Suresh Ramasubramanian on CircleID

Comments

EI, EI - NO!

Comment posted Mar 18, 2010 5:10 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I find your article's tone quite smug and self satisfied, and am quite glad that there's a reasonable counterpoint at http://www.circleid.com/posts/icann_expressions_of_interest_eowhy/ If you're resting easy that this proposal is dead and buried, I think you need to revise that expectation…

Domain Registrars & Registries: Don't Say You Weren't Warned

Comment posted Mar 18, 2010 5:07 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Beyond it driving domain squatters out of business that is.

Comment posted Feb 21, 2010 2:09 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
It is mostly useless domains on the table.

Comment posted Feb 21, 2010 2:08 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Do you? If so what is the amount earned by 1. Driving traffic from mistyped URLs / SEO etc to these typo sites versus 2. The money earned from offloading these supposedly "valuable" domains to someone - either another domain…

Comment posted Feb 19, 2010 12:35 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
You don't make money from typosquatting by PPC or driving traffic to the websites. You gain money by trying to sell these off to the company, the company's competitor, a blackhat SEO who wants to use these domains and pump…

Driver's License for Web Users... Bad Idea

Comment posted Feb 12, 2010 9:41 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
http://www.circleid.com/posts/internet_drivers_license_a_short_history_lesson/

"Internet Drivers License" - A Short History Lesson

Comment posted Feb 11, 2010 6:25 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Walled gardens are instrumented to catch a very restricted set of things that'd get defined as abusive - traffic generated by malware. Could be attacks, spam, botnet command and control etc. ISPs have to think long and hard before they…

The Greatest Free Riders of Our Time

Comment posted Feb 02, 2010 10:35 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
'nuff said.

Comcast and e360 Settle Lawsuit

Comment posted Jan 23, 2010 2:25 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
We need more like this .. and we need some active enforcement of this ruling. This is probably the best domain related news I've heard in a very long time.

Internet Drug Traffic, Service Providers and Intellectual Property

Comment posted Jan 07, 2010 4:18 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Xinnet seems to have gone down in a general chinese campaign on online porn. Nothing much at all to do with fast flux etc .. that's a campaign that's strictly local, appears totally unconnected with icann politics, or with knujon…

Comment posted Jan 07, 2010 3:31 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
My main grouse so far has been (and I told you this back when we had dinner at that chinese restaurant, during MAAWG San Fran last february) that knujon has been, so far, way too confrontational and media oriented to…

Comment posted Jan 05, 2010 5:21 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Right. Yunker was quoting an AV vendor's study about ccTLDs, on similar lines. That little fact corrected, the rest of my comments stand just fine on their own.

Comment posted Jan 05, 2010 9:27 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I've seen, and interacted with, people who work, constructively, with the registrar and registry community. And I've seen people with a taste for PR and a huge amount of marketing bluster backed with statistics that various other vendors too have…

The World's Most Dangerous Country Code Top-Level Domains

Comment posted Jan 05, 2010 9:23 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That's just one of the questions - but I could just as easily ask my friends at McAfee those I guess. The report itself is interesting, so thanks for posting a link to the report.

Network Neutrality, UPS, and FedEx

Comment posted Dec 26, 2009 1:15 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So thanks Dan for spending christmas day countering this fud in a teacup.

Malware and Botnet Operators Setting Up Their Own Data Centers

Comment posted Dec 22, 2009 2:58 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Rather more serious an issue than bogus data centers.

ISPs Are Speaking, Is Anyone Listening?

Comment posted Dec 18, 2009 5:16 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And for the ESPs and senders - this seems to be a clear message that they must take collective action to distance themselves from their peers who use coreg, leads, waterfalling etc etc.

I Don't Give Damn About My Bad Reputation - Joan Jett

Comment posted Dec 18, 2009 5:10 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And as to who gets to decide - millions of email users, people with accounts on gmail, yahoo, comcast etc - who click report spam buttons. Next innuendo laden question please?

China Tightens Internet Control in the Name of Fighting Porn, Piracy, and Cybercrime

Comment posted Dec 15, 2009 3:02 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Especially as most of the fraudulent registrations of fastflux / botnet domains (.cn - as well as .com, .net etc) are being done through like three or four China based registrars. Quite probably by eastern europeans with reseller status or…

Just Make It Stop

Comment posted Dec 06, 2009 1:26 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
.. and enforceable too, in the case of some userbases (corporations that'd mandate what their employees can and can't use their email for, for example)

What's Driving Spam and Domain Fraud? Illicit Drug Traffic

Comment posted Nov 20, 2009 7:14 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Pills yesterday, fake rolexes some other day .. malware URLs that broadcast trojans some other day. It varies.

Muzzled by the United Nations

Comment posted Nov 18, 2009 4:54 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I remember it because it was because of abusive activity from one of that campaign's opponents - who kept hacking into the campaign's facebook profile (possibly through a fake third party app or similar). Accounts that are hacked into are…

Comment posted Nov 18, 2009 4:42 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Grassroots political activists in a range of countries from India to > the United States have had their Facebook accounts suspended because > Facebook's automated systems thought they were spammers. A lot of grassroots activists adopt the same practice…

AT&T CTO Donovan: We Need Non-Discrimination

Comment posted Nov 06, 2009 11:57 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And very suddenly too. Interesting speculation here .. and yes I know the spectator is as right wing as you can get (even got greeted with a popup ad where Michele Malkin reads it and asks that you donate to…

Shouldn't Tea Time for Kenya Mean IDN Top-Level Domains?

Comment posted Oct 29, 2009 8:11 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Contempt, yes.

Comment posted Oct 29, 2009 8:04 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
IP lawyers? Domainers? A very short list of "usual suspect" NGOs? Or, perhaps, the actual industries that are supposed to be buying and deploying these domains?

Comment posted Oct 29, 2009 7:34 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Look at all the domainers out there who simply buy domain portfolios and stuff them with pay per click links. The (notional, only realizable when the domain is actually sold) value of that portfolio might be sky high. (And keep…

Beyond Net Neutrality: A Manifesto for Internet Freedom

Comment posted Oct 29, 2009 5:48 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
... well, they exist on both sides of the NN debate. And activists on either side love to claim that they are in the right by pointing to all that money being spent on DC lobbying. The "pro net neutrality"…

Shouldn't Tea Time for Kenya Mean IDN Top-Level Domains?

Comment posted Oct 29, 2009 5:43 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The point the article makes is correct. Domain names dont matter in the final analysis - usable content does. Websites in Arabic, Hindi and whatever other market the Kenyan tea makers sell to (assuming they conduct deals over the web…

Getting a Handle on IDNs

Comment posted Oct 24, 2009 1:19 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
"amazon.com." Second level domain names already can be transliterated into non-ASCII characters. A Hindi version of the site can appear as वीरबाला.com. That is, the domain name appears in Hindi characters followed by the familiar ASCII form of ".com." After…

Is America Getting More Like China?

Comment posted Oct 09, 2009 2:47 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
By ignoring and alienating his extreme left supporters just as much as he's alienated the hardline right. Comparing the Obama administration to China is way too much of a stretch, even for that hackneyed old logical fallacy, the "slippery slope"…

Sender Address Verification: Still a Bad Idea

Comment posted Oct 06, 2009 1:50 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Your 4th point that callouts are likely to get you blacklisted is dead wrong. > I personally am making 50k callouts a day and not getting blacklisted. 50K a day is peanuts mail volume wise for mailserver farms of…

Wrong on the "Exaflood," Wrong on Network Neutrality

Comment posted Oct 03, 2009 12:27 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
... is that some of "net neutrality"'s loudest advocates seem to think that's the be all and end all of net neutrality. Oh well.

ICANN’s September Surprise

Comment posted Oct 01, 2009 1:32 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
There are a lot of very interesting looking ties left around to ensure that the training wheels aren't all off at icann. http://www.circleid.com/posts/new_agreement_declares_icann_independent/#5796 I don't normally agree with Karl but this time he's pointed out a few interesting little flies…

New Australian Law Could Turn ISPs Into Online Sheriffs

Comment posted Sep 30, 2009 4:41 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
First the EFF five or six years back .. and now its the EFA's turn. "Police state", "vigilantes", "spying" .. every single meme that can be borrowed from the McCarthy era, 1984 etc gets recycled and bent out of shape…

The US as Keeper of a 'Free' Internet?

Comment posted Sep 24, 2009 12:34 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Somehow, I think not. I seriously doubt USG oversight is going to cease at all - and you won't get either industry or civil society stepping into the vacuum if oversight does cease by the way. I predicted much the…

Email Snooping Can Be Intrusion Upon Seclusion

Comment posted Sep 03, 2009 2:34 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Any provider of email that accesses its users' mailboxes without due process (and in specific cases, such as on receipt of a subpoena, or by prior concent of the user in order to troubleshoot some issue with her account) can,…

Another Internet Governance Forum: in the U.S.A.

Comment posted Aug 30, 2009 9:57 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And here I was thinking there was a critical shortage of forums to air IGF politics (which mostly boil down to ICANN politics, but I digress..). Manna from heaven.

Threats to Internet Oversight Mount as Key Protection Expires

Comment posted Aug 30, 2009 9:54 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
... or is it "Chinese Domains, Limited"? http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-wrixon/5/906/398 David Wrixon Owner, Chinese Domains Ltd Bradford, United Kingdom

Comment posted Aug 30, 2009 7:15 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
You think chinese markets are "underdeveloped" just because there arent chinese character .cn domains?

Swedish Regulator Bans Inclusion of Letters "b", "a", "n", "k" in Domain Names Under .SE

Comment posted Aug 28, 2009 2:32 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Not that I dont agree with Patrik about how an alternate approach wouldnt be out of place.

Verizon Awarded Over $33 Million in Cybersquatting Case

Comment posted Aug 28, 2009 2:29 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
This will drive the shadier registrars even deeper underground, and clearly draw a line between legitimate and illegitimate activity. A good thing, in some ways - and also trouble as it'll make the problem much harder to root out.

Oh, Spammer, Where Art Thou?

Comment posted Aug 27, 2009 12:03 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That's a Jewish charity or religious movement or something. Probably got hacked. Then 100freemb.com is a free webhost, snurl is a link redirection / short url service .. pretty mixed bag, that.

Study Finds Some 4000 Domains Expired After Being Won in Court, Some Disputed Again by Same Company

Comment posted Aug 26, 2009 1:03 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The only reason they were fought is that there are typosquatters willing to register them to glom on some tiny amounts of PPC traffic .. directly infringing the corporation's brand, and they're bound to fight any misuse or infringement of…

Oh, Spammer, Where Art Thou?

Comment posted Aug 21, 2009 1:45 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And a domain resolving to an IP in China now will suddenly resolve to somewhere in Brazil within the next minute or two (or whenever the TTL expires). So that's not a usable metric. Do what I suggested last time…

Threats to Internet Oversight Mount as Key Protection Expires

Comment posted Aug 21, 2009 1:43 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Especially given various comments from USG sources that ICANN is not yet ready to be freed from this oversight?

Are the FCC Workshops Fair?

Comment posted Aug 14, 2009 4:04 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Thanks for sharing that.

ICANN Culls Three More Domain Name Registrars

Comment posted Aug 11, 2009 3:52 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I heartily look forward to some further actions of this sort.

Why Can't We Make the Internet Secure?

Comment posted Aug 10, 2009 4:07 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
there's this concept called "mens rea"- criminal intent. I'm not sure you can compare akamai, ultradns, opendns to botherders and dns poisoners who exploit the Kaminsky bug .. quite a stretch, even using the shopworn old slippery slope logical fallacy.…

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

Comment posted Aug 09, 2009 2:32 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
which was a very poorly prosecuted case - and a real ISP, with a good lawyer, might have got a totally different decision. http://www.spamresource.com/2008/05/thanks-james-gordon.html Thursday, May 08, 2008 Thanks, James Gordon Remember James Gordon? The guy who sued Virtumundo, and…

Accepting New Top-Level Domains As Suffix-Less Cyber Brands

Comment posted Aug 04, 2009 2:14 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Or even as advertising and PPC vehicles, the way some domainers assume all domains are used :)

Comment posted Aug 04, 2009 3:20 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I am not sure if that was your original intent, but still .. congratulations.

Private Cyber Investigators

Comment posted Aug 04, 2009 1:21 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
There's nothing that prevents a private citizen, let alone a private detective, from investigating the causes of a breakin. There's a lot of law - and very good law - that prevents him from actually breaking into other premises to…

MAAWG Issues ISP Guidelines for End-User Bot Removal

Comment posted Aug 01, 2009 3:22 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-oreirdan-mody-bot-remediation-00 Well worth a read.

Domain Name Registry-Registrar Vertical Separation: The Economic, Anti-Trust Red Herring

Comment posted Jul 31, 2009 3:07 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The registrar constituency, by itself, might want to self regulate and restrain some registrars from continuing with some practices. And these are by no means restricted to accusations such as in the above cases - tasting copyrighted domains under shell…

Comment posted Jul 31, 2009 2:53 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And as for Tim's comment - If separation is maintained as it is today, I concede that there may be a few *very limited* cases where allowing a registry to directly register a *small number* of domain names *may* be…

Comment posted Jul 29, 2009 3:47 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Transamerica vs Moniker + Oversee + multiple John Does (plus one John Berryhill cited in the lawsuit among a long list of fictitious persons, possibly on the falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus theory) - http://domainnamewire.com/2009/07/08/transamerica-sues-moniker-over-trademarked-domain-names/

ICANN, Civil Society, and Free Speech

Comment posted Jul 28, 2009 4:19 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
A lot of the stakeholder debate - especially in the IGF (and in other civil society groups within and outside ICANN) <- the groups outside ICANN - such as the IGF which is supposed to have a much broader agenda…

Comment posted Jul 28, 2009 4:12 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
1. Membership that's fairly static and with politics / personal battles that go back decades - your comments on the NCUC are something I tend to agree with. 2. Non engagement of various governments in the GAC (where they'd send…

Think China Is the Highest Spamming Country? Think Again

Comment posted Jul 23, 2009 2:08 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That advertises chinese products / websites to a chinese audience, has content written by a native chinese speaker, etc. Quite often these are legitimate products that just "hired an email marketer", who then sends out advertising using unethical means. There's…

Content Filtering Ineffective, Harmful According to Public Knowledge Study

Comment posted Jul 23, 2009 2:03 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
As the subject says.

Think China Is the Highest Spamming Country? Think Again

Comment posted Jul 22, 2009 4:30 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
There's a huge amount of "local" (chinese language, for a chinese audience) spam sent by bots, but you wouldnt see it in a provider that's primarily english language. If you run freemails or ISPs with .cn / .hk / .tw…

Networks and Nationalization

Comment posted Jul 21, 2009 2:41 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
.. with a monopoly telecom operator. And expensive, highly restricted bandwidth. I come from just such a country, myself. And the "before" and "after" are as easily distinguishable as those old charles atlas ads about the bully kicking sand in…

Think China Is the Highest Spamming Country? Think Again

Comment posted Jul 20, 2009 12:55 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
But I dont see them tracking domains found in spam, sorted by ccTLD / registrar. And ob.surbl (whose stats I quoted) is fed from like 400k ++ domains, 40 million users. I hope that meets your exacting (and quite appropriate)…

Comment posted Jul 19, 2009 1:41 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
For domains listed in ob.surbl.org

Comment posted Jul 19, 2009 1:40 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
When it comes to domains registered on a particular ccTLD / in registrars of a particular country and used in spam .. china is head and shoulders at the top. For example - Domains blocked: 5642 Top 10 TLDs: 3401…

Turn the Table on Content Filtering

Comment posted Jul 05, 2009 3:18 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The ones about senior-ietf-member-* and programmer-*?

Comment posted Jul 05, 2009 3:27 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
FUSSP = http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html As for running filters at the sending MTA - outbound filtering is widely recommended as a best practice. However, most spam out there is sent through compromised hosts, botnets etc - that may not even be "regular"…

Gary Warner: We Are Well Past Time to Declare a Spam Crisis in China

Comment posted Jul 01, 2009 1:07 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The point Gary's making though is a bit different. Domains registered in spam, through registrars (in fact just two or three registrars for the most part) based in China. As for origins, you'd be closer if you looked at eastern…

Comment posted Jun 30, 2009 4:24 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Just to clarify the above data point.

Comment posted Jun 30, 2009 4:23 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Our statistics indicate that a huge majority of this originates from at the most three or four registrars based in China Xiamen Ename - which is the registrar for over 50% of domains we find in unsolicited bulk email every…

China's Censorship Blowback

Comment posted Jun 26, 2009 1:45 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I suspect you'd just have to look for the answer to that old latin tag .. "Cui bono". Who benefits?

Why Not an Interim Step Until DNSSEC is Ready?

Comment posted Jun 24, 2009 12:24 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
.. that post was the one about the "green dam" chinese filtering software. I seem to have typed it into the wrong firefox tab (got 3..4 circleid articles open in different tabs).

China's "Green Dam Youth Escort" Software

Comment posted Jun 23, 2009 9:26 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
1. IP claims against the software by a US software vendor - which US companies like HP, Dell etc would need to settle before they could consider this. 2. Some would also raise questions about the process by which this…

Why Not an Interim Step Until DNSSEC is Ready?

Comment posted Jun 23, 2009 9:20 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
1. IP claims against the software by a US software vendor - which US companies like HP, Dell etc would need to settle before they could consider this. 2. Some would also raise questions about the process by which this…

Careful What You Wish For: Why ICANN "Independence" is a Bad Idea

Comment posted Jun 23, 2009 9:17 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
How very alarmist.

"It's The Internet Stupid" ...I Respectfully Disagree

Comment posted Jun 16, 2009 1:57 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
It is a well reasoned advocacy of something that's fundamentally wrong. And yes, strange as it might seem, Brett's right here in that we can't go around distinguishing between small and large ISPs in this weird and wonderful fashion. Define…

It's Official: Value Moving to Edge

Comment posted Jun 16, 2009 1:53 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> The Oppenheimer team thinks the winners will be backhaul providers, towercos > and data centers—in other words, infrastructure providers. That's entirely consistent with hosted applications of the sort you describe. Me, I dont agree with David (and as I…

"It's The Internet Stupid" ...I Respectfully Disagree

Comment posted Jun 11, 2009 4:52 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Do note that I suggested a need to regulate the misuse of DPI, rather than demonize it. And goodmail is doing quite well indeed - as good as most reputation vendors around. They seem to have snagged the white house…

A Clear Case for ISP Regulation: IP Address Logging

Comment posted Jun 03, 2009 2:07 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well, good. I see that a lot of the public policy people have started to advocate what the ISP security crowd has known about for quite a while. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/06/02/Internet-providers-change-FCC-strategy/UPI-33481243950413/ "It's unreasonable for us to assume no action will occur (on…

Thoughts on IPv6 Security, Take Two

Comment posted May 26, 2009 5:25 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Deploying IPv6 won't make you any more or less secure. And there aren't any 'new challenges' as such. I keep seeing lots of agonizing about how (for example) spam filtering is going to migrate over from the v4 to…

Will Obama Re-Nationalize ICANN?

Comment posted May 18, 2009 8:55 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I think he'd see the impracticality of creating parallel governance structures, and concentrate on making ICANN's processes more open + relevant. No US govt so far (and certainly not the Obama administration I think, based on their approach to previous…

China Calls for an End to the Internet Governance Forum

Comment posted May 15, 2009 2:37 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And the basic value of IGF, to me, is that it is a forum where stakeholders from multiple, extremely diverse backgrounds meet - and are exposed to each others ideas. Thinking that IGF is going to be a parallel /…

Another Attack, Another Reason for the Urgency of DNSSEC Adoption

Comment posted May 03, 2009 2:00 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I saw your boilerplate reply the very first time. And I do appreciate the value of dnssec. Only - where there's a compromise of the sort you described, DNSSEC is useless because the bad guys just did an end run…

Comment posted May 03, 2009 3:26 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
.. DNSSEC wouldnt have protected anybody in Puerto Rico. Not under the circumstances the attacks were carried out. These are not kaminsky style cache poisoning .. something much more old fashioned .. gain control of the resolver through sql injections…

A Few Thoughts on the Future of Email Authentication

Comment posted Apr 19, 2009 4:09 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
You are confusing authentication with reputation, I'm afraid. Guess who are the single largest users and most enthusiastic adopters of spf, dkim etc? High volume unsolicited bulk mailers of the sort that spamhaus calls snowshoers. For throwaway domains they setup…

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009

Comment posted Apr 14, 2009 3:54 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Section 21, on "International Norms and Cybersecurity Deterrance [sic] Measures", is problematic. I don't think that lack of international norms or cooperation—to the extent that this provision might actually accomplish something—is much of a problem. Five cent version of my…

Obama's Missed Opportunity

Comment posted Mar 27, 2009 6:39 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I like Susan Crawford, and I respect her too. But ideological blinkers of one kind or the other are not appropriate for someone in such a post as Ms.Crawford is. An open mind, and an unbiased viewpoint are all that…

Comment posted Mar 27, 2009 4:27 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
It is shared by some extremely intelligent people, with substantial tech background but is unfortunately ill-informed, to say the least. Several posts on Dave Farber's IP list are from highly vocal, intelligent but - as I said, uninformed people who…

Comment posted Mar 26, 2009 4:18 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
But I must agree with Richard. Reluctantly. One thing that's going to help far more here is an open mind that sees both sides of some of these debates - filtering, net neutrality etc.

ICANN Asked to Remake the Internet in Joseph Smith's Image?

Comment posted Mar 22, 2009 3:05 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Everybody does it in a policy arena .. all the way from free speech and privacy advocates to corporations. Distasteful, to be sure. I dont like it any more than you appear to do, Lauren - but I equally dont…

DPI is Not a Four-Letter Word!

Comment posted Mar 14, 2009 3:35 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I am probably wasting my time asking this ..

Cybersquatter Hit With Maximum Penalty

Comment posted Mar 11, 2009 3:39 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Great news, for the first circleid post I read today. Thank you.

Memo to John Markoff: There are No "Do Overs" in History

Comment posted Mar 06, 2009 10:34 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
>>> small innovative business in India or China A basic contradition in terms I fear. Little or no innovation here and what does exist is speedily choked out. Sure you might have brilliant indians and chinese who are in some…

Comment posted Mar 03, 2009 2:01 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
This is one such time that I do agree with you. srs

Domaining Registrar Defeats Cybersquatting Lawsuit: Philbrick v. eNom

Comment posted Feb 26, 2009 5:26 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The article says "good luck collecting".. but perhaps a suit filed in a chinese court might have more traction, given the onlinenic d/b/a china-channel.com (the article you linked to says onlinenic is based in SFO but people are scrambling to…

Should We Make the Possession of Malware a Crime?

Comment posted Feb 07, 2009 4:01 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Burglar tools may be used solely by burglars - and may even be significantly different from locksmith tools, say. Malware possession on the other hand is best accompanied by a mens rea requirement as the CoE convention suggests. > the…

ICANN Blows $4.6 Million In Stock Market

Comment posted Feb 07, 2009 3:51 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Managed funds that have a guaranteed rate of return (by investing in money market, tbills and other government backed paper <- note, not junk bonds like fnma / fmac that pretended to be equivalent). If cash then certainly not in…

Comment posted Feb 07, 2009 3:44 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Some of the failed banks, say, or SIFY (the indian tech company that crashed and burned after it turned out its founder bled all the cash reserves out to speculate in real estate - nasdaq listed ADRs), or Madoff? As…

Law Requiring Sex Offenders to Hand Over All Internet Passwords Going Too Far?

Comment posted Jan 27, 2009 3:56 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
One good thing is that information thus gathered is "treated as private data" - and is consistent with sex offender registries. And also granted that there is a much lower bar for privacy wrt child sexual abusers, in the interests…

Why 2008 Was a Milestone Year for IPv6

Comment posted Jan 24, 2009 4:30 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
They do offer it. And he.net should offer it too.

Spam Fighting: Lessons from Jack Bauer?

Comment posted Jan 17, 2009 3:24 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Wish circleid had a killfile.

PIR's Anti-Abuse Policy for .ORG Offers No Due Process for Innocent Domain Registrants

Comment posted Jan 12, 2009 10:15 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Several state laws do apply in parts where can-spam hasnt superseded them. And nothing in can-spam stops ISPs from filtering spam. CAN-SPAM is simply about FTC prosecutions. So, you can effectively comply with (or skate around) the letter of the…

An Early Look at the State of Spam in 2009, Social Networking Spam on the Rise

Comment posted Jan 12, 2009 2:51 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
We publish ob.surbl.org by the way .. here's something from our latest stats. Domains blocked: 7193 Top 10 TLDs: 2882 .com 2837 .cn 984 .info 305 .net 64 .org 42 .biz 30 .ru 13 .uk 6 .us 5 .pl Registrars:…

PIR's Anti-Abuse Policy for .ORG Offers No Due Process for Innocent Domain Registrants

Comment posted Jan 10, 2009 3:44 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
BTW - Spam - a good working definition is unsolicited bulk email Whois accuracy is one way to go (and if I had my druthers I'd abolish private registration, given more scam artist domain registrations abuse it than any legitimate…

Comment posted Jan 09, 2009 7:45 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
After "dearaol.com" crashed and burned I dont think I've seen them tilting at this particular windmill.

Comment posted Jan 09, 2009 7:43 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I did have a few words with Danny on politech / IP, and then posted this on circleid. Nothing has changed .. and you dont want to listen to the way EFF spins this.. or maybe you want to listen,…

Comment posted Jan 09, 2009 5:04 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Personally speaking I would wait for any comment from them before I respond to it, or comment further on this policy. Afilias has very similar wording as you say, and as far as I have seen they have not enforced…

Comment posted Jan 09, 2009 4:33 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Call this a backstop against rogue or incompetent registrars. Quite often it will be the registrar that applies ITS policies. Where the registrar doesnt have a policy, or chooses not to implement its own policies .. guess what, it actually…

Comment posted Jan 09, 2009 3:43 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Policies dont matter as much as their actual enforcement does. And the line between vigilantism and policy enforcement is a very fine one .. but people have walked it for a decade or more. I've observed some very good results…

ICANN Uses For-Profit Companies as "Comparables" in Its Employee Compensation

Comment posted Jan 09, 2009 1:20 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
As long as there is a process to engage fellows between meetings (if you want long term participation from the same fellow), and to draw them into the larger icann community. And then a periodic value decision on what value…

PIR's Anti-Abuse Policy for .ORG Offers No Due Process for Innocent Domain Registrants

Comment posted Jan 09, 2009 1:16 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
A registrar or registry is quite free to set an acceptable use policy, and/or apply it on their service. And strawmen about wikipedia aside, they are targeting something specific - malware, botnet c&c;etc. Would you seriously equate wikipedia or google…

ICANN Should Pay Even More and Increase Its Spending Several Fold

Comment posted Jan 08, 2009 4:53 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Monopolies (and in some areas, even stateside, its all cable isp X, or dsl isp Y) charge just what they want. And expecting tier 1 call center staff to know anything at all about ARIN is .. well, they have…

Comment posted Jan 08, 2009 3:31 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And you are too quick to comment. And I kind of lost count of the number of "Hello X, I didnt know this, Thank you" emails you've sent in the past few months. There's a lot to be said for…

ICANN Uses For-Profit Companies as "Comparables" in Its Employee Compensation

Comment posted Jan 08, 2009 5:48 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Before you ask, I have on occasion consulted for the ITU (its right out there in my circleid profile too), but I dont see George coming across as a fan of the ITU, at all. Just for example, see below.…

Comment posted Jan 07, 2009 8:15 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
This is getting childish.

Comment posted Jan 06, 2009 4:54 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
.. and that's the UN. I consult for the ITU from time to time, and they have salaries separate from perdiem when traveling. Airfare is covered, and there's a fixed perdiem (per day allowance that covers hotel, local expenses) for…

Comment posted Jan 06, 2009 2:38 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Thanks Kieren .. that part about keeping "fellow travelers" out was a lesson we had to learn early on. The other thing we learnt was that we had to actively hunt for fellows. And have people on the fellowship committee…

Comment posted Jan 06, 2009 1:41 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Since the past five years, I've chaired the fellowships committee for APRICOT (www.apricot.net) - the largest network operators conference in the asiapac, sort of like the asiapac equivalent of NANOG. We have an active fellowship program and extend fellowship to…

Who Pays for Email?

Comment posted Jan 05, 2009 8:00 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And what works or used to work there, or maybe even 15..20 years back in the canter and siegel era (or before that) doesnt really work today. Thanks for explaining it to him.

Domain Name Disputes Doubled Since 2003, Origin of Most Cases in US

Comment posted Jan 01, 2009 4:29 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Anything more than that little factoid in the report?

Undersea Cable Cuts, Internet Governance, and Lessons Learned

Comment posted Dec 23, 2008 3:09 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Satellite for example, other undersea cables in the region .. Competition in terms of more undersea cables? Laying those is a very costly exercise, and the companies that used to lay these (such as tyco) went bankrupt - sold for…

One Good Outcome from the Wall Street Journal: Google Flap

Comment posted Dec 21, 2008 11:08 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Though I think that the WSJ article was more dumb reportage than a clever attempt to exploit a fissure. But that's just me.

ICANN Responsible for Domain Name Trademark Mess

Comment posted Nov 27, 2008 10:55 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
As Levine and others have pointed out, that's simply none of their concern.

Phishers Expand Number of Top Level Domains Abused, Policy Changes Found Effective in Prevention

Comment posted Nov 27, 2008 10:55 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
biz and us are certainly far lower down on the list of most abused TLDs than com, cn, info .. They used to have a much more massive problem earlier, mostly with spam sites - but that seems to have…

On Why and How the Internet Needs to Be Governed

Comment posted Nov 10, 2008 1:25 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
If there is "nothing much of a substance" in this article why did it create this much of a peculiar reaction from you? My reaction was that there isnt much of substance in your article. That's something that's not unknown…

Comment posted Nov 10, 2008 6:22 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That said, I second Simon's comment. If this so-called "scientific mind" is not capable of reasoned argument and analysis, then it is correctly recognized as waffle, and people that waffle tend to get cut off, very quickly indeed. Now where…

Email Ad Network Isn't Liable for Spam: Ferron v. Echostar

Comment posted Oct 09, 2008 3:16 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
List brokers and sellers - practitioners of "coregistration", mostly - are one of the prime movers / facilitators of spam that may later go on to violate canspam (and even before that be sufficient to land up on several ISP…

Google's Eric Schmidt: Internet Becoming a Cesspool Where Brands Are Increasing Important

Comment posted Oct 09, 2008 3:13 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Sue some of the worst kiters and squatters out of existence, scare the rest out of business. The world will be a better place without tasting and kiting.

Net Neutrality an 'American Problem', Australians Suggest Alternatives

Comment posted Sep 29, 2008 4:26 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
They're actually talking sense and their pricing models are grounded on some solid realities. NNSquad etc be damned, its about time some saner ISP pricing models were introduced .. capping traffic is fine. Prioritizing to different places .. well, bandwidth…

IGF Meeting Blacklisted

Comment posted Sep 19, 2008 8:55 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Blocking outright rather than scoring on carefully chosen blocklists is a good idea Doing that on other than the connecting IP isnt the brightest of ideas. I do hope thats what you meant, rather than "use dnsbls only for scoring,…

Comment posted Sep 19, 2008 6:23 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
If someone is over aggressive enough to scan all headers for cbld IPs and then reject such emails wholesale .. (I might score such email a bit, but wouldnt reject outright) then thats not the cbl's fault. Kids playing with…

EstDomains and Intercage vs. Cybercrime

Comment posted Sep 17, 2008 9:32 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
They're legit and have legit customers - with, yes, a spam hosting + botnet problem they're presumably dealing with.

Cyber Crime: An Economic Problem

Comment posted Sep 07, 2008 1:58 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
But what I'd regard as a definitive study on the economics of malware - by Professors Johannes Bauer of MSU and Michel van Eeten of TU-DELFT - is at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/53/17/40722462.pdf

Will .cn Become the New .com?

Comment posted Aug 29, 2008 11:44 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
... who cares about the numbers it waves around?

ISP Deep Packet Inspection Remains a Probable Option, Despite Controversies

Comment posted Aug 20, 2008 3:35 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
For example here is a CISCO NBAR config that Indonesian ISPs used to block sites serving up Geert Wilder's racist Fitna movie, based on a government order to block Fitna from being served up to Indonesians. http://risnaini.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/youtube-fitna-cisco-regex-filter-nbar/ [and no, I…

McCain Tech Plan: The Only Vision is Backward-Looking

Comment posted Aug 16, 2008 3:07 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
David Isenberg had something much more reasoned in his circleid post .. http://www.circleid.com/posts/88151_mccain_tech_policy/ Just for example. Simply throwing around memes like "backward looking" might do very well for an EFF blog or deeplink - but those aren't meant to be…

ICANN Paints Itself Into a Corner

Comment posted Aug 13, 2008 4:19 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I count at least 34 .mobi domains - most with random names - in ob.surbl.org I wonder.. I seriously doubt if it is "mobile" spam, that lot .. we dont run any mobile networks / push email so far.

ACLU, Anti-Spam Laws, and the First Amendment

Comment posted Aug 09, 2008 2:59 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
All due respect to the ACLU - but yes, someone needs to point out to them that: The FTC prosecuting can-spam infringements, the DoJ / FBI going after fraudulent or criminal spams - or the various state antispam laws under…

Hunting Unicorns: Myths and Realities of the Net Neutrality Debate

Comment posted Aug 08, 2008 8:55 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That's well on the way to becoming one of the classic logical fallacies. thanks srs

Comment posted Aug 06, 2008 4:24 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Blame specific practices. Dont blame the tools used for them, or business rationales that motivate these to be used wrongly, or paint them as evil. That kind of tactic is plain FUD and mudslinging rather than rational debate. Not to…

Comment posted Aug 06, 2008 4:21 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And I do wish more of the "NN Squad" types actually knew what they were talking about, or knew packets from a hole in the ground for that matter… 1. Yes there are patently unfair or even wrong ways in…

Deep Packet Inspection: When the Man-In-The-Middle Wants Money

Comment posted Aug 04, 2008 12:11 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And a very useful tool for security. Feel free to blame its abuse if you wish. But dont knock DPI for that.

Is It Time to Create a Market for IPv4 Addresses?

Comment posted Jul 16, 2008 11:20 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/04/a_case_of_network_identity_the_1.html Sure, it is just a few /16s so far (and there's another spammer who managed to get a fresh /15 and two /17s, and sundry other space, from RIPE, pretending to be various DSL networks in eastern europe ..…

Anti-Phishing and Hong Kong

Comment posted Jul 16, 2008 11:52 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
https://www.hkdnr.hk/register/registraion_agreement.jsp especially these. Now, a domain that sells fake stocks, fake pills etc, is used on botnets, and has patently fake whois information would violate at least some of these clauses, thus voiding the contract the registrant had with the…

Comment posted Jul 16, 2008 11:48 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Hi James - Any registrar must do their own due diligence before taking domains down, just that a huge percentage of the domains registered under the .hk ccTLD were by pill spammers, for a long period of time (you dont…

Comment posted Jul 16, 2008 4:43 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
http://www.circleid.com/posts/hk_the_most_unsafe_domains/

Comment posted Jul 16, 2008 3:59 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
They got it from "industry sources" - like us for instance, and like the SURBL blocklist (www.surbl.org). Just like the APWG does. The list wasnt "definitive", trust me. The advantage HKDNR had back then was that most - over 99%…

Google Sued for Selling Ads on Parked Domains and Error Pages

Comment posted Jul 16, 2008 3:44 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
If GOOG withdraws adwords / google ads from ppc on parked domains, there are very few large enough ads players left. Lovely.

Potential Danger Ahead for Registrants: dot-info Abusive Domain Use Policy

Comment posted Jun 23, 2008 3:35 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And having been a postmaster for about a decade now, responsible for blocking and unblocking IPs / domains, and for terminating users (well, managing automatic filtering policies and teams that block IPs/domains and terminate users, at any rate) for a…

Comment posted Jun 22, 2008 7:44 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And they're setting up the REGISTRAR here, with a code of conduct that requires them to do due diligence to prevent spammer / bot / phish etc domains from signing up, and to then take these down.

It's Time to End Domain Name Front Running

Comment posted Jun 22, 2008 7:14 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
As you say in your paper .. After Registration Solutions: 1. Making the ICANN transaction fee (currently $0.20 per year) nonrefundable to names deleted during the registration grace period.[7] 2. Charging a fee for excessive deletions.[8] These two will get…

Potential Danger Ahead for Registrants: dot-info Abusive Domain Use Policy

Comment posted Jun 22, 2008 7:07 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
.info is infested with spammer and botnet domains. Spam is illegal, as are botnets.

It's Time to End Domain Name Front Running

Comment posted Jun 21, 2008 3:34 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Sure, restocking fee increases, reduction / elimination of the AGP will do a lot to blow a hole in kiting (and hell, in domaining as well.. and 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished). But you really shouldnt be putting…

MySpace Wins Big Against Richter?

Comment posted Jun 20, 2008 1:06 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
http://www.47-usc-230c2.org/2008-06-16-application-to-confirm-arbitration-award-OCR.pdf particularly page 59 - The need to award substantial damages is informed by Scott Richter's undisputed admission that he would be willing to pay one million dollars in litigation to make eight million dollars in profit. Like I said,…

Comment posted Jun 18, 2008 6:04 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Finally, why was this dispute in arbitration? I would think MySpace would want to be in front of a jury who could inflict its passion and emotion on Richter? It seems like Richter moved to compel arbitration of the dispute.…

CIRA Creates Backdoor WHOIS Exceptions for Police and IP Owners

Comment posted Jun 14, 2008 9:59 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
http://www.circleid.com/posts/canadian_domain_whois_law_enforcement/

Comment posted Jun 12, 2008 5:22 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well, in my experience, even the fakery tends to follow a specific pattern, which helps tie various domains together to the same scam artist. Please see this paper (submitted to GNSO during the whois consultation process) by OPTA, a dutch…

Comment posted Jun 11, 2008 9:02 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
A lot of spam and cybercrime abuses private or anonymous registration, far more than people legitimately use it - and not all registrars have the clue level CIRA has so that they'd be even more vulnerable. Treating what CIRA did…

Security Research Names Hong Kong and China Most Dangerous Country Domains, Finland Safest

Comment posted Jun 06, 2008 5:28 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Replied to this in a separate circleid post - http://www.circleid.com/posts/hk_the_most_unsafe_domains/

.hk the "Most Unsafe" Domains?

Comment posted Jun 06, 2008 5:22 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
We (outblaze) live in HK - its a great city and I'd hate for it to be considered a bad neighborhood, even online. :)

Are Botnets Run by Spy Agencies?

Comment posted May 18, 2008 11:53 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Ah, the negative fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_proof The last major FUD campaign from the EFF was of course the Dearaol astroturfing, and that, I see, is dead in the water since 2006. I am gratified to note that the EFF hasn't lost…

Call for "ISP Point of Contact" Database for Neutrality "Event" Concerns

Comment posted Apr 09, 2008 3:31 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
As I already told you, Lauren, you wont get ISPs to give you the time of day. You tend to mistake routing outages for network neutrality issues, and you tend to treat ISPs as your enemies. No better way to…

Domain Name Price Jump: Moore's Law or Parkinson's Laws?

Comment posted Apr 04, 2008 2:00 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Do ICANN meetings in as ugly and filthy cities as possible (this lot from Forbes mag would do for a start.. baku, azerbaijan, dhaka, bangladesh, bombay, india etc) http://www.gadling.com/2008/03/16/worlds-25-dirtiest-cities/ See how fast travel gets minimized to the bare essentials.

An Open Letter to Yahoo!'s Postmaster

Comment posted Apr 04, 2008 1:56 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
FYI ASTA and some other initiatives evolved into MAAWG, the Messaging Anti Abuse Working Group (http://www.maawg.org) There are far more best practice documents available now - http://www.maawg.org/about/publishedDocuments Some of them are focused on outbound spam, some on efficient abuse desk…

IPv6 Hour... One, Two, Three, IPv4 Switched Off!

Comment posted Mar 02, 2008 4:24 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So yves, do you have any stats from the v6 hour at apricot TPE? I missed it - the first apricot I missed since 2003 - but this is something I'd love to hear about from as many people who…

European Spam Networks Continue to Surpass Those in U.S.

Comment posted Feb 10, 2008 2:23 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
"Increasing"? Shit, estonia has far more broadband penetration than the USA, and its not like that's the most broadband dense country in europe.

Domain Tasting to Go Away for Real This Time

Comment posted Feb 05, 2008 3:44 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Yeah. And he'd still have to bequeath that domain to several generations of your descendants, have them monetize it with ppc traffic, before they get the money back that they paid for the thing. Unless they can find another sucker^Wdomainer…

Microsoft's Offer to Buy Yahoo: An Anti-Spam Point of View

Comment posted Feb 04, 2008 10:16 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Yahoo has shown remarkably good sense not touching SPF (or senderid) with a bargepole. Being forced into doing it would be a disservice to yahoo users.

Is China Preparing to Go its Own Way with its Own Internet Root?

Comment posted Feb 01, 2008 2:04 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
This is more like "vendor who has political connections enough to flog a dud product" http://www.circleid.com/posts/explaining_chinas_ipv9/

Domain Tasting to Go Away for Real This Time

Comment posted Jan 31, 2008 11:16 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Ah. A kook. If this were usenet I'd have concluded that faster, I guess. Thanks, entertaining read, that faq.

Comment posted Jan 31, 2008 2:30 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
@ Jeffrey A Williams I am sure you realize that what you describe would be too clever by half. You would find yourself in very very deep doo-doo with your credit card issuer if you dispute charges falsely. Especially if…

Comment posted Jan 30, 2008 3:45 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
For the trademark typosquatters, even those that are shell companies in the carribbean and costa rica .. there's stuff like the dell lawsuit. And GOOG cracking down on kited domains is more fun. Nice, two nails (Dell, GOOG) and now…

As of Feb. 11, Google Says It Will Block AdSense from Kited Domains

Comment posted Jan 28, 2008 5:59 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Oh GOOD. Now to crack down on the other forms of chicanery (redirectors and such) that will be tried to get around adsense not being allowed on kited domains. Sooner or later, T.R.A.F.F.I.C is going to end up meeting at…

Google as a Real-time Blackhole List

Comment posted Jan 11, 2008 2:27 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Not a very bright idea. Certainly one that I wouldnt automate. I might possibly look it up to see what it appears to be, reputation-wise, but 1. That's just one metric in a decision 2. It requires human rather than…

Homeland Security Department Was Warned About DNSSEC Key Ownership and Trust Issues

Comment posted Dec 20, 2007 8:20 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
It is "political" as long as people like you politicize it.

Google Blocking 1 Billion Messages a Day; Calls 2007 Spam and Virus Attacks Worst in History

Comment posted Dec 19, 2007 1:26 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well, viruses emitting spam started off with sobig / sober, at least two years before 2006 - shall we say 2004. Those two were the first, crudest version of spam emitting botnets, I'd say.

Comment posted Dec 15, 2007 4:52 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Botnets are networks of infected PCs, usually with broadband Internet connections that are co-opted by hackers and used to send spam and virus attacks. Often they are compromised without their owner's knowledge. We started to see these botnets kick in…

Report on Best and Worst Anti-Phishing Domain Registrars

Comment posted Dec 13, 2007 5:24 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Not the most accurate of studies. And to be frank, Brian Krebs normally doesnt take PR generated cry wolf whitepapers at face value. Oh well, I guess there should have been enough feedback about it [there is some in the…

Taking Down Spammers via Legalization, Regulation and Economics

Comment posted Dec 08, 2007 2:17 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Got news for Gadi - but he really should take a look at http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/ among other places.

Domain Tasting: Big Multifaceted Action on Bad Actors

Comment posted Dec 05, 2007 2:09 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
In which case, my other prediction - about T.R.A.F.F.I.C getting hosted in a Days Inn and catered from the local Wendys would probably come true. Deletion refund and AGP getting eliminated .. ICANN doesnt want to do that either. Any…

Comment posted Dec 04, 2007 2:31 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
What, a slow death? Its a carribbean shell company and the guy being sued is apparently a front man / gofer. The real principals will probably set their next shell company up in outer mongolia or somewhere.

Telecommunications Advocacy: Who's Behind That Blog?

Comment posted Nov 30, 2007 3:28 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I posted this to my blog in September: not about telecom blogs, but yes, about astroturf. And about political blogs in general. 2007.09.24 11.13 The Petraeus ad and my reactions to it Seeing all the noise around this made me…

First in Domain Squatting Cases: Dell Charges Typosquatters as Counterfeiters

Comment posted Nov 30, 2007 3:28 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Prof Froomkin says that quite a few of the kited domains dont even look like a Dell website so it should be fairly hard to prove counterfeiting. My reply on his blog: Umm.. there's no shortage of fake rolexes in…

Spam Kings: Book Review (Part 2)

Comment posted Nov 28, 2007 1:21 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well Terry .. it was an enjoyable read. But a read was all it was. Dig through some nanae threads that discuss the book if you like. http://groups.google.com.my/group/news... srs (who was a nanae regular during all this ancient history)

An Internet Security Operations Viewpoint of IGF

Comment posted Nov 26, 2007 10:06 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well, the OPOC proposal was a horrible mess. The sunset proposal wasnt going to fly all that far .. it was painfully obvious from the start. For a rather better informed take on this, from a law enforcement perspective, take…

Hackers Spreading Malicious Code Using Typosquatted Domains

Comment posted Nov 21, 2007 12:14 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That press release ranks right up there with releases like * The pope is catholic! News at 11 * Bears do crap in the woods, parks official confirms

ICANN CEO: "High Politics" Fueling IGF Debates

Comment posted Nov 14, 2007 1:36 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The Famous Brett Watson said: "The discussion of the role of ICANN has gone on for some time, but there is no consensus for change," Twomey said, adding he felt the discussion distracted from more important issues like providing greater…

Whois: If You Want Privacy, Pay For It

Comment posted Nov 10, 2007 3:01 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Er excuse me, Patrick? If you want privacy there are other alternatives to using those domain privacy schemes. * A PO box / other maildrop * A hotmail account used solely for whois etc etc etc. If you can come…

Google Testing Option to Block Domain Parking Sites

Comment posted Nov 10, 2007 2:46 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Yay. At least some domainers are going to find out how a Days Inn and a Wendy's look like, rather than the Marriott :) About time. Now if only yahoo overture would do this as well, let's see how fast…

ICANN: WHOIS Back to Rathole #0

Comment posted Nov 04, 2007 2:50 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
If not from whois it will get harvested from somewhere else. There's various opinions on how best to secure public posting addresses - expiring mail, web contact forms with captcha etc .. none of them are foolproof. And none of…

Comment posted Nov 04, 2007 2:12 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Larry Seltzer said: Suresh, is this the mess you know or something else? A very well known mess indeed. Some registrars are a favorite with spammers and also offer anonymous whois. The media's latched onto this - but not much…

Getting Rid of Whois

Comment posted Nov 01, 2007 4:23 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Suresh Ramasubramanian said: I have a feeling we are not going to see much consensus on this, for the next several ICANN meetings. This is going to be a spectacularly long "sunset" What do you know, my prediction came true.…

ICANN: WHOIS Back to Rathole #0

Comment posted Nov 01, 2007 4:09 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So whois remains in status quo? Full whois, with the addition of weird and wonderful fakery, domain cloaking etc? Well, better the mess you know than the mess you dont. It is a state of affairs that neither the privacy…

Getting Rid of Whois

Comment posted Oct 31, 2007 1:53 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Even interestingly faked whois has patterns in it that turn out to be very useful indeed. I have a feeling we are not going to see much consensus on this, for the next several ICANN meetings. This is going to…

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

Comment posted Oct 30, 2007 5:42 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
My comments are of course e&oe;the case where one domainer sells to another domainer .. that's part of the endless money circulation scheme that this domain name bubble is. Like ponzi schemes, it doesn't really take too much to make…

Comment posted Oct 30, 2007 5:38 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
jaysen merrick said: I recently purchased a domain name from the guys who own www.assumedomain.com and already have realized my purchase was a good one. Yeah I know they probably paid 15 bucks for the name (I paid 1500.00) Yeah.…

Comment posted Oct 28, 2007 3:19 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That article is umm.. ambiguous. This all making domains a very attractive asset due to its stream of income for an unlimited period*, and it’s possible after-market value. (...) There are many uncertainties*, to many to discuss here, but can…

Comment posted Oct 26, 2007 2:14 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Surviving in a bubble is a fine art .. and knowing exactly when to bail out of one is the acme of that art. Certainly.

WHOIS Redux: Demand Privacy in Domain Name Registration

Comment posted Oct 26, 2007 4:33 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
OPOC - the so-called "operational" model - has enough operational issues in it to make it very non operational indeed. And the people who are making common cause here are doing so for entirely different reasons - IP lawyers and…

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

Comment posted Oct 25, 2007 4:53 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Lots of retirees, who might very well have been smart, clued etc - still end up buying florida swampland, with maybe the brooklyn bridge thrown in to boot. Next, please?

Comment posted Oct 25, 2007 4:03 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
customer said: You are correct in that the price may not justify PPC revenue, but who cares? If you buy conventional property, you'll have alligators too, no? In the case of cyber property, the alligators are very small and don't…

Comment posted Oct 25, 2007 3:02 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
customer said: C'mon! Comparing the purchasing of domains to the tulip craze of 1637? With all due respect, I think this author can't possibly be more wrong! .. for all that, the perceived valuations on most domains held in "portfolios"…

A Consociational Bureau for the Internet Governance Forum

Comment posted Sep 24, 2007 7:09 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I take your point there. The tunis agenda states - the full involvement of governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations I rather suspect a lot of the internet community would squeeze into the "private sector" rather than…

Comment posted Sep 24, 2007 5:44 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The problem you highlight here is that the civil society groups, by and large, have been marching to the beat of their own drum. And while they may be active users of the internet, they have zero idea about how…

Developing Internet Standards: How Can the Engineering Community and the Users Meet?

Comment posted Sep 21, 2007 7:41 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I am sure Milton Mueller considers himself an end user, for one :) To be fair, ALAC does have quite a few clued people, that I respect, on it.

Comment posted Sep 19, 2007 5:23 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Patrick, Milton's totally wrong dnssec in that, as Patrik points out, he simply doesn't realize the trust model involved. Or prefers not to realize it. Authentication and reputation are two entirely different things - and dnssec is like, to use…

Defendants Convicted in 1st Criminal CAN-SPAM Trial

Comment posted Sep 11, 2007 6:54 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Let's put it this way. * A lot of these cases are prosecuted under multiple counts, multiple laws. * CAN-SPAM provides for several "enhancers" - aggravated violations - that often involve criminal acts employed in the sending of spam (forgery,…

If WHOIS Privacy is a Good Idea, Why is it Going Nowhere?

Comment posted Aug 30, 2007 1:25 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Yes, except when the domain registrant is fake, and the opoc is fake as well. Call it an extra layer of obfuscation to fight through. Even there - only natural persons get extended that kind of protection, with business entities…

Another Whois-Privacy Stalemate

Comment posted Aug 26, 2007 7:38 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
There are other people with rather more reasoned opinions: Presentation by OPTA Netherlands on “The Importance of Whois Databases for Spam Enforcement” - http://www.icann.org/presentations/opta-mar-26jun06.pdf Comments from the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) - http://forum.icann.org/lists/whois-services-comments/msg00036.html

Comment posted Aug 24, 2007 7:39 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Oh. So the majority opinion was against whatever opinion you were able to drum up? Interesting. Like I said, there's nothing that stopped half a dozen of your grad students (and various others from your project) from calling in to…

New Paper Discusses Global City TLD's in the Public Interest

Comment posted Aug 23, 2007 5:39 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
There is of course the minor matter of which of several cities with the same name get the city tld. Madras in India? Madras in Oregon?

Another Whois-Privacy Stalemate

Comment posted Aug 23, 2007 6:39 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
and from the IGP blog post - They tried to whittle down the shielding of data to natural persons whose internet activities were completely noncommercial in nature. Yeah. That is how it works, anywhere else in the world. In reality,…

How Spammers Get Around SPF

Comment posted Aug 22, 2007 3:19 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
You can’t use the SPF records published by spammers to build a blacklist, as you can’t trust data from spammers. Oh but you can, and very well too .. AFTER you crosscheck manually and see stuff like reverse dns pointing…

Phishers Now Targeting Domain Registrars

Comment posted Aug 09, 2007 11:12 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I’ve since read of people who have forwarded that same email to Go Daddy. I’ve yet to see any response from them as of this post, although I’m sure they’re on top of it. Godaddy is part of the anti…

CAN-SPAM Defendant Awarded $111k in Fees/Costs: Gordon v. Virtumundo

Comment posted Aug 08, 2007 6:45 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Y'know, the gordon v/s virtumundo case seems more like 1. Professional plaintiff 2. Didnt do his homework in the case Whether that case was on spam, or on one of the more usual happy hunting grounds for ambulance chasers -…

Phishers Now Targeting Domain Registrars

Comment posted Aug 08, 2007 6:38 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
There is a lot of "take" in a registry + hosting facility that a phisher will find attractive, besides the scenarios you and Ed mentioned. 1. Access to the user's ID / name / address / CC etc stored in…

MSN Messenger is Censoring .info Domains

Comment posted Aug 07, 2007 2:04 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
gpmgroup.com said: There's a lot of FUD with regards .info & spam Well, I do agree that right now .info is not the flavor of the month that it was wrt spam domains - or .biz either. But make no…

Comment posted Aug 07, 2007 9:06 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That's no more censorship than spam filtering is censorship of email. They do need to be a bit less overbroad, perhaps, but given the horrible state of infestation that .info has (a few ccTLDs are in even worse state, I…

DotAsia Auctions Aim to Address Problems of the Past

Comment posted Jul 29, 2007 1:00 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Thanks for the note. It certainly might be a good idea to declare your affiliation (Zenogroup, PR consultant / spokesperson for pool.com, as a quick google search shows) more clearly though, in such a post.

The Cold-War Fight Against Domaining Continues

Comment posted Jul 03, 2007 9:12 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
You know when the domaining industry has problems? It is when people like Levine, who have zero stake in it and couldnt care less whether it thrives or dies, are quite certain that it will eventually die. Forget Gandhi there,…

Squeegee Domains

Comment posted Jun 27, 2007 6:38 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Adam Strong said: Why don't you guys gather together your brain power and put together something that solves the problem To start with, perhaps, have ICANN get rid of Add Grace?

Comment posted Jun 26, 2007 2:41 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Snoopy said: Or perhaps you missed the boat early on with domains? Am I on the right track here or is there another reason for your post? John is one of the very few people in the world where I'd…

Comment posted Jun 25, 2007 6:39 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Notional values assigned to any good - like for example all the "ifs" in your reply over there - have a nasty way of disappearing, suddenly. Or turning out to be much less than you think they're worth.

Comment posted Jun 25, 2007 6:04 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Kevin Ohashi said: How is it any different from me clicking on a search engine result? I clicked on something that sounded like what I wanted versus typed it into a browser bar and added .com to it? "Informed Consent"…

Comment posted Jun 25, 2007 5:23 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Kevin Ohashi said: As far as the defense of typo/tm names, depends on the typo. Even some typo names are defensible, are you going to argue flickr.com is a typo of flicker? If the typo term is generic and it…

Comment posted Jun 25, 2007 4:38 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Frank Michlick said: John, I have to agree with Kevin here. Domain Monetization is not necessarily based on typo domains. And while you might not do so, users do indeed type in generic domains such as stocks.com and videocameras.com to…

Comment posted Jun 25, 2007 4:22 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Squeegee Men it is. Wonderful meme there, John. srs (waiting for TRAFFIC to get hosted at Days Inn and catered by Wendys)

Opt-In Permission for Mailing Lists: Is It Enough?

Comment posted Jun 22, 2007 10:04 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well Neil. I am sure you have enough independent numbers to verify what is just empirical observation, but I've found that single optin lists do have an appreciably higher rate of complaints. The rate gets even higher (and moves very…

Petition Launched on YouChoose.net Against Domain Name Parking

Comment posted Jun 22, 2007 10:00 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Right. A lot of things that combine to make T.R.A.F.F.I.C start getting hosted at a Days Inn and ordering food from Wendy's once the bottom drops out of this market. Domain names are the tulip bulbs of this decade, looks…

The New Hong Kong Anti-Spam Law, and a Small Fly in the Ointment

Comment posted Jun 07, 2007 11:20 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Ale said: If we value the Internet, participating in mailing lists, contacting anyone in the globe directly, and publishing our email addresses are part of its value. Governments wishing to sacrifice that on the ephemeral altar of a negligible business…

Comment posted Jun 04, 2007 4:49 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Eric Goldman said: I think this cost-accounting for spam is incomplete. See here. Eric. Read some more of your paper. I must disagree with most of its conclusions. The 7-8% of people surveyed purchased items sold in spam, and that…

Comment posted Jun 04, 2007 4:29 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Saw. An interesting perspective. But the economic harm caused [1] is very easy to underestimate [2] Is not the only reason to regulate spam

Discussion at the Internet Governance Forum in Geneva

Comment posted Jun 03, 2007 4:48 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
IGF? Not by itself. It certainly doesnt have a mandate to do anything of the sort. However, getting all the relevant people together in the same room tends to speed up the process, if at least through backchannel contacts first. …

IGF Preparatory Meeting: A Score Draw in Geneva

Comment posted Jun 01, 2007 4:27 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
There is a problem there. You are approaching the IGF with an entirely divergent viewpoint to what the authoritarian governments you have cited are approaching it, wrt management of critical internet resources. And the IGF has been structured without any…

Domain Speculation: Attack of the TechnoPinkos

Comment posted May 27, 2007 2:36 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
But, my main question is, how do “billion dollar portfolios vanish” if domain tasting is eliminated, as you said above? You mean a billion dollars worth of domains at $10 a pop? Or a bunch of fewer domains with a…

IGF Preparatory Meeting: A Score Draw in Geneva

Comment posted May 27, 2007 2:33 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I was in GVA for the cluster of wsis events, though I only stayed for the security workshop and then the access workshop the day after that - the IGF consultation meeting was too late in the week. There's enough…

Domain Speculation: Attack of the TechnoPinkos

Comment posted May 25, 2007 5:35 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Building up a portfolio of carefully selected domains over years .. you have naturally dropped the domains you dont need and actually paid for the rest. And most of the random typosquats / randomly named domains go right away. That's…

Comment posted May 25, 2007 5:33 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Darn, where'd that last line go? T.R.A.F.F.I.C would have to move to the peoria days inn (oh, and food from the Wendy's next door) if icann abolished add grace. Levine's http://www.circleid.com/posts/domain_in_bad_taste/ is well worth reading.

Comment posted May 25, 2007 5:30 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The problem I have with the kind of domaining you describe is just the same as John Levine has with it. There's a previous post on circleid where he compared this with setting up a condiments business by grabbing the…

ICANN's At-Large Process: Exit, Without Voice

Comment posted May 23, 2007 6:10 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well, there seems to be a new "structure" emerging to see what it can do - some people have been harping on RALOs as the new feature of the at large model, have to see how it goes.

Vint Cerf on the Diminishing Novelty of Internet

Comment posted May 19, 2007 4:37 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So Kieren, did the sub editor anticipate things and is ICANN going to extend the deadline again after Friday? :)

When Domain Names Aren't Enough

Comment posted Apr 03, 2007 12:44 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Hold on, are we talking about IDN keywords here? That's very very old, in Japan / Korea. And there's enough vendors there with enough market share that they're not the happiest of campers at IDN coming along to put them…

Comment posted Mar 31, 2007 3:29 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
For once, the japanese are behind the curve. Pill spammers routinely send out image spam that's a screenshot of a browser, with a URL (the pill spam URL) typed in, and the URL is circled in red. There's hashbusting dots…

ICANN Discussing Domain Registrar Crackdown

Comment posted Mar 26, 2007 4:32 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I do hope they do something about registrars who seem to exclusively host spammer / botnet domains. Having some kind of mechanism that's streamline this, make it far faster, would be a good thing to do. http://www.silicon.com/research...

XXX Comes to a Head

Comment posted Mar 10, 2007 5:47 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The way you’ve argued things, that we should not listen to affected parties (you call them “their competitors” or “those shouting the loudest”, but it’s certainly more than that), it would justify ANYONE putting forth an application over the howls…

Social Networking and Web 2.0 Creating DNS Performance Issues for Carriers

Comment posted Mar 08, 2007 8:05 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Oh one other thing - does product placement (like the CEO of a DNS server vendor making statements that knock a competing product) really have a place on circleid? Quote from the original article below, with a lot of the…

Why I left the ICANN At Large Advisory Committee

Comment posted Mar 07, 2007 11:10 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Hi Adam - yes I'm aware the meetings are hosted free of charge - and certainly appreciate the gracious gesture of the governments that have agreed to host IGF. However, please consider that a "greatest good of the greatest number"…

Social Networking and Web 2.0 Creating DNS Performance Issues for Carriers

Comment posted Mar 07, 2007 7:04 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Have you actually correlated the frequency of myspace / social networking site dns queries from a particular IP with subsequent explosions in query traffic to other sites? And since quite a lot of the content on the internet gets served…

Why I left the ICANN At Large Advisory Committee

Comment posted Mar 07, 2007 2:44 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
IGF has a lot of commonalities with ICANN - 1. Academics with biased agendas (semipro) 2. A large "civil society" crowd - again what John calls semipros - most of which alternate slogan shouting with scarfing down spoonfuls of caviar…

Entrepreneurs Profiting From Free Domains

Comment posted Feb 20, 2007 4:22 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Returning clothes after using them for a party - not as good an analogy as the one John Levine used in http://www.circleid.com/posts/domain_in_bad_taste/ - it is more like running a condiment business by scooping up free ketchup packets from every diner…

EURid Tightens Control on .eu Domain Names

Comment posted Jan 25, 2007 4:10 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Bah. Nothing at all to do with spam .. just a very obvious workaround to keep kiters and squatters off .eu in future

Microsoft Choking Domain Parking Business Practices?

Comment posted Jan 12, 2007 2:40 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Let us examine intent here. Is MS' intent 1. Getting into the typo monetization racket themselves and using their near monopoly on the browser market to crowd others out? or 2. Participate in what they see as brand / trademark…

Comment posted Jan 12, 2007 6:44 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
R-o-s-e-b-u-d Whether this is a Citizen Gates move by Microsoft or not .. as long as they make typosquatting unpopular, that's quite fine This is going to turn into a very interesting way to ruin the domain monetization racket, I…

Earthquake in Asia, Spam Plummets

Comment posted Dec 29, 2006 4:59 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Brett's figures are way off base from being in a state with less than 2% asian population, and the total population of WY being less than that of just washington, DC .. the population of that one horse burg he…

Domain Registrations Hit 112 Million

Comment posted Dec 24, 2006 3:18 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Clear with the expansion of registrable characters exploding from the current 37 to something well in excess of 50,000 to many the dot com name space is suddenly going to feel an awful lot less crowded. You mean the kiters…

Domain Tasting in the Spotlight

Comment posted Dec 17, 2006 1:54 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> These issues aside, there is growing pressure on ICANN > to do something about domain tasting. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, and that's sure to give Moniker and other [tasters|kiters|squatters] out there some serious heartburn. Go for…

Europeans Moderate GAC Principles, But...

Comment posted Dec 13, 2006 3:02 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Too bad there wasnt a consensus on it eh? Not likely to be any consensus in Lisbon either .. till which time status quo (full whois data) is maintained. Have privacy in whois if you need to - but if…

How India's .IN Domain Rouses from its Slumber

Comment posted Dec 01, 2006 11:24 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
eNom, Directi etc all offer .in domains now. If you see a registrar you recognize, rather than a hole in the wall outfit, then feel free to use it.

Release of IE7, Firefox 2.0 Will Drive Significant IDN Demand

Comment posted Nov 19, 2006 2:57 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I just remembered something about "netpia" and "legal action against microsoft". They've been talking about this since at least 2005. There was this post on circleid from "Jason S", who posted some really vague sounding "concerns" about IDNs, praised keywords…

Comment posted Nov 17, 2006 7:36 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
My heart bleeds for netpia, I'm sure. Unless netpia had some kind of contract with Microsoft where Microsoft committed itself to supporting keywords, I don't see on what grounds they can sue Microsoft for bringing out a browser version that…

ITU Expressing Its Own Claim to Legitimacy

Comment posted Nov 14, 2006 10:12 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Might be a good idea to read Utsumi-san's speech as transcribed - http://www.intgovforum.org/IGF-OpeningSession-301006.txt However, I do not share the perspective of those who argue that Internet Governance is just a developing-country problem. I disagree, because the basis of this perspective…

Assault on State Censorship at the IGF

Comment posted Nov 12, 2006 6:14 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That's part of the reason why I follow up to his "position papers". People might actually end up believing them. Which wouldn't be a very good thing at all. Ditto my responses to various EFF people, whenever they start up…

Comment posted Nov 12, 2006 2:18 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Veni, the funny thing is .. > Let me explain to you what I wrote. Obviously you > are the only one who interpreted what I wrote the > way you did Milton likes to say what he thinks other…

Comment posted Nov 11, 2006 7:26 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well said, Veni. ps: Milton, I don't really recall my question in your "panel" on "dns root zone governance" (the one with a long fishing expedition into whether dnssec was a governance issue) getting answered at all. What I asked…

EFF and Its Use of Propaganda: Could Karl Rove do better? Probably

Comment posted Oct 28, 2006 3:31 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I note with some schadenfreude that dearaol.com is dead in the water. And AOL is still using goodmail. And Granny still isn't paying to send email. The last post on that blog (5/9/06) signed off with: > AOL's silence in…

ICANN Board to Vote on Domain Tasting Measure

Comment posted Oct 22, 2006 2:07 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
It is numbers you must limit then, I guess? And/or preventing the automated creation and surrender of thousands of domains at a time? Assuming you want to keep tasters / kiters / whatever off your registrar that is.

What is Anti-Spam?

Comment posted Oct 19, 2006 6:03 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Hector, for a lot of proposed antispam solutions, particularly those that argue that smtp must be replaced, I'd strongly encourage the proposers to read http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html I've had my share of words with the EFF on their standpoint on spam filtering…

Spamming the News Cycle: Spamhaus Non-Story Goes Viral

Comment posted Oct 14, 2006 8:33 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
* Spamhaus sticks people like e360 Insight on its blacklist because under UK law they are spammers [..] US law some of these spammers are not breaking the law. Spamhaus lists based on sending of unsolicited bulk email. Not based…

ICANN Ordered by Illinois Court to Suspend Spamhaus.org

Comment posted Oct 11, 2006 11:41 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
ICANN's response - as expected http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-10oct06.htm [...] Please note that ICANN is not a party to this action and no order has been issued in this matter requiring any action by ICANN. Additionally, ICANN cannot comply with any order requiring…

ICANN and the DOC

Comment posted Oct 02, 2006 1:13 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Brett: Suffice to say I'm sure a balance can be struck, but there shouldn't be total anonymity in whois. Even with substantial initiatives taken by ICANN (and there are, effectively, none at present) to make registrars crack down on abusive…

Comment posted Oct 01, 2006 6:12 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Given the turn this thread has been taking, people coming to the IGF might take a look at this session - http://info.intgovforum.org/yoppy.php?poj=20 Human Rights and the Internet: how anonymous can and should we be?, organized by the The Council of…

Comment posted Oct 01, 2006 5:44 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Milton - do me a favor and tell me what difference (or use to an email / filtering admin) you can see between a bunch of domains with whois records M.Mouse (mickey.mouse@example.com) 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington DC and when all…

Comment posted Sep 30, 2006 1:00 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well said, George And Susan - if you increase whois privacy (and that is, by itself not a bad thing at all) you'll need to have enough ICANN policy and enough work done with registrars that there's a clear and…

China Building Its Own IPv6, Reducing Country's Foreign Dependency

Comment posted Sep 26, 2006 12:31 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
What's [also] being discussed here, besides v6, is CNGI, the Chinese version of Internet2. CNGI is all v6. Nothing new though. CNGI has been around for quite some time and you'll find them at apnic meetings [and nanogs too I…

Why We Need to Find Solutions on Internet Governance As Soon As Possible

Comment posted Aug 30, 2006 12:55 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
What you said was correct too, Ram .. [and well said, Brett] A lot of the criticism that is floating around the wgig is due to a complete misunderstanding of the way the root servers work and are run. Some…

Will Splogs Kill .INFO Domains?

Comment posted Aug 28, 2006 1:37 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Googlespamming is getting to be a nuisance - but .biz and .info are already widely enough abused by email spammers that finding those in a URL, in email, tends to get that email a fairly high score in spamassassin. Or…

How Could the Internet be Governed: Perspective from Bulgaria

Comment posted Aug 23, 2006 11:15 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Hi Veni Interesting article Quoting Milton Mueller - > While IGP’s official filing offered a detailed rationale for > that position, the IGP website provided a simple means for > individual Internet users to transmit that message to the USG.…

Nominet Takes Action Against Domain Name Tasting

Comment posted Aug 09, 2006 8:54 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
.. and action against abusive tasting seems to be in a very early stage now. Well, it'll grow, and fast. My compliments to Nominet.

Conflict of Opinion

Comment posted Jul 29, 2006 2:18 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Edit it to suit your taste. Let's see what the domainers have to say .. a wikipedia edit war is a fun thing when it lasts :)

Comment posted Jul 29, 2006 2:10 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> And finally, WTF is a “domainer”? This is a new one to me. > Can it really be a word if there’s no Wikipedia entry for it? A domainer? Well, he's what your reader would describe as a legitimate…

Comment posted Jul 27, 2006 2:49 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
given the complex nature of posts in this forum, as you say, you probably realize that it is a forum for discussion, not for getting work done for free.

74,000 .eu Domain Names Suspended, Registrars Accused of Stockpiling

Comment posted Jul 25, 2006 2:55 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Fantastic news. Hope to see more such busts of squatters ..

Domain Tasting Target of US Federal Cybersquatting Lawsuit

Comment posted Jun 29, 2006 12:34 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Remind me to buy the next aussie regulator I meet a beer. Cracking down on some of the more unethical aspects of domain kiting (typosquatting, brand squatting in keywords or elsewhere) is something that needs to be done, and fast.

Conflict of Opinion

Comment posted Jun 22, 2006 7:35 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
What you describe - third level redirection of typo domains - is a bad idea - whoever does it. And I'm not pointing specific fingers. I'm just pointing out one very simple thing - a lot of the domaining is…

Comment posted Jun 22, 2006 5:45 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
But wait! You mean I should pay scumbag cybersquatters to advertise my own stuff? Well, I was in New York City last week, and you can’t walk two blocks without running to some scruffy character wearing a sign on his…

Send a Message to NTIA

Comment posted Jun 17, 2006 4:14 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I'm all for sending reasoned feedback in to NTIA. Only thing I'm not for is to run a campaign to have people copy and paste boilerplate comments for the NTIA. 1. You aren't going to generate nearly enough critical mass…

Comment posted Jun 15, 2006 6:45 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Just my point. Encourage people to respond to NTIA by all means. Don't feed them boilerplate, encourage them to click a link and paste that boilerplate in. You want responses from thinking people, not ignorant sheep, if you need these…

Comment posted Jun 15, 2006 1:53 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Any reason why you need to get people to astroturf the NTIA when there are enough people to submit regular, quite valid comments? And any expectation that having people astroturf NTIA with the very same boilerplate is going to produce…

Domain Tasting Target of US Federal Cybersquatting Lawsuit

Comment posted Jun 11, 2006 1:25 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So, Karl - was pushing "add grace" through a creation of ICANN's staff? Or ICANN's law firm? And why fire the law firm for a staff decision that was probably made in all good faith at that time?

Comment posted Jun 10, 2006 3:52 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So domain kiters are handing that 600K for five days to VRSN out of the goodness of their hearts? Or just for the pleasure of pumping up VRSN's balance sheets? If kited domains account for over 90% of registrations, that…

Comment posted Jun 08, 2006 1:53 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well .. we run one of the SURBL URI blocklist zones (www.surbl.org) and we pick up something like 800..1200 brand new domains a day that are referenced in spam. I havent done a real deep study but pulling out whois…

Comment posted Jun 08, 2006 2:47 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Spammers have been spamming using brand new domains for quite some time (months, at least) - and in some cases, in active collusion with registrars and resellers / setting themselves up as resellers. Creating thousands of throwaway domains at a…

Comment posted Jun 07, 2006 12:15 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Speaking of kiters and spammers .. http://www.vnunet.com/articles/print/2157582 Domain 'kiting' threat on the rise Scammers using 'disposable domains' for criminal gain Matt Chapman, vnunet.com 05 Jun 2006 The proliferation of temporary websites being set up by criminals is a growing threat,…

Comment posted Jun 05, 2006 4:04 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So, a website that is mostly setup to sell, say, a generic, unbranded toilet paper, is allowed to stuff words like "charmin", "kleenex" etc into the keywords for their website, whether or not they actually sell those, just so that…

Comment posted Jun 05, 2006 3:11 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
OK - can someone produce a fact or two? The lawsuit seems to - according to the CNET article - allege that a Dotster employee "Scott Fish" tried to sell a Nieman Marcus rep one of those typo'd domains, for…

Comment posted Jun 05, 2006 2:23 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
John - with retail advertising that advertised NM, obviously? I am not sure if NM would have been too happy if VRSN had stuffed those sitefinder'd typo domains with ads for Macy's, or for mortgages for that matter. Ram's just…

Comment posted Jun 04, 2006 7:42 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I wonder how far that VC $$ will go when faced with multi million dollar lawsuits from IPR lawyers. I am sure there are reputable players (for some value of reputable, at any rate) in that industry - and if…

Comment posted Jun 04, 2006 7:32 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
:) If I've seen one thing for the decade or so that I've been looking at this stuff, have a bunch of people doing anything at all and someone will start a conference on it.

Comment posted Jun 04, 2006 7:07 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Fighting abusive registrations is going to be easy initially, especially using "search and destroy" to terminate all domains registered by a known speculator / domain kiter in one clean sweep. The more unethical kiters will go deeper underground, probably to…

Comment posted Jun 04, 2006 1:25 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
As John Levine pointed out in his article "In bad taste: * The grace period is being massively abused so that it is costing registries significant amounts of money to deal with this abuse * As far as I can…

ITU Launches IDN Survey and ccTLD Outreach

Comment posted Jun 03, 2006 12:57 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Please read what I said earlier. The survey does provide raw data, as do other ITU surveys before this .. but there's far more value in the analyzed and edited final output.

Comment posted Jun 02, 2006 9:44 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That's great. You know something, Ram? If you point to a survey and say you're concerned its going to be spin doctored, it just might be a good idea to say that the people doing that survey are not the…

Comment posted Jun 02, 2006 8:42 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Ram - you said: My concern is that real data will be lost in editing, and we will end up in simply having a spin-doctored version of reality And that is a quite valid concern - but my question was,…

Comment posted Jun 02, 2006 4:43 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Such a report would indeed be useful, especially if the actual > survey responses are provided “as-is” and not editorialized. My > concern is that real data will be lost in editing, and we will end > up in…

EFF and Its Use of Propaganda: Could Karl Rove do better? Probably

Comment posted Jun 01, 2006 3:50 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I will be the first man to say that bad and even grossly incompetent spam filtering exists. That shouldnt give EFF the excuse to beat up on all spam filtering in general. regards -srs ps - I've found AOL quite…

Why ICANN Nominating Committee Has Difficulty Finding Directors

Comment posted May 25, 2006 3:16 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
You missed my point, Ram. ICANN has some great people working for it on the board, now and earlier as well. My point is simply that the entire workflow could do with some substantial amounts of improvement, including what Veni…

Comment posted May 25, 2006 2:45 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Ram, please dont tell me this hasn't yet occured to current or former board members? Quite a few of them have years of senior management experience, some in companies that have a turnover of several million dollars, at least. What…

Comment posted May 25, 2006 1:52 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Perhaps the critics should apply for the > board? And do some real work for a change? :) > Or I should go to join the staff. Ah, that's an idea.

Comment posted May 25, 2006 1:25 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Er Veni .. I'd be interested in finding out who else can do this. On their own time and money. You're either very rich and socially conscious, already traveling such a lot that ICANN wont make more than a small…

EFF and Its Use of Propaganda: Could Karl Rove do better? Probably

Comment posted May 25, 2006 5:34 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I've not got a very good opinion of moveon.org or their emailing policies .. but well, that bit about "cancer patients" is rather stupider than their usual stuff. This dearaol campaign is starting to fizzle out - so I guess…

Comment posted May 24, 2006 3:48 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I know the people who implement AOL's antispam policy I have also seen more than 5 years worth of similar propaganda on the spam issue from the EFF For the answer to that question - poke around circleid for older…

Why ICANN Nominating Committee Has Difficulty Finding Directors

Comment posted May 23, 2006 2:06 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So given Valdis' comments about kernel development, and Veni's breakup of the time he's got to spend doing ICANN related work Is there any workflow management or optimization called for here, so that ICANN governance and day to day operational…

Comment posted May 20, 2006 2:04 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Veni - governments are going to have a substantial role, like it or not. It is like that old question - "where does a 800 pound gorilla sleep?". Answer - "wherever it wants to" :) But seriously they do have…

EFF and Its Use of Propaganda: Could Karl Rove do better? Probably

Comment posted May 17, 2006 4:18 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Oh I read it all right. And I've been having a fairly longish conversation with Danny on politech about it. Check www.politechbot.com for that lot.

Wall Street Journal Article on Whois Privacy

Comment posted May 05, 2006 12:19 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Sounds like a great thing for afilias to take the lead on, then.

Comment posted May 04, 2006 3:22 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Registrar policy enforcement is probably the weakest link in trying to fight net abuse right now The problem is of course not the ISPs, registrars etc that do take action, it is those that just dont bother to do so.…

Comment posted May 03, 2006 6:40 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
WRT your comment on Levine's post - What is interesting is that aggressive and automated domain tasting seems to occur almost exclusively through just a handful of registrars (I should know). You'll find that a handful of registrars are a…

Comment posted May 03, 2006 6:37 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Its not rocket science. And a substantial part of it is building automated fraud warning systems. It is not just the small shops by the way. You'll find very large registrars that have huge numbers of spammer / botnet etc…

Comment posted Apr 30, 2006 11:38 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
And spam fighting as well - I've had it up to here with botnets being setup that cycle through a few hundred brand new domains a week. Have whois privacy if you want, but as a necessary corollary, have registrars…

Governments Need to Pass More Anti-Spam Laws, Says OECD

Comment posted Apr 22, 2006 11:05 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
It is a quite well produced doc .. definitely worth a read. I contributed a background paper to this, on Spam Problems in Developing Economies. This was in early 2005 and I am impressed with the amount of other material…

Fighting Over the Scraps from ICANN's Table

Comment posted Apr 19, 2006 12:41 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Even reasoned views may not take, if the tone is either mildly sarcastic or stridently critical :) Yes ICANN should definitely hear from the Internet community at large. But if the Internet community at large starts developing consensus on anything…

Comment posted Apr 15, 2006 10:34 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Its not just that we see the same criticism and the same griping. A lot of the commentary does seem either kooky, or edge case, or both. No surprise, given that most of the commentary is either "I'm going to…

Finding Good ICANN Board Candidates

Comment posted Apr 14, 2006 6:03 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Hi Ram With all due respect to the people you had in mind when you wrote that - 1. The people who expect to be invited are absolutely wrong as candidates - they'll have more hubris / arrogance, and be…

California Frets about Goodmail Email

Comment posted Apr 09, 2006 10:03 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Esther Dyson v/s Danny O'Brien, moderated by Mitch Kapor. Should prove "interesting". I'm sure they could do with a few alternate viewpoints, that are rather more informed than the ones they usually trot out on this or any other spam…

China's MII Publishes New Email Regulations

Comment posted Mar 12, 2006 1:34 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Nothing that'd interest the icann watchers, or the icann bashers in that lot. China seems to be moving towards an optin law - and that comes as a pleasant surprise. Let's see how far they carry its enforcement.

The Future of Some Email May Not Use Email

Comment posted Mar 08, 2006 2:11 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Well, Goodmail’s first announcement was that it > would degrade, that the other whitelist programs > would be phased out. They later retracted that > statement. But surely one must wonder about the > risk when you see statements…

Comment posted Mar 02, 2006 2:29 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I have heard from all over the place that moveon sent that petition about goodmail out to quite a few million users. And they got what - 1500 odd people signing it? Even with a carefully written petition that adds…

Internet Governance: An Antispam Perspective

Comment posted Feb 21, 2006 5:06 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Er… i'm sorry to rain on your parade, but I got news for you. PAYPAL HAS AN SPF RECORD. Does that stop you from getting paypal phishes? And what role do the rest of the non spf based rulesets in…

Comment posted Feb 21, 2006 3:14 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So - citibank.com has a spf record. What stops phishers from registering c1t1b4nk.com and publishing an spf record for it? "Reputation". SPF's been touted as a whole lot of things so far. Unfortunately for it, as it turns out in…

Comment posted Feb 17, 2006 4:57 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Poor choice of words Or a well chosen choice of words .. if Meng was out to troll circleid. I'd say he's succeeded, brilliantly. And hooked lots of people.

Comment posted Feb 17, 2006 2:04 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Brad—email is a long long way from default deny. And content is - mostly - not an issue (except for truly illegal content that's internationally recognized as criminal .. child porn and warez for example) Unsolicited Bulk [and/or Commercial] Email…

Comment posted Feb 16, 2006 4:16 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I wish it were that easy. Replacing smtp, or signing everything with s/mime - neither of these is the FUSSP (final ultimate solution to the spam problem) .. http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html Some that seem particularly applicable - knows-SMTP-4 You know that SMTP…

Comment posted Feb 15, 2006 4:57 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
But meng, how or why do you posit that email is moving towards default deny? Some dnsbls blocking everything they can see? Nobody with a lick of sense uses them on a truly production mail system. Or is it cisco's…

EFF on Goodmail: Further Confusing an Already Confused Issue

Comment posted Feb 13, 2006 2:59 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Eric, sometimes, new IT manager or not, it's probably rather cheaper and more useful for the bank to pay a reputation vendor of some kind and possibly use a path agnostic auth system like domainkeys / dkim, or goodmail for…

Comment posted Feb 13, 2006 2:06 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Eric, I guess you're just lucky to have a bank that's clueful enough to know how to handle email. My bank (HSBC in Hong Kong) just doesn't send me any email at all. Any communication I have with them is…

Comment posted Feb 13, 2006 1:40 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I would stop far short of calling goodmail blackmail / extortion / goodfellas. Their current monopoly is that they're the "sole third party reputation vendor" - or in goodmail's crypto based approach, they're a CA for a trust / reputation…

Comment posted Feb 12, 2006 1:23 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Looks like the EFF party line is that this is basically blackmail. Now Brad Templeton is on the shakedown theme as well .. http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200602/msg00107.html Then there's cindy's followup on IP, talking about why she thinks its blackmail - http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200602/msg00091.html As…

Comment posted Feb 12, 2006 12:57 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Domainkeys (and most likely DKIM when it comes through the IETF process) is a solid and well designed authentication mechanism. There's no element of reputation there - reputation of a sender that signs with DK is determined by the recipient…

Challenges in Anti-Spam Efforts

Comment posted Feb 11, 2006 4:07 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
My article in circleid on this issue - http://www.circleid.com/posts/...

Comment posted Feb 10, 2006 3:40 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Eric, there's a minor problem here. A lack of understanding of terminology that AOL people used. Quoted well out of context, In a lobbying group where the people participating in it dont like spam filtering all that much, and see…

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

Comment posted Feb 04, 2006 5:49 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
OK. Two different things getting compared here, I'm afraid. Returnpath - standard "build good relationships with ISPs, and act as a mediator between senders and ISPs, help senders to improve their bulk mailing practices" etc. Goodmail - E-stamping with elements…

WIPO Crowing Again About "Cybersquatting"

Comment posted Feb 03, 2006 11:19 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Wendy - thanks. Was just setting the stage for a rather more serious question. Are the faults you see, that need fixing 1. In WIPO 2. In the UDRP 3. In WIPO's implementation of the UDRP And where would the…

AOL and Goodmail: Two Steps Back for Email

Comment posted Feb 03, 2006 11:02 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
If the original post that triggered this thread was based on this rather inaccurate clickz article .. I would suggest that Returnpath talk to AOL's postmasters (Charles Stiles, who was quoted in the article, would be a good person to…

WIPO Crowing Again About "Cybersquatting"

Comment posted Feb 02, 2006 4:20 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
If the WIPO wants to take stricter steps than they do on cybersquatters and typosquatters, I am all for it. How good an idea is it, though, to point at individual bad judgements, and use that to criticize this? I've…

IPv6: Extinction, Evolution or Revolution?

Comment posted Jan 13, 2006 4:15 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
As Ed Lewis pointed out - there's no "killer app" that's driving v6 adoption .. nothing that can't be done over existing v4 networks. High amounts of hype from IPv6 advocates make an interesting constrast to less than visible performance…

Europe is to the US Controlled GPS as Europe is to the US Controlled DNS Root?

Comment posted Jan 09, 2006 10:56 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Very good points. But those are second or third level tld issues at best. ITU's country codes for numbering in each country might be compared to what is served by the roots - 1 for the USA, 91 for India…

Splitting the Root: It's Too Late

Comment posted Jan 05, 2006 2:30 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
You didnt understand John too well, did you? He's saying that a lot of this is possible with the canonical set of root servers, doesnt need no steenkin' alternate roots. Extending his analogy of AAA tollfree numbers routed to the…

Europe is to the US Controlled GPS as Europe is to the US Controlled DNS Root?

Comment posted Dec 31, 2005 5:49 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The issue is not the tiny little zone with 250 entries. Its all the sub zones that branch off from that. And the necessity of maintaining global uniqueness in domains so that you dont get any number of alternate roots…

Comment posted Dec 30, 2005 9:12 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Karl, you've been around long enough to remember how this stuff started - people maintaining static hosts.txt files and ftp'ing them across. People soon realized that didnt work too well (again, mainly for the reasons people keep pointing to, for…

Comment posted Dec 30, 2005 5:27 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
OK, two different types of positioning systems. Fine. Different encodings for TV signals (PAL, SECAM, etc). Fine again. They can work just fine and dont interfere with each other. Now could you please stop trotting out those bad analogies to…

The Problem With Wikis

Comment posted Dec 21, 2005 1:39 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
paid? probably the best way to go is to find volunteer wiki admins who can be trusted to have a free, fair attitude plus operate with a light hand. it'd build a sense of community there, something that ICANN would…

Splitting the Root: It's Too Late

Comment posted Dec 04, 2005 1:13 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So John, does IDN development inevitably lead to a split root? Right now there's this massive split in the implementations (keywords, anyone?), and a complete lack of standardization in character set for various languages. Makes the situation even more confusing…

The WSIS Deal

Comment posted Nov 24, 2005 11:14 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The GAC has representatives from vaious governments. And so does the proposed IGF. There is little or nothing that stops various governments from nominating representatives to GAC who will put forward the same points of view that are put forward…

Five More Years! There Was No "Deal" and WSIS Resolved Nothing

Comment posted Nov 24, 2005 11:07 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Few countries, though, have a well thought out Internet plan especially on policy angles And as evidenced by some of those countries you quote, as well as many others .. that doesnt stop them from making policies and thinking out…

Questioning the Illusion of Internet Governance

Comment posted Nov 22, 2005 1:59 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I know it is scary but it is quite possible, you'll agree. For a more detailed discussion on these please check out the articles by Geoff Huston / Paul Wilson / Tom Vest in the IP addressing and Internet Governance…

Comment posted Nov 19, 2005 7:52 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
3. I read your post—not exactly clear what you’re saying. I had some contact with KRNIC and JPRS officials in the past re IDNs, so I do have something of an understanding of IP policy in those countries. Well -…

Five More Years! There Was No "Deal" and WSIS Resolved Nothing

Comment posted Nov 18, 2005 2:33 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well, I sort of expected this. What we have here is WSIS-II, or maybe "Son of WSIS". I expect at least one or two more rounds of this process before any kind of meaningful consensus gets hammered out. Or was…

Questioning the Illusion of Internet Governance

Comment posted Nov 17, 2005 5:21 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Ah. So you think DNS / root servers are the only thing at issue here? :) Vixie's support for ORSN is highly qualified and he has fairly sound reasons for it. But even after reading a whole lot of discussions…

The WSIS Deal

Comment posted Nov 17, 2005 2:51 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
2. Paragraph 38 provides strong support for the Regional Internet Registries with language that says “we call for the reinforcement of specialized regional Internet resource management institutions to guarantee the national interest and rights of countries in that particular region…

WSIS Deal: Oversight

Comment posted Nov 17, 2005 2:39 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
My comments in response to Ram Mohan on circleid a few days back tend to mirror just what you said http://www.circleid.com/posts/nomcom... And let me repeat that I'm really happy that what you say tends to bear me out in what…

Actions Required by Developing Economies Against Spam

Comment posted Nov 13, 2005 7:07 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
It is not as simple as you think it is. However it is an interesting idea that you might want to take before arin / apnic at one of their meetings .. the best place to start with if you're…

Comment posted Nov 13, 2005 3:28 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Damn. I wish it were that simple. Start with finding an abuse reporting format that is machine parseable (http://www.mipassoc.org/arf/ is a start but its still useful only for provider to provider aggregation of reports and not for general use) Then…

The U.N.'s Threat to the Net

Comment posted Nov 13, 2005 3:24 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
MLATs are the "normal legal cooperation" route that's completely independent of the internet, and concluded between law enforcement agencies in different countries And at least for OECD economies there are several recommendations about how these should be applied - one…

Questioning the Illusion of Internet Governance

Comment posted Nov 10, 2005 4:03 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Thanks for expanding on what i wrote in reply to Bruce Levinson at http://www.circleid.com/posts/the_un... ---------- # By Suresh Ramasubramanian | Nov 09, 2005, 04:57 am PST | Link Virtually all free speech is a crime in some of the countries…

The U.N.'s Threat to the Net

Comment posted Nov 09, 2005 12:57 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Virtually all free speech is a crime in some of the countries that are closely involved in the WSIS and WGIG. Do we really want Americans or the residents of any country to be internationally prosecuted for activities that are…

Nom-Com Appoints Independent and Diverse Candidates to ICANN Leadership Positions

Comment posted Nov 07, 2005 6:00 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
yup .. that's kind of my point. thanks for understanding

Comment posted Nov 07, 2005 4:39 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I must largely agree with what Brett says, Ram. You were doing just great till that last "new and unproven" thing I think. Right now - like it or not governments are around and they feel they have a stake…

You Paid to Join; You Can Leave Anytime

Comment posted Nov 06, 2005 7:37 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well Ram, you probably know this already, but for the sake of completeness, I'd attribute the reason for what you noticed to 1. Increased competition 2. The earlier complete lack of peering + static routes to upstream type of rudimentary…

Comment posted Nov 04, 2005 4:20 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
* circleid is not moderated - it is open posting, with the circleid admins apparently maintaining a loose and reasonably hands off policy except in rare cases * circleid is not slashdot and nor is it j.random left/right wing blog…

Comment posted Nov 04, 2005 5:07 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The article is staggeringly naive, but does highlight one of the main grouses foreign ISPs have - almost all their traffic (even for local websites) is outgoing to the USA, for various reasons * Lack of local peering and/or incompetent…

Welcome to the Root, .MOBI

Comment posted Oct 29, 2005 7:36 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Oh what fun. And isn't .mobi meant for only mobile infrastructure? No reason to see email related traffic through it at all I'd guess?

Forgotten Principles of Internet Governance

Comment posted Oct 25, 2005 2:14 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Fully agree with Brett - you aren't going to find copyright law very useful or applicable. I think Karl’s Principles of Internet Governance are resoundingly impractical, but at least they recognise the need for describing the end that the means…

When will we run out of IPv4?

Comment posted Oct 24, 2005 2:06 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
so the RIRs * go out reclaiming IP space more aggressively * make ISPs in their region of coverage adopt better IP addressing and accounting practices, and teach these (with tools etc) more and more in their tutorials - a…

Forgotten Principles of Internet Governance

Comment posted Oct 24, 2005 1:59 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Karl, no hidden agenda here as such. Merely tired of your vague ranting that you like to think is technospeak. Heard much of it before too, and I'm sure I'll hear it again, in one blog or the other. But…

Comment posted Oct 23, 2005 3:36 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Prove that alternate roots are going to meet your vaguely defined "needs" rather than lead to complete chaos and groups of people each touting their own set of TLDs, none of which the users of some competing system can reach…

Breaking the Internet HOWTO

Comment posted Oct 14, 2005 11:53 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I have serious doubts whether an alternate root zone is being proposed here - but what people are moving extensively forward on is an increased oversight role for other countries' governments in ICANN. I have seen suggestions in china and…

If It's About to Break, Fix It!

Comment posted Oct 10, 2005 3:50 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Sorry if I seem dense, Peter - but whose official comments were those that you quoted? -srs

Comment posted Oct 04, 2005 12:54 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
What, you mean the blogosphere and the ranters on how prepcom3 sucks and the ITU sucks, and that the ITU cant even run a conference wireless network properly, and they want to run the INTERNET?!?!?!? type people are all "internet…

To Meow or not to Meow: .CAT TLD approved by ICANN

Comment posted Oct 02, 2005 12:24 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Vittorio - thanks for the note about Catalans - I got a brief idea of their long history, culture and language (rather more liquid, flowing and poetic than castellano spanish, lots of repeated ll sounds etc, almost like what welsh…

Should the Government Prepare a Preemptive Cyber-Attack?

Comment posted Sep 28, 2005 3:29 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Comparing "Cyber attack" to the effects of a hurricane? That is such a sick analogy. The level of rhetoric at these meetings does seem to depend on how vendor driven the agenda is, I've found. Yes, there are practical, hard…

To Meow or not to Meow: .CAT TLD approved by ICANN

Comment posted Sep 27, 2005 1:59 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
As I see it, that is just a sideline for .lang .. all it does is - 1. Aggregate 2. Sidestep sovereignity issues for at least some languages that span borders and/or have other politics associated with them Kind of…

Comment posted Sep 26, 2005 2:47 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
A .lang tld is an idea that i would support, probably followed by various languages, like .cat moving to .cat.lang It also neatly sidesteps the sovereignity issue associated with ccTLDs And doesnt crowd the namespace for what is going to…

Whither DNS?

Comment posted Sep 23, 2005 2:05 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
To Colin - Keywords, you mean? AOL's been doing that for quite some time

.XXX as Proposed is Wrong for Families & Kids

Comment posted Sep 21, 2005 5:23 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
>> Switzerland DOES want "xxx.cz". The Czech Republic on line 1 for you. And Switzerland / Confederation Helvetique / .ch on line 2 to say they dont want .cz, and the Czechs are welcome to it.

Comment posted Sep 20, 2005 10:37 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Neither do I, neither do I - but at what age do you stop this? And what's to stop the kid from getting several dozen different ways to access regular porn? Lots of cases where kids can just get their…

To Meow or not to Meow: .CAT TLD approved by ICANN

Comment posted Sep 19, 2005 2:55 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
| The Board noted the written | communications it had | received from the | governments of Spain and | Andorra not objecting to | the .CAT application. That is actually quite noteworthy. The catalans are an ethnic group -…

Whither DNS?

Comment posted Sep 16, 2005 3:04 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
>> The original point was that the world doesn't end immediately when you >> don't have access to DNS, and that governance effort is often misdirected Nor does traffic completely stop because there's been a pileup on the freeway. >>…

Comment posted Sep 16, 2005 2:35 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
DNS was set up with a specific purpose in mind. Not as a telephone directory or yellow pages Sure you have various people overloading dns and using it for what they want to do, at the edge - and the…

Comment posted Sep 16, 2005 2:33 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Whatever the truth, it is clear that private 'typed' > directories (people, places, things, ideas) and namespaces > are booming. DNS is an ubiquitous service. Like electricity, or water. Those private typed directory things are highly visible, heavily marketed,…

.XXX as Proposed is Wrong for Families & Kids

Comment posted Sep 16, 2005 2:27 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> and now the adult entertainment industry has a letter > writing campaign against .xxx (yes, you read that correctly) > > http://www.freespeechcoalition.com/xinfo.htm And some of the countries that recently conveyed their opposition to .xxx cannot even claim neocon lobbyist…

Sitefinder Writ Small

Comment posted Sep 16, 2005 2:12 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Yes - running something that rejects bogus uk.com domains at least in email would be a welcome step. Without that we're going to be buried in spam forging *.uk.com domains One very large provider I know of that * Publishes…

.XXX Puzzle Pieces Start to Come Together: And the Picture is Ugly

Comment posted Aug 20, 2005 4:55 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
For the sake of argument, what are the right reasons, and what change in governance do you suggest out of the four options in front of the wgig? Personally I'd prefer something not too far removed from the status quo…

Comment posted Aug 20, 2005 12:55 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> .XXX ccTLD "ccTLD"? :( That sort of thing is what happens when you post to circleid at 6 AM in the morning before your first cup of coffee. Power outage woke me up far earlier than I usually wake…

Comment posted Aug 20, 2005 12:48 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Milton, I'm not closing ranks around Sharil in this case. In case I didn't make myself clear, I'm not amused by what the DOC is doing right now about .XXX. But Sharil's diplomatically phrased warning was quite right. The USG…

Comment posted Aug 19, 2005 3:21 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Milton - interesting article, that. A couple of points, mostly in agreement with Mr. (not Ms. by the way) Crishna. The article, while quite accurate in itself, could have avoided the slightly strident tone that crept into it .. a…

Objections to .XXX, Attention in High Places

Comment posted Aug 16, 2005 5:58 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I rather suspect the sequence goes like this - Various representatives in the GAC and other quarters of ICANN where governments have representation see the issues, debate it for quite some time till there's not much left to debate And…

SPF Loses Mindshare

Comment posted Aug 13, 2005 4:33 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Bah. HELO is a good way to go. Signing received: headers like DKIM is a good way to go. Both of them look at the sending host and validate that. Trying to validate the sender is a level of granularity…

Comment posted Aug 10, 2005 7:05 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
More spf / sender id fun - http://news.com.com/Sender+IDs+fading+message/2100-7355_3-5824234.html?tag=nefd.lede Sender ID's fading message Published: August 9, 2005, 4:00 AM PDT By Joris Evers Staff Writer, CNET News.com At the start of last year, Bill Gates told the world's elite at an…

Comment posted Aug 03, 2005 10:04 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Wayne - as a first step please group those domains by 1. Common NS 2. Common MX That'd give you a whole lot of clusters - large providers that do spf. And it'd likely give you lots of small sites…

Comment posted Aug 03, 2005 5:31 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Wayne: do a bit more aggregation. Find out how many of those are "v=spf1 -all" entries published by domain squatters Find out how many -all entries are setup by a single webhost with several hundred to a few thousand small…

Comment posted Aug 03, 2005 2:49 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
First find a good reputation service to back it. Second, convince all the twits out there who treat spf failures (or even softfails) as an excuse to hard reject email. SPF works in a limited set of use cases -…

Comment posted Aug 03, 2005 12:37 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well, I'm rather ahead of the curve. We removed our spf records back in february, right after the San Diego MAAWG. This MAAWG report is after the next meeting (Dusseldorf). http://www.circleid.com/article/1039_0_1_0_C/

Abusive Anti-Anti-Spam Scheme a Dreadful Strategy

Comment posted Aug 01, 2005 2:17 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Here's a lovely article about bluesecurity and the mindset of its users. I'm quite happy for useless "let's spam the spammer back" schemes to auto-darwinate. Saves time having to explain to a lot of people that no, not all antispam…

IGP on Future U.S. Role in Internet Governance

Comment posted Jul 29, 2005 4:50 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
It is a statement on the lines of "ICANN is the devil we know, so let us maintain something that is nearly like the status quo" I'm sure Karl Auerbach will absolutely hate the idea, but sometimes stating the obvious…

A Balkanized Internet Future?

Comment posted Jul 27, 2005 2:17 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Colin - thanks Sure they dont need to. But sometimes they'd like to, just like lots of non chinese speakers want to access everything from a recipe for peking duck to cantopop songs. > The Chinese don't need to. Some…

Comment posted Jul 27, 2005 7:03 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
No demands there, Karl. Just a plain statement of opinion. Start as many as you like. Just see what sort of critical mass they get Then, once they achieve critical mass, see how soon they start tending towards merging again…

Comment posted Jul 27, 2005 1:17 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
No, Karl .. you use religious terminology because after you left ICANN with extremely bad vibes about what ICANN was doing, what you do is to religiously criticize anything that can be associated with an ICANN activity. I'd almost make…

Comment posted Jul 26, 2005 4:41 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Karl, my argument is that the internet is just too valuable to fragment. What you propose will effectively reduce it to lots of split apart and separate systems. It is not just english speakers who wont be able to access…

The Internets

Comment posted Jul 26, 2005 3:25 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
competition policy is one of the main concerns with the way this is moving. lots of countries have government owned majority telcos with an [un]healthy interest in preserving their monopoly, and in the position of competing with other ISPs in…

A Balkanized Internet Future?

Comment posted Jul 26, 2005 3:11 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> The argument that there must and shall be > but one catholic internet DNS root is an > argument that denies both innovation and > human choice. Here's what I wrote in Joi's blog in response to just this…

Comment posted Jul 23, 2005 2:28 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
China's advantage in controlling its internet users is not v6 or anything else like that. It is that most chinese quite naturally gravitate only to chinese sites, hosted in china. What is physically located in china is quite easy for…

News from the Authentication Summit in NYC

Comment posted Jul 22, 2005 2:08 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
In the interests of setting several records straight, and making a few points clearer. "AOL's spf" is just plain wrong. SPF is by meng weng wong of pobox.com (http://spf.pobox.com). The most that AOL has done is to use it in…

Working Group on Internet Governance Releases Report

Comment posted Jul 15, 2005 4:28 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I envision something that falls between #2 and #3 I have no hope of a GIC succeeding where the GAC doesnt. Option #4 is a nightmare that I'm not prepared to consider feasible. A stronger, tighter organized GAC as well…

ICANN, WSIS and the Making of a Global Civil Society - Part III

Comment posted Jun 08, 2005 7:45 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
on this topic, here's an interesting UNDP/APDIP paper on i-governance.. it covers most of the issues that the wgig has raised (root server admin, IP allocation etc) in what I feel is a sensible manner. -srs This is an interesting…

Some Notes on the .XXX Top-Level Domain

Comment posted Jun 03, 2005 2:00 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Rather, I think it will be seen as Internet > endorsement of behaviour seen by a significant > number of diverse minorities across the planet > as offensive. For what specific gain? Gives the pornographers a lobby of their…

Comment posted Jun 03, 2005 10:19 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Well Joi, ICANN's going to get hit out at whatever it does, from several quarters. Some will rail at this apparent support for further "pollution" of the internet Others will decry - quite possibly with reason - the ostensible segregation…

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

Comment posted Jun 02, 2005 1:08 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Good, remove one single point of failure and introduce another - even though the chance for failure is quite less here, as you point out. Add to it the time and headache that pushing through a new TLD involves. Why…

Actions Required by Developing Economies Against Spam

Comment posted May 30, 2005 3:49 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Here's a direct link to the paper, in pdf format - http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/5/47/34935342.pdf

Port 25 Blocking, or Fix SMTP and Leave Port 25 Alone for the Sake of Spam?

Comment posted May 16, 2005 1:58 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
To throw some fuel in the fire, right before I shut my laptop and board my plane .. here's Miles Libbey from Yahoo on sender authentication. https://antiphishing.kavi.com/events/Conference_Notes/sender_auth_myths_and_domainkeys.pdf

Comment posted May 16, 2005 1:49 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
a. I'm not suggesting you run anything at all that's not licensed under a FLOSS license [free/libre and open source software, a term coined by an old friend, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, btw - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOSS) b. It is a free country…

Comment posted May 16, 2005 1:31 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Sure, it certainly doesnt require a license from Microsoft. But I must remind you that even if it does get an RFC assigned to it, there's no MUST requirement to use SPF, as opposed to (say) domainkeys, or CSV. Right…

Comment posted May 16, 2005 3:14 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
SMTP auth - fine. Port 587 - excellent. From and reply-to should be the same - whatever for? And why? I frankly cant see your logic here, or the utility of such a measure. SPF -all enforcement: your network, your…

Address Policies

Comment posted May 10, 2005 1:40 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Excellent. Though the origins of most of the opposition to the current structure can be summarized like this, is what I suspect: * Large government owned telco + ISP is not too good at managing current address space, and finds…

Port 25 Blocking, or Fix SMTP and Leave Port 25 Alone for the Sake of Spam?

Comment posted May 10, 2005 1:12 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
John - interesting comments there. SPF's worst enemy is the fervent advocacy that's driving it, right now. So, Doug, what would you say to a combination of CSV and domainkeys, to kind of mutually complement each other? How feasible is…

Do We Really Need IDN?

Comment posted May 09, 2005 7:44 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Ebina - yes, thanks. I'm aware of the full disclosure list and its history. And I do find it useful to lurk on that list .. however that's completely besides the point here. Would "transparency" and "declaration of vested interests…

Comment posted May 09, 2005 1:31 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> this is not a place for praising IDN in > which any opinion against IDN is considered > PR. Oh, there are lots of ways you can express opinions against IDN, by presenting reasoned technical arguments. The arguments in…

Comment posted May 09, 2005 12:40 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Circleid is not a place for articles without technical merit that are posted only to spread FUD or score political brownie points. "Jason S"'s commentary is totally out of place, and as he works for a large keyword provider but…

Comment posted May 07, 2005 2:09 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
not the first time people try to use a public forum like circleid for amateurish PR efforts won't be the last either unfortunately

Comment posted May 05, 2005 3:04 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Keywords are a fairly non standard way to go about the entire thing. And your entire argument seems to be that IDN has some issues - which are being worked on by the way - and that people who are…

Port 25 Blocking, or Fix SMTP and Leave Port 25 Alone for the Sake of Spam?

Comment posted May 03, 2005 12:31 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
About Cisco IIM, it is quite similar to domainkeys (e&oe;devils in the details) that there's at least some work being done on merging the two specs CSV, based on IP address and HELO tends to make for a easier variety…

Comment posted May 02, 2005 6:52 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
we just have to wait for all the false positives sudden and widespread deployment of this will inevitably cause sitting back and saying "i told you so" can be fun, but the consequences of doing so in this case are…

Comment posted May 01, 2005 1:45 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
John Thanks for the recap of spf / other authentication protocols' history with the ietf A strange thing is that most of the current spf records published by people are not for the purpose of ensuring authentication .. but for…

Could IP Addressing Benefit from the Introduction of Competitive Suppliers?

Comment posted Apr 29, 2005 9:42 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Karl I wont comment on ICANN here. But in response to this - On another point, you mention the lack of technical expertise on the part of some WGIG participants. > It is easy to dismiss the people who are…

IP Address Allocation vs. Internet Production I: Understanding the Relationship, and the Differences

Comment posted Apr 29, 2005 2:48 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
great article, tom - i've just linked to it from that mega thread that geoff's article started off.

Could IP Addressing Benefit from the Introduction of Competitive Suppliers?

Comment posted Apr 29, 2005 2:43 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Tom Vest just posted an excellent circleid article on this subject - http://www.circleid.com/article/1064_0_1_0_C/ Required reading, at least by the indian and chinese representatives at WGIG, before they continue to advocate the Zhao proposals.

Comment posted Apr 29, 2005 1:59 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I read the session transcripts of that WGIG meeting that have been posted on www.wgig.org, and am gratified to know that Leichtenstein (on behalf of the presidency of the EU), Australia et al do understand the issues involved. Most of…

Phish-Proofing URLs in Email?

Comment posted Apr 27, 2005 4:01 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
So you think email is the only channel phishes are sent over? :)

The Geography of Internet Addressing

Comment posted Apr 26, 2005 1:31 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Paul, do you by any chance have a kind of scale model / projection of the costs involved in running IP allocation and routing the same way as a national telephone system + its numbering is run? Compare, additionally, the…

Could IP Addressing Benefit from the Introduction of Competitive Suppliers?

Comment posted Apr 26, 2005 1:28 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Ram, here are a few answers, sort of - A lot of the points you raise are covered in several papers available on NRO / the apnic website's public policy section etc, but ... 1. It is a case of…

Comment posted Apr 20, 2005 5:55 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
For some more perception on competition and adam smith's economic theories, try Tom Vest's paper "The Wealth of Networks", http://www.pch.net/resources/papers/the-wealth-of-networks/Vest-WoN@SIMS-DLS-050316.pdf > quantitative technical metrics than they > do to softer social and economic metrics. Nothing much more than "I've made…

Comment posted Apr 20, 2005 2:19 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Brilliantly written article, there. But, on the topic of the commons, and overgrazing of them, the alternative was much worse - pastures enclosed by landlords, and let out on a share or rent basis to tenants, who were then at…

Phish-Proofing URLs in Email?

Comment posted Apr 19, 2005 2:47 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
oh - hsbc also has this prominent banner on their homepage that warns you not to click on URLs you get in email .. hmm.. this time they have a link to a short tutorial on basic internet security linked…

Comment posted Apr 19, 2005 1:32 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Given all the phishing fears around, a lot of people are not very inclined to trust any email at all that says its from a bank. Some banks deal with it in different ways .. 1. My wife has a…

Study Finds Spammers Use P2P Harvesting to Spam Millions

Comment posted Apr 18, 2005 4:45 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
A few questions - first, do you seriously expect spammers - especially the trojan using sort that'd exploit p2p networks - are going to seriously look at your do not disturb list? That, and the FTC last year raised several…

Port 25 Blocking, or Fix SMTP and Leave Port 25 Alone for the Sake of Spam?

Comment posted Apr 18, 2005 1:48 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Along with Joe's excellent paper on zombies cited in this article I would suggest reading this - http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~joe/port25.pdf

Comment posted Apr 18, 2005 1:34 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I must acknowledge the minor point Brett suggests - but, in any case, i typically wouldnt want to accept mail from a domain to which i couldnt deliver bounces to. such bounces would only clutter up space on my mail…

In Pursuit of IDN Perfection?

Comment posted Apr 17, 2005 4:56 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
> Suresh, perhaps an even larger part of > what's needed for India is local-language > content, not only software. Chicken and egg problem there. All three are part of a complex equation .. 1. .in domains + a better…

How India's .IN Domain Rouses from its Slumber

Comment posted Apr 17, 2005 4:50 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
just adding to my comment - it would be quite useful for the registry to be proactive in that it 1. works with registrars to set up antispam acceptable use policies 2. watches for signs of fraudulent registration, and alerts…

Comment posted Apr 17, 2005 4:48 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
ram: the policies as such seem to be driven by different registrars. godaddy has been quite proactive about stamping down on spammer registered domains, especially where they have evidence of bogus contact info. directi in india took some extensive prodding…

In Pursuit of IDN Perfection?

Comment posted Apr 16, 2005 12:00 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Thanks, Dr.Govind. In any case, the issues in the cjk area are at a level where interoperability is quite possible, given sufficient discussion At least in India, we need a lot more attention to indian language characters in unicode first.…

How India's .IN Domain Rouses from its Slumber

Comment posted Apr 16, 2005 1:00 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Ram, here's the way you can go about it. 1. Have policies for fair and accurate reporting of information set by the registry .. *.in used to require faxes of company registrations etc, no need to go to that extent…

Comment posted Apr 15, 2005 9:36 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
I perfectly agree about sending signals - but there's a rather good, existing mechanism for that, which doesnt involve broadcast advisories asking people to block sTLDs

Comment posted Apr 15, 2005 7:25 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
funny. i run a rather large isp's antispam operations (40 million users is large enough I hope) but so far I haven't seen 1. That .co.in is any better or worse than any other .in second level TLD 2. Not…

The Ultimate Solution to Internet Governance: Let ITU and ICANN compete

Comment posted Apr 14, 2005 1:03 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
For a rather detailed overview of this situation, I would strongly recommend reading Geoff Huston's article in the latest (March) issue of the Internet Protocol Journal (www.cisco.com/ipj/) Highly recommended reading, that.

In Pursuit of IDN Perfection?

Comment posted Apr 12, 2005 3:34 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Thank you for clarifying this .. it does need to be made very clear --srs (who still thinks the same as you privately did till a while back - why the hell do we need IDN)? :)

Comment posted Apr 12, 2005 2:06 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The chinese can use an arbitrary standard and an arbitrary browser plugin so that local people can read only chinese-only pages. Other countries can implement IDN the same ad-hoc way. But interoperability between different IDN schemes, and the fact that…

The Ultimate Solution to Internet Governance: Let ITU and ICANN compete

Comment posted Apr 12, 2005 1:14 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
In order for ICANN and ITU to compete, there should be at least a common set of ground rules, to avoid two competing and subtly if not overtly different systems getting built. Especially in the realms of domain naming and…

How to Stop Spam

Comment posted Apr 07, 2005 1:49 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Tonez - sure you can. Easily. 1. Route your mail through your ISP's smtp server (instructions at http://www.hserus.net/sendmail.html - or exim.html / postfix.html / qmail.html) or 2. Get a shell on a static IP server (plenty of free shell account…

How India's .IN Domain Rouses from its Slumber

Comment posted Apr 05, 2005 1:12 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
thanks, i will do this -suresh

Comment posted Apr 04, 2005 2:33 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Ram, congratulations on doing a great job. I must say it is a relief to register .in domains without going through a huge rigmarole of form filling and assorted other bureaucracy. There is of course the problem of firms getting…

How to Stop Spam

Comment posted Apr 04, 2005 1:58 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
To Chris S - no, SPF is not a solution of any sort. It might be promoted as a solution to everything from phishing to forged spam .. doesnt mean that it automatically becomes that way.

Spam Volume Redux

Comment posted Feb 16, 2005 4:43 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Umm.. spam isn't levelling off. What you're seeing is more probably the start of a huge spike :) When you consider that the amount of inbound spam that attempts to be delivered is several orders of magnitude more than the…

How to Stop Spam

Comment posted Jan 26, 2005 10:12 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
To Jeffrey Williams - <<"Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others" - Pierre Abelard>> Now, I'll ask a rather precise question. "A lot of the spam you get is from AOL, Yahoo etc". Is that…

Comment posted Jan 25, 2005 11:58 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
[damn, i just wish circleid had threaded posting like livejournal has] -------------- Going back to a more real-world example for SMTP, however… [description of smtp auth relay from offcampus] ---------------- Yes - and port 587 (the MSA / Submit port)…

Comment posted Jan 25, 2005 11:51 pm PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Michael - I realize that what you are saying is ideal, but with all due respect, running a university network or a large corporation is still a far cry from trying to drink at the firehose of large ISP abuse…

Comment posted Jan 25, 2005 7:19 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Initial note to put some of my posts in this thread in context: I don't work for Carl or for AOL .. but I do work for a large webmail ISP with 40 million users and I can see where…

Comment posted Jan 25, 2005 4:58 am PST — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Meta reply to several posts in this thread. Phil Karn (on why Bayesian is great): There's a communication gap here. Carl's talking about something that can be done on the server side. While bayesian makes an excellent antispam solution on…

What the ITU WSIS Spam Meeting Accomplished

Comment posted Aug 11, 2004 3:18 pm PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
The syrian delegate too was, in the final analysis, concerned with getting his words into the final agenda, which is about the only thing he focused on doing. :) I sure wish a stronger plug for open source antispam filters…

Blacklisting Under Wrong Assumptions

Comment posted Jun 21, 2004 10:39 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Seamus, you might want to check out CAUCE Asia Pacific - http://www.apcauce.org Antispam workshops / conferences every six months, at regional network operators conferences like APRICOT and SANOG. Speakers like Dave Crocker, Meng Wong, David Harris (the author of pegasus…

80% of Spam Originating from Home PCs

Comment posted Jun 21, 2004 10:18 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
A few ways to mitigate this - * Filter inbound mail to your servers using the spamhaus XBL (exploits block list) at http://www.spamhaus.org * ISPs - monitor XBL entries for anything in your IP space, and jump on 'em -…

Email Address Forgery

Comment posted Jun 21, 2004 10:11 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
That's a short, and really good summary of what MARID finally amounts to :) Also - my followup to Esther's article, at http://www.circleid.com/article/607_0_1_0_C/#1087811284

Friction-Free Commerce, Spam-Free Future

Comment posted Jun 21, 2004 9:48 am PDT — by Suresh Ramasubramanian
Esther, I guess the problem with the inboxevent sessions you attended was that there's a whole lot of feel good morale boosting support for spf + caller id, domainkeys and other MARID proposals, which are all really good .. except…

Topic Interests

Cyberattack, Spam, Security, Internet Protocol, DNS, Cybercrime, Email, Top-Level Domains, ICANN, Censorship, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation, Malware, Domain Names, Domain Registries, Whois, Telecom, Net Neutrality, Access Providers, Broadband, Privacy, Law, IP Addressing, IPv6, P2P, Regional Registries, Multilinguism, Enum, Wireless, Mobile, VoIP, Cybersquatting, Web, DNSSEC, Cloud Computing, Data Center