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  • Member Since: Jun 14, 2004
  • Total Comments: 78
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We Hate Spam Except, Of Course, When It's Inconvenient to Do So

Comment posted Jul 01, 2005 7:56 am PDT — by John Levine
Paul is correct that there is a minor error in my note. It should have said the IP “where Textileshop collects their orders” rather than “where Textileshop’s web site lives.” Re their moving, since Paul would evidently rather complain than…
Comment posted Jun 28, 2005 7:59 am PDT — by John Levine
Right. So why aren’t you pushing your buddies at Yahoo to get rid of high profile, well documented spammers? They need only enforce their AUP.
Comment posted Jun 21, 2005 6:12 pm PDT — by John Levine
See the comments on the original copy of this story at http://weblog.taugh.com/ and follow the link to Spamhaus in the story itself for more info on what Spamhaus blocked. Since textileshop has been hopping around, it’s the address of the…
 

Abusive Anti-Anti-Spam Scheme a Dreadful Strategy

Comment posted Sep 10, 2005 1:28 pm PDT — by John Levine
Now I’m completely confused by Comrade Lee’s comments.  There is a private right of action in the junk fax law, and it works.  There is no PROA in a CAN SPAM and it doesn’t work. I agree that we haven’t…
Comment posted Sep 01, 2005 8:15 pm PDT — by John Levine
Re Mr Craig’s question, the quote I cited from BS’s web site seems pretty clear to me. Despite all the smoke and mirrors, it’s basically intended as a DOS attack. I haven’t seen any noticable change in the amount of…
Comment posted Jul 30, 2005 1:21 am PDT — by John Levine
The real answer is that an illegal DOS is whatever a court says it is, but having looked at a lot of computer crime laws, I’d have to say that intention counts for a lot.  As I noted in my…
Comment posted Jul 27, 2005 2:16 am PDT — by John Levine
I think Tim is asking about my blog at http://weblog.taugh.com from which this article is mirrored. As the comment form there says: Note: all comments require an email address so we can send a confirmation to verify that it was…
 

SPF Loses Mindshare

Comment posted Aug 03, 2005 4:51 am PDT — by John Levine
Confidential to Wayne: yes, we know who was on the committee at MAAWG who wrote the whitepaper. They’re writing about their actual experience testing it at large ISPs, at least one of which hired Meng to help them do it,…
Comment posted Aug 03, 2005 4:45 am PDT — by John Levine
Nobody’s waiting for a perfect solution; we’re waiting for a solution that doesn’t cause more problems than it solves.  SPF and Sender-ID have been grossly oversold.  If you already have a list of domains from which you know you want…
 

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

Comment posted Aug 26, 2005 6:05 pm PDT — by John Levine
I thank William for confirming all of my important points. In MARID they did invent a 2.0 record, but at the same time they decided to fall back to SPF1. As far as Microsoft saying no, a headline saying “Microsoft…
Comment posted Aug 26, 2005 2:45 am PDT — by John Levine
My, aren’t we touchy.  I expect that if Wayne had numbers that supported his arguments, he would tell us what they are, so I’ll let people draw their own conclusions.
 

Verisign Gets .COM Forever, But ICANN Gets a Lobbyist

Comment posted Oct 27, 2005 8:37 pm PDT — by John Levine
Yes indeed, they are recurring annual fees. You can prepay up to 10 years at the current rate. As others have pointed out, Tucows informally offered to run .COM with a $2 fee, and Afilias in the .NET tender offered…
Comment posted Oct 25, 2005 9:17 pm PDT — by John Levine
Oh, look at that. Section 7.2(e) keeps the existing Variable Registry-Level Fee at 15 cents plus a per registrar fee which doubtless adds up to the 25 cents. So you’re right, ICANN will be tripling the fee to 75 cents…
 

ICANN Gets the Root Zone, Too

Comment posted Oct 30, 2005 2:28 am PST — by John Levine
I don’t know why the myth of “A” being special continues to be perpetrated, either, but I also don’t understand why you’re bringing it up. The question at issue is who creates the root zone, not how it’s distributed.  When…
 

Welcome to the Root, .MOBI

Comment posted Oct 29, 2005 5:03 am PDT — by John Levine
.MOBI is a most interesting experiment.  Once the big players get established, they plan to throw it open to individual registrants. There’s a whole bunch of rules about what’s supposed to go in .MOBI, mostly requiring that it work from…
 

DMA Requires Email Authentication, Do We Care?

Comment posted Nov 09, 2005 12:46 am PST — by John Levine
It’s true, the DMA’s membership list is secret, but it’s not hard to get a pretty good idea who their members are. Membership is expensive enough that shadowy little companies are extremely unlikely to join, even if there were some…
 

Splitting the Root: It's Too Late

Comment posted Jan 04, 2006 11:28 pm PST — by John Levine
Ask 100 Internet users if they were aware that the same exact domain name brings back multiple responses, based on where they are physically located. Care to guess how many are aware of that? Oh, you mean like when I…
Comment posted Jan 04, 2006 8:55 pm PST — by John Levine
Disclosure is fine, but if you rounded up a hundred typical Internet users from Egypt and China and asked them if they’d rather use the local root or the ICANN/IANA root, the response from at least 98 of them would…
Comment posted Dec 04, 2005 1:20 am PST — by John Levine
I don’t understand this comment at all. If I had noted that ICANN’s IDN dithering had led to a split root in a cheery and upbeat way, what difference would that make?  If Afilias has added IDNs to .INFO, that’s…
 

Time to Renew .coop, .museum, and .aero ICANN

Comment posted Jan 02, 2006 8:09 pm PST — by John Levine
If you say there are 10K registrations, I believe you since you presumably registered most of them. So I pointed my browser at http://www.expedia.travel, and I got an Encirca page, not Expedia. I tried http://www.orbitz.travel and got the same Encirca…
Comment posted Jan 01, 2006 11:14 pm PST — by John Levine
Since you can’t buy a .travel domain until tomorrow, doesn’t it seem a little bit premature to claim “tens of thousands” sold?  There are definitely tens of thousands of geographic place names reserved, but that’s meaningless, since there’s no reason…
 

The Politics of Email Authentication, 2006 Edition

Comment posted Jan 18, 2006 8:00 pm PST — by John Levine
There’s two somewhat separate reasons not to waste any effort on SPF. One is that it’s considerably harder to get SPF right, even for simple configurations, than it looks.  I was talking to someone at Godaddy a while ago that…
Comment posted Jan 06, 2006 7:39 pm PST — by John Levine
DKIM provides multiple “selectors” per domain for multiple keys.  If the .name registry wanted to give each user his own selector for mail signing, they could do that, allowing them to cancel the selectors for people who misused them. If…
 

Sponsored TLD Unnecessary? Ron Andruff Responds to Forrester Research

Comment posted Feb 24, 2006 12:06 am PST — by John Levine
I have nothing against sTLDs, being one of the tiny band of suckers who actually uses a .AERO domain, but I can’t see arguments that domains will become successful merely by becoming older as anything other than wishful thinking on…
Comment posted Feb 23, 2006 9:29 pm PST — by John Levine
Aha! Failure is not an option because ... we’ll define whatever happens to be success! Why didn’t I think of that? The sTLDs from the previous round are all failures not just because they all missed their most pessimistic size…
Comment posted Feb 23, 2006 7:07 pm PST — by John Levine
Gee, I guess we should feel encouraged that .TRAVEL has the same problems as other sTLDs. It seems to me that .MOBI has some chance of success, since they have a somewhat captive audience in all the mobile phone users. …
 

In Bad Taste

Comment posted May 11, 2006 5:12 pm PDT — by John Levine
Bob Parsons of Godaddy suggested making the 25 cent ICANN fee non-refundable, which would do the same thing and avoid giving the registries an incentive to encourage tasting churn. I don’t see how registries can impose a restocking fee without…
Comment posted May 04, 2006 12:54 am PDT — by John Levine
Uh, no, the registries didn’t create it.  Surely you read the second and seventh paragraphs of the article you’re responding to.
Comment posted May 03, 2006 11:21 pm PDT — by John Levine
Last week I had dinner with one of the execs at the .ORG registry, and he told me quite vehemently that it’s costing them significant real money to handle all the speculative registrations and cancellations.  That’s not surprising—you build your…
 

Another Try at Proof-of-Work e-Postage Email

Comment posted Aug 12, 2006 10:39 pm PDT — by John Levine
When you talk about the ISP’s server, you’re missing the point. The ISP has no more idea than anyone else what mail from Grandma’s PC is real and what is bot spam.  You’re conceding that the ISP is going to…
Comment posted Aug 02, 2006 8:44 pm PDT — by John Levine
Well, that will give Grandma plenty of time to wait on hold when she calls to complain.
Comment posted Aug 02, 2006 2:27 am PDT — by John Levine
The situation I forsee is that a spammer hijacks Grandma’s computer, then Grandma can’t send mail any more. She never sent much in the first place, now she can’t send any at all. Or more likely it’s not Grandma, it’s…
 

Nation of Cameroon Typo-Squats the Entire .com Space

Comment posted Aug 18, 2006 1:36 pm PDT — by John Levine
My, aren’t we snarky this morning. I presume most people can tell the difference between a national government and a private business, so I won’t belabor the irrelevance of what Google’s owners do.  But I will point out that the…
Comment posted Aug 18, 2006 5:28 am PDT — by John Levine
We all know what the FAQ on the wildcard page says. But I’m not sure how much of it I believe.  Your estimate of $10M/yr for the clickthroughs is plausible, but what we don’t know is how much if any…
Comment posted Aug 09, 2006 3:18 am PDT — by John Levine
I poked around looking for more TLD wildcards, and found quite a few of them.
Comment posted Aug 07, 2006 2:53 pm PDT — by John Levine
With respect to Ram’s comment, it’s just an A record that points to a web server, so any other attempted connection with fail. They published SPF -all records to discourage people from sending or receiving mail, for whatever good that…
Comment posted Aug 07, 2006 3:53 am PDT — by John Levine
I poked around the .cm TLD and found some interesting stuff which I wrote up in this blog entry.
 

More Top-Level Domain Wildcards

Comment posted Feb 24, 2007 11:05 pm PST — by John Levine
You’re confusing browser hacks with TLDs.  There is no .hp domain, nor is there a .art domain. (I’m not guessing, I just FTP’ed a copy of the root zone file to be sure nobody’s playing games with it.) Many browsers…
Comment posted Aug 09, 2006 4:18 pm PDT — by John Levine
For the *.cn and *.tw wildcards, someone noted on my blog that they resolve for IDN (non-ASCII) names, which I verified.  Each leads to the respective registry.
 

Huge Increase in Spam in October Email

Comment posted Jan 12, 2007 11:12 pm PST — by John Levine
People have been sending out faux bills like that for at least a decade. Have you ever heard of someone collecting? Or a spammer stopping because of one?
 

An Alternative to .XXX: IANA Adult Port Assignments

Comment posted Mar 18, 2007 3:31 am PDT — by John Levine
No, it’s ports above 1024. I’m referring to what TCP software on actual computers actually does. Every TCP connection requires a port number at both ends, and the normal approach in TCP software is to for the client end of…
Comment posted Mar 18, 2007 12:59 am PDT — by John Levine
This is a terrible idea for mostly technical reasons. There’s only about a thousand port numbers that can be used by net services. (Port numbers are a 16 bit field, but numbers above 1024 are traditionally available for dynamic allocation…
 

Registerfly Victims Are Really Stuck Now

Comment posted Jul 26, 2007 2:39 am PDT — by John Levine
This case is going nowhere.  The case documents in PACER are all about choice of venue, since the case was filed in North Carolina, but Registerfly was (is?) in Florida, eNom is in Washington, and ICANN is in California.
 

ICANN Asked to Adopt Specific TLD for Banks

Comment posted Mar 31, 2007 6:28 pm PDT — by John Levine
Users basically don’t understand domains names.  If there were a .bank TLD, you could advertise whatever.bank until you’re blue in in the face and people will still type in whatever.bank.com or bank.whatever.com or bank.cm. As Paul Hoffman’s recent note points…
 

Splitting the Root: It's Too Late

Comment posted Apr 08, 2007 9:47 pm PDT — by John Levine
Karl’s viewpoint is quite reasonable.  Other people have noted that it’s somewhat common for ISPs to FTP copies of the IANA root zone and run their own local root servers, which works fine. Assuming that ICANN ever unties its IDN…
Comment posted Apr 07, 2007 2:55 am PDT — by John Levine
Yes, it’s mirrored from my blog where the entry’s date was accidentally reset when I restored it from a backup. It’s still as true now as it was then, though.
 

Oklahoma Spammer Fighter Loses Even Worse

Comment posted Jun 13, 2007 5:58 pm PDT — by John Levine
I would think this would be obvious, but in the U.S., courts are charged with enforcing actual laws, rather than imaginary laws that we might wish had been passed instead. The highly imperfect CAN SPAM act says that mailers have…
Comment posted Jun 12, 2007 6:27 pm PDT — by John Levine
Except that he did file and unsubscribe request.  He pointed them to optoutbydomain.com.  Seems pretty obvious to me. Aw, come on.  Imagine for a moment that you are an ESP. Some guy calls you on the phone and rants at…
Comment posted Jun 12, 2007 11:48 am PDT — by John Levine
Except that’s not what happened.  Mumma didn’t unsubscribe, he called them up and ranted at them, refusing to tell them what address he wanted them to stop mailing.  CAN SPAM is quite clear that a mailer can provide any reasonable…
 

IETF Has Approved DKIM, DomainKeys Identified Mail

Comment posted May 24, 2007 12:13 am PDT — by John Levine
FYI, it’s official. You can read the RFC at ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc4871.txt
 

Squeegee Domains

Comment posted Jul 06, 2007 1:25 am PDT — by John Levine
It is well known that search engines, browsers and ISP’s are redirecting user typos to their own pages. That may well be the case in the domain speculators’ alternate reality.  Here in the regular reality, if I type, say, bermduda…
Comment posted Jul 06, 2007 12:01 am PDT — by John Levine
Tia Wood said: Can you define ... Not in a way that would apply in the domain speculators’ alternate reality, so I won’t try.
Comment posted Jul 05, 2007 11:34 pm PDT — by John Levine
Tia Wood said: John Levine, you do realize that Microsoft, Yahoo, etc are actually the biggest cybersquatting “squeegee men”, correct? There is a bizarre alternate reality inhabited by spammers in which Microsoft sends more spam than anyone else, users welcome…
Comment posted Jun 27, 2007 2:12 pm PDT — by John Levine
Adam Strong said: However, instead of resorting to name calling ... ... the techno-pinkos would like ... My, we’re touchier than ever. Well, anyway, if I were king of the Internet, I’d solve the typosquat problem by persuading Google and…
Comment posted Jun 26, 2007 10:38 pm PDT — by John Levine
Well, when I type “stocks” into my copy of Firefox, I get an error message saying that it can’t find stocks.  Sounds like you have the Yahoo toolbar installed, so you chose to use whatever defaults your toolbar provides. It…
Comment posted Jun 26, 2007 3:27 pm PDT — by John Levine
My goodness, the domainers sure are sensitive to any reference to the value-subtracted nature of what they do. I’ve been registering domains since about 1990. (Look at the date on iecc.com, which was not my first domain.) I have all…
Comment posted Jun 25, 2007 4:26 pm PDT — by John Levine
Thanks, I couldn’t ask for a better example of self-serving babble. In case anyone didn’t notice, he changed the topic from typosquats to domain speculators, implicitly agreeing that there’s no defense for typosquat squeegee domains. I don’t have much sympathy…
 

Spamhaus Appeal: They Win on Substance

Comment posted Sep 05, 2007 2:32 am PDT — by John Levine
As I said, the appeals court reminded the trial court that E360 has to documenthis damages, which he hasn’t. Having read the affidavit (it’s not hard to find, you know, you don’t have to speculate), the largest chunk of damages,…
 

More on WHOIS Privacy

Comment posted Sep 11, 2007 1:32 pm PDT — by John Levine
Yes, WIPO is a bunch of hypocrites and there’s a lot of bogus whois info.  We all know that.  The point I’ve been making over and over, which I really do not think is particularly subtle or complex, is that…
Comment posted Sep 08, 2007 4:46 am PDT — by John Levine
When I thought up the registrar/registry split in 1996, I anticipated correctly that registrars would bundle domains with other stuff, but I didn’t foresee the race to the bottom that’s given us razor thin margins and registrars whose entire business…
Comment posted Sep 05, 2007 2:46 am PDT — by John Levine
Jeez, guys, can’t you just read what I wrote?  I entirely agree that more accurate WHOIS data would require actual work costing actual money. But unilaterally making WHOIS worse, with no benefits to WHOIS users, just isn’t going to happen.…
Comment posted Sep 04, 2007 6:43 pm PDT — by John Levine
I’m using “much” in the standard English sense.  Consult any dictionary. The data for spews is completely bogus, and we all know it.  What’s your point, other than to confirm mine?
 

More on Dell's Anti-Tasting Suit

Comment posted Dec 13, 2007 6:55 pm PST — by John Levine
Dell’s complaint had a typical laundry list of trademark related charges, including cybersquatting and counterfeiting. There’s one new case document, a response from the defendant, which I’ll blog at http://weblog.johnlevine.com in a few minutes.
Comment posted Dec 04, 2007 6:53 pm PST — by John Levine
Hmmn, I was unaware that ICANN’s registration policies forced you to use Dell’s computers. Is there a clause in the RAA that I missed? If I choose to buy a Dell computer and use all their shovelware, it may not…
 

Domain Tasting to Go Away for Real This Time

Comment posted Feb 05, 2008 3:58 pm PST — by John Levine
Oops, you’re quite right. I should stop blogging at 1:00 AM. But Suresh’s point is well taken.  Marchex has yet to be more than marginally profitable, and has lost money in the first three quarters of 2007, so it’ll be…
Comment posted Feb 05, 2008 3:50 pm PST — by John Levine
Well, there’s the problem.  No doubt the current link farm on cameras.com brings in lots of revenue from the suckers who foolishly hoped that cameras.com might have some actual information about cameras.  As I said before, this won’t stop without…
Comment posted Feb 05, 2008 2:57 am PST — by John Levine
John Berryhill said: To be clear, the [ $180M domain name portfolio ] purchase was by a public company, and if there is “puffery” in an SEC disclosure statement, someone is going to jail.  http://www.secinfo.com/d14D5a.1658z.htm Oh, right, I’d forgotten about…
Comment posted Feb 04, 2008 12:02 am PST — by John Levine
Gary is quite definitely confusing domain tasting and domain squatting.  They are not the same thing at all. Domain tasting is registering huge numbers of more or less random names of at best marginal value, typically variants on famous names,…
Comment posted Feb 02, 2008 4:16 pm PST — by John Levine
It seems extremely unlikely. When PIR added their restocking fee, the tasting dried up.  It’s pretty obvious that the gross margins for registries are gross indeed, since we’ve never heard a peep out of Verisign about the several million daily…
Comment posted Jan 30, 2008 2:30 pm PST — by John Levine
Gary Osbourne said: I fail to see what all the positive fuss is about. Ok, so there’s no more domain tasting (or less anyway, see PIR’s Org. attempt) This changes the economics by orders of magnitude. The papers in the…
 

The Front Running Class Action Suit

Comment posted Feb 28, 2008 12:18 am PST — by John Levine
Dan Campbell said: Wouldn’t the class in the action be other registrars A court would be unlikely to certify them as a class.  The point of a class is that it’s impractical to identify all of the individual plaintiffs, but…
Comment posted Feb 27, 2008 7:17 pm PST — by John Levine
Sigh. Make that aiding and abetting fraudulent concealment.  The fraudulent concealment charge seems extremely weak on its own, but that’s for another message I’ll post shortly.
Comment posted Feb 27, 2008 7:14 pm PST — by John Levine
I don’t purport to be a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that if I were a lawyer, I would know that clause 5.10 precludes third parties from suing for violations of the RAA, which has nothing to do with the…
 

The Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act of 2008

Comment posted Mar 06, 2008 9:26 pm PST — by John Levine
.pH said: John Levine says: Please read the paragraph after that one.  It’s only illegal if you use the name to mislead people. Sigh.  If you’re not willing to read the bill, why are you complaining about it?
Comment posted Mar 06, 2008 9:02 pm PST — by John Levine
Egad, John B and I agree.  Alertthe media!
Comment posted Mar 06, 2008 8:51 pm PST — by John Levine
paul g said: The bill would make it unlawful if the domain name was identical or confusingly similar to the name or brand name of a government office, nonprofit organization, business or other entity. Please read the paragraph after that…
 

A Patent for SiteFinder-Like Resolution

Comment posted May 08, 2008 10:46 am PDT — by John Levine
Indeed it uses a DNS wildcard in one of the examples (and a sloppy one at that, since the figure is missing the labels), but as I presume you’re aware, what matters is the claims, which indeed say nothing about…
Comment posted May 08, 2008 2:12 am PDT — by John Levine
Why do I get the impression that nobody pontificating on this patent has actually read it?  It’s number 7,337,910, available at uspto.gov. It was filed in 2001 and, looking at the examples, was intended for the .CC ccTLD.  The patent…

Recent Comments — by John Levine

Indeed it uses a DNS wildcard in one of the examples (and a sloppy one… May 08, 2008
Why do I get the impression that nobody pontificating on this patent has actually read… May 07, 2008
.pH said: John Levine says: Please read the paragraph after that one.  It’s only illegal… Mar 06, 2008
Egad, John B and I agree.  Alertthe media! Mar 06, 2008
paul g said: The bill would make it unlawful if the domain name was identical… Mar 06, 2008

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