I have one question for you. Why not? When it debuted, OpenDNS' main advantage was speed. It is a great deal faster than the DNS operated by most ISPs so, if you configure your border router/DHCP server to use OpenDNS name servers, the t'internet magically speeds up... On looking at the OpenDNS stats for my home network the other day, one item gave me cause to scratch my head a little. There was a non-trivial number of AAAA look-ups going on. In case you don't know (and I know you do), AAAA look-ups are IPv6 address look-ups... more

Best Approach for Appraising Domain Names

There are two types of domain name appraisers, designated here as type "1" and type "0," with the former being appraisers who rely on a scientific approach. A large number of domain owners use the services of type "0" -- the nonscientific -- or do the appraisal themselves. Approaches used by scientific appraisers include regression-type statistical modeling, discounted cash-flow analysis, and reliance on the Law of Large Numbers. This post looks at some of the typical erroneous arguments against taking a statistical approach and provides an example from law... more

A Packet of Lies

I've been reading the kerfuffle around Comcast's blocking of various random network protocols with interest. Whilst I remain convinced that blanket "network neutrality" legislation remains just a form of digital gripe water (cures colic for cybernauts), there's clearly a problem. As I previously alluded there's a definite consumer protection issue over what you buy when it says 'Internet' on the tin. So here's tuppence worth of additional input... more

Why a Net Neutrality Law is Not Enough

Once we decide that Network Neutrality is a good thing to (re)enshrine in law, then we need to ask how to do that effectively. One way would be to pass a law saying, "Thou shalt not discriminate." That's the current approach. But network operators will say that they must manage their network, and if, in the course of network management, they were to disadvantage some source, destination, application, service or content, they might be accused of violating the law. So any Network Neutrality law must have a Network Management Exception... more

Thank Heavens for Class Action Lawyers

If you had an e-mail address any time in the past six years, you've probably gotten spam for something called VigRX for Men, with fairly specific promises that it will make you, ah, manlier. I always wondered how many nitwits could fall for this kind of nonsense. Thanks to a recent class action settlement, we now know that there have been quite a lot of them. A class action suit filed in 2001 in Colorado settled recently, with some quite amazing info in the documents available at http://lemsettlement.com. LEM stands for Leading Edge Marketing, the name used by the defendants for several companies in the US, Canada, and the Bahamas. more

Do Spammers Change Their Tactics Based on Recipient Verification? Yes, They Do

Or, to be more precise, it sure looks like they do. I wrote on another post on a publicly available spam tool, and I mentioned that I came across a page that allowed people to verify whether or not an email address is actually live. The question naturally arises: do spammers clean up their email contact lists based upon whether or not the address is legitimate? Spammers would have an incentive to do this... Do we actually observe spammers changing their sending patterns? I believe that we have evidence that they do. more