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Multiple (Even Random or Garbled) Domain Names to Bypass Spam Filters Not a Violation

The California Supreme Court issued its opinion in Kleffman v. Vonage, a case certified from the Ninth Circuit. The California Supreme Court held that the transmission of "commercial e-mail advertisements from multiple domain names for the purpose of bypassing spam filters" does not violate California's spam statute. more

Compliance Overhaul a Start

ICANN is clearly changing with the new CEO making immediate changes to the organizational structure and Compliance announcing a number more effective tools and procedures at Sunday's At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) and Regional Leadership Meetings. It seems very ambitious and they will need to be because our year-long research, publicly distributed here for the first time, shows a complete breakdown in ICANN's Compliance functions on every level possible. more

Is Whois Data Accuracy Enough?

The Whois Task Force of the Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO) has been consulting with registrars over the past few months on the Whois accuracy issue for law enforcement. The Task Force has enumerated three primary areas of interest: accuracy, uniformity, and better searching capabilities. When the registrars met with the Task Force in Shanghai, a fourth area of interest was also brought forward and advocated by many of the registrars at the meeting as paramount to the other three areas. This fourth area of interest was privacy. more

Cyber-Terrorism Rising, Existing Cyber-Security Strategies Failing, What Are Decision Makers to Do?

While conventional cyber attacks are evolving at breakneck speed, the world is witnessing the rise of a new generation of political, ideological, religious, terror and destruction motivated "Poli-Cyber™" threats. These are attacks perpetrated or inspired by extremists' groups such as ISIS/Daesh, rogue states, national intelligence services and their proxies. They are breaching organizations and governments daily, and no one is immune. more

Report from UN Spam Meeting in Geneva

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), held an ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Countering Spam from 7 to 9 July 2004, in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting was focused around various topics including: Scope of the problem, Technical solutions, Consumer protection and awareness, Legislation and enforcement, and International cooperation. The following is a report by William J. Drake, Senior Associate International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development in Geneva. more

How Not to Get Your Mail Delivered

A small company in suburban Philadelphia called Holomaxx recently filed two lawsuits against large webmail providers, complaining that they weren't delivering mail from Holomaxx. The first suit is against Microsoft and Return Path, and the second suit is against Yahoo and Cisco/Ironport. Neither is going anywhere. more

“Internet Drivers License” - A Short History Lesson

The press, the blogosphere, CircleID - everybody has been discussing Craig Mundie's comment on the need for an "Internet Driver's License". Most of the reaction has been from privacy advocates fearing that this is simply another way to kill anonymity on the Internet. Oh well... that's the usual set of reactions. Now... the fun part is, a driver's license also shows that you have the competence to drive... more

DotSpam? Certain New gTLDs Rapidly Outpacing Legacy TLDs in Terms of Abuse

Would you like to hear about how to treat your psoriasis? Where to get a cheap oil change? How to flatten your belly? Achieve a stronger sexual life? Cheap toner? Annuities? Herpes? Bed bugs? Free energy? Varicose-Veins? Herpes? Saggy skin? Arthritis? Overactive bladder? Drug addiction? Herpes? No? Well, that's too bad, because that you are going to hear about it whether you like it or not. Many of the messages about these and other subjects are being carried to you via new gTLDs. more

Can Technology Can Spam?

It seems to be impossible to implement a law against spam - unsolicited bulk email - without making a hash of it. At best, anti-spam laws are ineffective; at worst, they cause more problems than spam itself. Can technology fare any better? ...But despite this flurry of initiatives, we are yet to see a definitive answer to the spam problem. An Anti-Spam Technical Alliance has been formed by Microsoft, America Online, Yahoo! and EarthLink, but these companies continue to proffer competing solutions. Meanwhile, the technology being deployed in the spam wars is causing collateral damage, in the form of 'false positives' - email that is incorrectly categorised as spam, and so never reaches its intended recipient. more

The Mainsleaze Blog

Mainsleaze is nerdy slang for spam sent by large, well-known, otherwise reputable organizations. Although the volume of mainsleaze is dwarfed by the volume of spam for fake drugs, account phishes, and Nigerian 419 fraud, it causes work for mail managers far out of proportion to its volume... The problem with mainsleaze is that it is generally mixed in with mail that the recipients asked for, and there's no way to tell the difference mechanically. more

MIT 2010 Spam Conference Starts Tomorrow…

In January we presented the glorious history of the MIT spam conference, today we present the schedule for the first day. Opening session will be from this author, Garth Buren with a topic entitled The Internet Doomsday Book, with details be released the same day as the presentation. Followed by Dr. Robert Bruen with a review of activities since the last MIT spam conference... more

Black Hats, White Hats, Crackers and Bots

One of the other web sites I subscribe to is Stratfor. It's a global intelligence website and doesn't really have much to do with spam. But I like politics so I read it. They have some articles which you can get for free, but the better stuff you have to pay for. About two weeks ago, they ran a three-part series on Cyberwarfare. The first article was the title of this post, which you can access here (requires registration). In the article they described different types of cybercriminals and not-so-criminals which they referred to under the umbrella as "hackers." more

CAUCE Director Neil Schwartzman Wins Prestigious MAAWG Award

CAUCE Executive Director Neil Schwartzman won the prestigious Mary Litynski award on June 08, 2011 for his contributions to Internet anti-abuse efforts, including the passage of Canada's Anti-Spam Law. more

An End to Spam Litigation Factories? (Gordon v. Virtumundo)

When CAN-SPAM was passed in 2003, it was fairly clear that Congress wasn't trying to enable broad private enforcement. Everyone knew that rabid anti-spammers would seize any new statutory right for a litigation frenzy... Although I personally think Congress would better served all of us by omitting all private enforcement rights in CAN-SPAM, unquestionably the private rights in CAN-SPAM are drafted narrowly to prevent their abuses. That hasn't stopped some zealous anti-spammers from testing the limits of CAN-SPAM's private enforcement remedies anyway. more

Spamtraps Are Overblown… by Senders

One of the fascinating parts of my job is seeing how different groups in email have radically disparate points of view. A current example is how much value senders put on spamtraps compared to ISPs and filtering companies. I understand why this is. In all too many cases, when a sender asks why they're mail is going to bulk or being blocked, the answer is "you're hitting spamtraps." The thing is, spamtraps are almost never the only reason mail is being blocked. more