AOL and Goodmail: Two Steps Back for Email, Part II

There's been a lot of noise this week since the news broke about AOL and Goodmail, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to change the direction of the dialog a little bit. First, there are two main issues here, and I think it's healthy to separate them and address them separately. One issue is the merits of an email stamp system like the one Goodmail is proposing, relative to other methods of improving and ensuring email deliverability. The second issue -- and the one that got me started earlier this week - is the question of AOL making usage of Goodmail stamps a mandatory event, replacing its enhanced whitelist. more

WIPO Crowing Again About “Cybersquatting”

Most of us would be put off if a court issued a press release cheering the number of prisoners its judges had put behind bars or the number of tenants it had helped landlords to evict. That seems antithetical to the neutral adjudication of disputes, and ethical rules regularly decry such "appearance of bias." Yet WIPO seems to think it perfectly natural to crow about its arbitrators' favoritism for complainants against "cybersquatters" in UDRP proceedings. It issued a release that reads like a solicitation for trademark claimants' business, not a promotion of neutral arbitration services... more

What’s Wrong with Domain Names?

Despite the significant traffic that comes from typed-in domain names, the public harumphing and clucking about type-in traffic is climbing in volume as it becomes clear how much money is involved. Articles this week show that domain names, and the people who make money on them, are making some commentators uncomfortable. more

If It’s About to Break, Fix It!

The UN's WSIS Prepcomm in Geneva has ended on a divided note. The US Government's Ambassador Gross pre-announced war-cry "The United Nations will not be in charge of the Internet. Period." had been met by a nearly unanimous global response from nations for some sort of government control of the Internet on a multilateral basis. A raft of proposals to alter the current situation are on the table -- most of them fairly benign, but none supportive of the indefinite continuance of unilateral US control of the root zone authorisation. more

Time to Play Offense

The United States is under cyber-attack. An article in Time magazine titled "The Invasion of the Chinese Cyberspies" discusses a computer-network security official for Sandia National Laboratories who had been "tirelessly pursuing a group of suspected Chinese cyberspies all over the world." The article notes that the cyberespionage ring, known to US investigators as Titan Rain, has been "penetrating secure computer networks at the country's most sensitive military bases, defense contractors and aerospace companies." more

Maybe the IETF Won’t Publish SPF and Sender-ID as Experimental RFCs After All

Yesterday, the IESG, the group that approves RFCs for publication received an appeal from Julian Mehnle to not to publish the Sender-ID spec as an experimental RFC due to technical defects. IESG members' responses were sympathetic to his concerns, so I'd say that a Sender-ID RFC has hit a roadblock. The problem is simple: Although Sender-ID defines a new record type, called SPF 2.0, it also says that in the absence of a 2.0 record, it uses the older SPF1 record. Since SPF and Sender-ID can use the same records, if you publish an SPF record, you can't tell whether people are using it for SPF or Sender-ID. Ned Freed commented... more

Twenty Myths and Truths About IPv6 and the US IPv6 Transition

After hearing over 350 presentations on IPv6 from IPv6-related events in the US (seven of them), China, Spain, Japan, and Australia, and having had over 3,000 discussions about IPv6 with over a thousand well-informed people in the IPv6 community, I have come to the conclusion that all parties, particularly the press, have done a terrible job of informing people about the bigger picture of IPv6, over the last decade, and that we need to achieve a new consensus that doesn't include so much common wisdom that is simply mythical. There are many others in a position to do this exercise better than I can, and I invite them to make a better list than mine, which follows. more

An Infrastructure TLD: Avoiding the Side Effects of Today’s .Net

I've mentioned before that there is something special about the .net top level domain - in particular .net is the place where the legacy root DNS servers and most of the TLD servers are to be found. Thus, if .net were to wobble there is more than a strong chance that the DNS root and other TLDs would also begin to wobble. This kind of cross-dependency is something that A) is a risk to overall internet stability and B) is something that ICANN seems utterly unable to perceive. more

Customer Service is Law: The Panix Story

The NANOG list yesterday was the virtual equivalent of a nearby nocturnal car alarm: "panix.com has been hijacked!" (whoo-WEE, whoo-WEE); "those jerks at VeriSign!" (duhhhhh-WHEEP, duhhhh-WHEEP); "no one's home at Melbourne IT!" (HANK, HANK, HANK, HANK). Finally, on Monday morning in Australia, the always-competent and helpful Bruce Tonkin calmly fixed the situation. So the rest of us can get some sleep now. But as we nod off in the quietness, let's consider just exactly what happened here. more

The Accountable Net: Who Should Be Accountable?

Two weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission held a summit on e-mail authentication in Washington, DC; the community of people who handle bulk mail came together and agreed on standards and processes that should help reduce the proliferation of spoofed mail and fraudulent offers. This was a big, collective step in the right direction. But e-mail sender authentication alone won't solve the Net's fraud and phishing problems - nor will any single thing. It requires a web of accountability among a broad range of players. Yet this week there's another meeting, in Cape Town, South Africa, that could make even more of a difference...but it probably won't. more

Sender-ID Back from the Dead

With the closure of IETF's MARID group a month ago, many of us have left Microsoft's Sender-ID standard for the dead. After being rejected by the Apache Foundation and the Debian Project over licensing issues, and causing the closure of MARID for some of the same issues (in addition to already long running technical ones), some thought that Microsoft may have just buried it and gone on to better things like IETF's new MAILSIG group (in formation). But just like the ghost of Hamlet's father it just refuses to die and now it looks like it is coming back to life in a new reincarnation... more

Thoughts About “Protection Against BIND”

Imagine my surprise upon reading a BBC article which identified ISC BIND as the top security vulnerability to UNIX systems. At ISC, we have striven for a decade to repair BIND's reputation, and by all accounts we have made great progress. "What could this be about," I wondered, as I scanned the BBC article for more details. It turns out that BBC was merely parroting what it had been told by SANS. OK, let's see what SANS has to say... more

Languages in the Root: A TLD Launch Strategy Based on ISO 639

TLD registrations in the Internet's root-zone file currently are divided into two broad classifications: generic and country-code top-level domains. With respect to the latter classification, no new "strategy" is required to add further ccTLDs as a relatively well-working process is already in place to integrate the occasional new country-code top-level domain. With one of these two classifications under reasonably sound management, it is therefore perfectly understandable to see that the ICANN organization consequently views its obligation to "Define and implement a predictable strategy for selecting new TLDs" as a mandate "to begin the process of allocating and implementing new gTLDs"... the flaw in this conclusion, however, stems from the presumption that the Internet's taxonomy must necessarily contain only the two above-so-mentioned broad classifications. I am proposing a third TLD classification -- based on languages. more

.EU: Lucy’s Football?

Those of you familiar with the American comic series "Peanuts" by the late Charles Schultz may be familiar with the recurring theme of Lucy's football. Lucy holds a football on her toe for Charlie Brown to practice a field goal kick. Charlie Brown realizes that the last 25 times Lucy has held the ball for him to kick, she pulled the ball out of the way at the last minute, causing him to trip and fall. Charlie Brown knows full well that Lucy may not keep the ball in place for him to kick, yet his determination gets him running towards that unlikely opportunity each and every time. more

To Fight Domain Name Theft: Sex.com Gives Birth to a New Property Right

For those who are Star Wars fans, the following scene from the prequel, Attack of the Clones, will be easy to recall: a young and misinformed Jedi, known as Obi-waan Kenobi, opines about how an army of clones had been able to snatch a victory from imminent defeat. Yoda, a Jedi Master and virtual fountain of wisdom, immediately gushes forth an important correction: "Victory? Victory you say? Master Obi-waan, not victory." Yoda explains that winning a battle is not a victory, if the win merely signals that the war has just begun. Yoda's apparent perception seems particularly apt for the precedent setting federal court opinion involving the sex.com domain name. Notwithstanding that individual domain name registrants may seek comfort in the victory obtained from the Ninth Circuit's opinion in Kremen v. Cohen, that decision merely signals a beginning -- not an end -- to the controversy over the proper legal framework for resolving domain name theft.  more