A federal court granted a request for attorney's fees (in the amount of $806,978.84) against prolific CAN-SPAM plaintiff Asis Internet. I thought things were looking good for Asis - whose lawsuits have generated substantial blog fodder - when it recently obtained a 2.5 million dollar default judgment in a spam case. more
This week, 17 individuals from about a dozen organizations in the DNS space met up in Manchester, NH at the Dyn Inc. headquarters for a first of its kind Summit for DNS industry insiders. Called "Inside Baseball," we wanted to bring people together from every spectrum of the DNS industry to inspire collaboration and innovation. more
The most recent episode of The Ask Mr. DNS Podcast offers up some disturbing corroborating evidence as to the extent of DNS filtering and outright blocking occurring in China. VeriSign's Matt Larson and InfoBlox's Cricket Liu, who co-host the geeky yet engaging and extremely informative show, held a roundtable discussion including technical experts from dynamic name service providers (better known as "managed DNS" services) DynDNS, TZO, No-IP, and DotQuad, as well as Google and Comcast. more
Let's start by stating the obvious: All business communications depend on IP addresses. Without an IP address, you simply can't communicate over the network. No IP address means no access to your email server, no access to your website, and no cell phone or VoIP access. So much for the new VoIP system installed last month. What does that mean to you? more
A recent study reveals a browser history detection method, largely dismissed as an issue with minimal impact, can in fact be used against a vast majority of Internet users with significant malicious potential. Researchers, Artur Janc and Lukasz Olejnik, analyzed real-world results obtained from 271,576 Internet users and have reported the results in a paper titled, "Feasibility and Real-World Implications of Web Browser History Detection". more
A recent decision from a federal district court addresses an issue I hadn't seen before: whether searching malware on the suspect's computer was outside the scope of the search warrant issued for that computer. It seems a narrow issue, and unfortunately the opinion issued in the case doesn't tell us a whole lot about what happened; but I thought the issue was worth writing about, if only to note that it arose. more
Complainant sells RV parts and accessories in the eastern part of Tennessee. Respondent, no stranger to UDRP proceedings, registers domain names and sets up pages with pay-per-click ads related to the subject of the words in the domain name. Though Complainant had been operating on the web since mid-2004, which is the same year it incorporated, it claimed that its predecessor in interest had been using the ADVENTURERV trademark since 1989. more
The deployment of Domain Security Extensions (DNSSEC) has crossed another milestone this month with the publication of DURZ (deliberately unvalidatable root zone) in all DNS root servers on 5 May 2010. While this change was virtually invisible to most Internet users, this event and the remaining testing that will occur over these next two months will dictate the ultimate success of DNSSEC deployment across the Internet. more
Pioneering cryptographer Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie has joined the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as Vice President for Information Security and Cryptography. Diffie will provide advice on general security matters related to ICANN's mandate, and to ICANN in the design, development and implementation of security methods for ICANN-managed networks. He will oversee the continuous improvement and 'best practices' process for information security and cryptography. more
Facebook sure is getting beaten up recently. There's even a crowd-funded initiative to replace it with something open, called Diaspora -- everyone on Facebook is talking about it. Yet it wasn't even two full years ago that Facebook was the darling of the ditherati. For a while it seemed as if nearly everything Facebook did was hailed as the future of messaging, perhaps the future of the Internet - or maybe the Internet didn't matter anymore, except for Facebook. more
The first Internet domains using the Cyrillic script were launched on May 13 after Russia was officially assigned the .?? (.rf, for "Russian Federation") domain by the global Internet governing body. Representatives of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) handed Russia its Cyrillic domain administration certificate at an Internet forum that kicked off in Moscow. more
In case you missed it, last Thursday, May 6, we saw a remarkable day on the stock markets. The day started off with some selling which went down neat and orderly. Suddenly, around 2:40 pm eastern time, the market started selling off rapidly taking huge hits in in the span of 30 minutes. It was an incredible ride and at one point, the Dow Jones average was off 1000 points for the day, the largest drop in history (though not the largest percentage drop). It was kind of like October of 1987. more
Do you know how big your web site will be in a year? You probably can guess, or even estimate how much traffic will hit your site in a year. You can also use millennia proven methods such as Crystal Balls, Animal Entrails or even Coffee Stains. But seriously, it is no easy task evaluating site growth in this volatile, ever changing economy. A key element in the scaling of any web site is the Application Delivery Controller (ADC). more
As Reddit recently learned it's not a great idea to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host mailservers. There are a number of reasons for this, most of them related to the reputation of mail coming from EC2 servers. When you're using machines in the cloud, changing IP addresses is as simple as initializing a new server. Spammers discovered this almost as soon as the EC2 cloud became public. more
Brian Krebs reporting on the Krebs on Security blog: "The FBI's top anti-cyber crime official today said the agency is planning a law enforcement action against so-called 'money mules,' individuals willingly or unwittingly roped into helping organized computer crooks launder money stolen through online banking fraud." more
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