CircleID

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Symantec Acquires VeriSign’s Security Business for $1.28 Billion

• Comment posted May 20, 2010 2:52 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Just Internet infrastructure management stuff like the registries?

Network Neutrality, UPS, and FedEx

• Comment posted Dec 28, 2009 11:23 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  For those complaining about vendor claims of "unlimited" service or about the rates speeds, I think government, working with industry and others, could play a constructive role standardizing fair language for such things. If ISPs didn't have to one-up each…

• Comment posted Dec 24, 2009 5:55 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  BTW, I've also done the UPS trick you speak of, but it takes a lot of nerve to feel cheated for getting exactly what you pay for.

• Comment posted Dec 24, 2009 4:52 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  You have it exactly backwards Karl. The real threat to uses like VoIP comes from unrestrained P2P users who cause jitter on the network. Why would an ISP cause a costly support nightmare for themselvess by doing what you suggest?

The Real Face of Cyberwar?

• Comment posted Dec 12, 2009 2:02 am PST — by Larry Seltzer
  This analysis of the leaked files makes a good case that it was an inside leak. The Russians? Pure speculation based on supposed motives. The world's full of suspects using those standards.

The Role of a Cybersecurity Czar

• Comment posted Nov 05, 2009 4:04 am PST — by Larry Seltzer
  For years now, there have been calls for a high-level cybersecurity official, preferably reporting directly to the president. In fact, the main person calling for this in recent times was Obama himself in the campaign. He specifically promised to do…

America is No. 1 in Broadband According to New Connectivity Scorecard

• Comment posted Feb 23, 2009 5:06 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  I live in a fairly well-off town in north Jersey, the most densely-populated part of the US, so I should expect many choices in broadband and I have them. I can get Comcast cable modem, FiOS, DSL from Verizon, and…

• Comment posted Feb 23, 2009 3:22 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  I've been trying to research the more famous numbers of how the US is a 3rd world country when it comes to broadband and I can never really nail them down. This "scorecard" number is complicated, but I'm not surprised…

Hathaway to Head US Cybersecurity Effort

• Comment posted Feb 09, 2009 5:32 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  I was curious about the line I quoted from eWEEK (for whom I write) so I went and found the exact line on the Obama site: http://www.barackobama.com/2008/07/16/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_95.php

• Comment posted Feb 09, 2009 5:25 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  Not that I really care, but the list of campaign promises broken by Barack Obama got a little larger today. According to the WSJ story linked to above "Ms. Hathaway will be a senior director at the National Security Council,…

Egyptian Minister Demands ICANN to Become an Independent Organization

• Comment posted Nov 04, 2008 6:59 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  No. Now what's he going to do?

Are You Getting Your News From Spam? My Mother Does

• Comment posted Oct 12, 2008 3:10 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  In fact, a lot of what you read in the New York Times and AP or on TV news is full of crap too. Even if it's not false, it can be misleading in any number of ways. Not to…

The Root of All Email

• Comment posted Oct 07, 2008 11:04 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Internet e-mail standards are too successful. They've become almost impossible to change.

Comcast's Network Management Practices: A Brief Analysis

• Comment posted Sep 23, 2008 5:00 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Analyzing Attachment A is basically just for historical interest. As you note, they intend now to move to a user threshold model. So how do they do that? Let's assume that upstream bandwidth hogging is still the major issue and…

Studies Indicate 29% of Internet Users Buying Goods from Spam Emails

• Comment posted Aug 20, 2008 6:18 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  I have a very hard time believing these numbers. From the linked article on Marshall's web site: Marshal’s research results are derived from a web-based survey hosted on the Marshal website during June and July 2008. They got a representative…

Evidence that Georgia Cyberattacks Were "Populist" in Nature

• Comment posted Aug 19, 2008 6:20 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Well duh! Some of us haven been saying this from early on and the best evidence of it was that if the Russian government wanted to do this it would have been far more effective.

Google's Cerf Offers Alternate Strategy to Metered Broadband Billing

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2008 12:09 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  So what do they actually say? I priced out Comcast cable modem at my house (I use FiOS now) and as offered "Performance with PowerBoost® (Speeds up to 12 Mbps)" and "Blast® (16 Mbps)". The fine print below says: "...Many…

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2008 11:47 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Indeed, the US is primarily cable orientated. Europe (from what I know) is mostly DSL based. In the end one is always sharing some very fat pipes which can also get congested. The question with speed is always "from where…

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2008 11:27 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Let me follow-up my own question: Would I be correct in believing that this is basically a cable modem problem? I've had DSL from two different providers and in both cases always had exactly the rated speed, based on simple…

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2008 10:22 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Another analogy that works I think: speed limits on a highway. If a highway has a 65MPH or (insert metric equivalent here) limit, that doesn't mean that everyone can do that speed at peak traffic times.

• Comment posted Aug 05, 2008 10:16 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  We can talk about theoretical models, but there are a lot of users installed already, a lot of older cable modems out there and a lot of equipment out on poles. What models can be supported without having to rip…

Google Talks About Owning Your Internet Connection

• Comment posted Jul 24, 2008 1:21 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  This sounds like a terrible idea to me. It's going to be a major investment for an individual user and for what? You still have to buy services from one or more companies. There still may be CPE issues.

Largest Synchronized Internet Security Effort Underway to Patch Newly Found DNS Bug

• Comment posted Jul 08, 2008 9:16 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Is this the DNS bug that was patched today by Microsoft?

Proposal for .sport, a New Top-Level Domain

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2008 10:54 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  The topical TLDs like .travel, etc.

ICANN GNSO Votes to Kill Domain Tasting

• Comment posted Apr 29, 2008 9:02 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  It will certainly cripple tasters, I'm not sure it will kill tasting altogether. I wish they just axed the whole grace period since it never benefits end users. Can any of you name a registrar that lets customers cancel within…

Spam Turns 30

• Comment posted Apr 26, 2008 2:54 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  When was the first botnet? That I'd like to know.

IP Addresses and Personally Identifiable Information

• Comment posted Mar 19, 2008 4:41 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  From today (3/19)'s Gigalaw feed: Italian Rule Bans Spying on Illegal File Sharers Italian companies may not spy on individuals who engage in illegal file-sharing, according to a controversial new ruling. The ruling of Francesco Pizzetti, president of the official…

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

• Comment posted Feb 04, 2008 11:26 am PST — by Larry Seltzer
  If they continue to support DKIM what's the downside to publishing SPF records?

North Dakota Judge Gets it Wrong

• Comment posted Jan 19, 2008 1:58 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  It's clear we don't have all the information here that we need to make a completely informed analysis. It's also clear that the judge got pissed off at Ritz because (so the ruling says) he ignored an injunction and accessed…

Network Solutions Responds to Front Running Accusations

• Comment posted Jan 09, 2008 3:15 am PST — by Larry Seltzer
  Yes Andrew, he's implying that registries sell their lookup data. Who knows if this actually happens. I first wrote about front running (I called it whois hijacking) about 18 months ago. I never got a clear indication of how it…

• Comment posted Jan 09, 2008 2:23 am PST — by Larry Seltzer
  My word, that's on the short list for most self-serving, hypocritical excuse I've heard from a business. We're front-running in order to save you from the front-runners.

ICANN: WHOIS Back to Rathole #0

• Comment posted Nov 04, 2007 2:48 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  The spam standpoint is that if my e-mail address is in whois someone's going to harvest it and spam me. Consider what Network Solutions does instead; use a long complicated forwarding address and change it periodically so that it can't…

• Comment posted Nov 04, 2007 2:05 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  One outcome I expect from this is that private, unsanctioned privacy schemes will grow even faster. The biggest registrars all offer them; I bet before too long we start seeing price competition on them. My own registrar (pairnic) will only…

WHOIS Redux: Demand Privacy in Domain Name Registration

• Comment posted Oct 26, 2007 1:15 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  How can anyone stand ICANN anymore? The organization is unbearable. And they act like they want to be the United Nations, as if that's a good thing. Wendy is right that intellectual property interests have thrown the biggest monkey wrench…

ICANN Investigating "Domain Name Front Running"

• Comment posted Oct 24, 2007 8:34 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Hey, this is my story! My best guess was either that someone had compromised a web-based whois proxy (i.e. the web server with the "see if your domain is available" form) or the service or some corrupt person at the…

Study Says Email Has Surpassed Telephony as Corporate Communication Tool

• Comment posted Aug 28, 2007 10:03 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  >>According to the research, 100% of the end-users surveyed use e-mail… Let me guess. Was it an e-mail survey?

ICANN Wants to Update Its Domain Name Registrar Accreditation Process

• Comment posted Jul 31, 2007 2:36 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  I'd like to grumble about how they should have thought of this stuff when they made this mess several years ago, but better late than never. They do look like good questions to ask.

Spam About to Get Worst, Says Former Spammer in New Book

• Comment posted Jul 20, 2007 9:02 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  "As broadband speeds increase, spammers will increasingly look to market goods by making VoIP calls or sending out videos..." You know, I've been hearing this for years and years. Maybe there's more to it that just natural progression.

CAN SPAM Applies Even Within a Single Provider

• Comment posted Jun 21, 2007 10:30 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  >>The judge disposed of those arguments in a few paragraphs, noting that the law's definition of "internet access provider" is quite broad, and that since MySpace lets you send messages from one named user to another, that's e-mail and CAN…

IP Address Intelligence Burdening Content Providers with Regional Laws?

• Comment posted Feb 05, 2007 10:15 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  I once write a column related to this: Major League Baseball Knows Where You Live! It was the Simpsons who first broke the story: Major League Baseball was spying on Bart's thoughts with a special satellite that he shot down,…

The Closing Window: A Historical Analysis of Domain Tasting

• Comment posted Dec 20, 2006 7:32 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  The best solution would likely be for VeriSign to send an email to all registrars announcing a restocking fee effective next-week. Even a 2 cent restocking fee (trivial for real errors) would be enough to curb tasting dramatically. And they…

Huge Increase in Spam in October Email

• Comment posted Nov 06, 2006 7:10 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  I just did a column on this too. Botnet hunters like Gadi Evron will tell you that the botnets are getting assertive these days, showing that they can't be stopped. But why push more spam? Perhaps it's just for the…

Nation of Cameroon Typo-Squats the Entire .com Space

• Comment posted Aug 23, 2006 8:21 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  I was doing some follow-up on this and the wildcard seems to be down again; was there some resolution on it? But there are some good typosquats up. Try www.youtube.cm.

Conflict of Opinion

• Comment posted Jul 29, 2006 2:41 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  So what about a domain that has content and advertising? Like this one. Yes, of course that's different. A child could see the difference. What about larger corporations owning domains and not using them. For example “beautiful.com”, owned by P&G;?…

• Comment posted Jul 29, 2006 2:13 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  I apologize. Further research reveals that there is a Wikipedia redirect from "Domainering" to "Domain parking." Domainering is, I presume, what a domainer does. Wikipedia defines cybersquatting as necessarily involving bad faith use of trademarks. I'm not so sure this…

• Comment posted Jul 29, 2006 2:07 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Perhaps some definitions are in order, especially for me after a reader of one of my pieces objected to my failure to distinguish between cybersquatters and "legitimate domain name investors." What is a cybersquatter? I distinguish between it and typosquatters,…

How Domain Name Traffic Testing/Tasting Works

• Comment posted Apr 25, 2006 9:56 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Wouldn't this be the way to go for a phishing domain, at least if you were ready with an e-mail burst when the registration goes through? Has anyone correlated that data yet?

The Future of Some Email May Not Use Email

• Comment posted Mar 08, 2006 1:24 am PST — by Larry Seltzer
  For those defending it, why are you defending it?  Do you think it's a good trend?  Do you think it will stop spam at all, let alone better than other methods? I don't think of it as a good thing,…

• Comment posted Mar 07, 2006 9:25 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  Mr. Templeton: What Goodmail means is that AOL is, rather than doing that duty, blocking a fair bit of legitimate mail. This is one of my problems with the dearaol.com argument: your assertion that AOL's quality of service for non-Goodmail…

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2006 8:51 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  Paul seems to subscribe to the theory energizing the DearAOL coalition that once AOL starts accepting certified e-mail service for non-certified mail will be degraded. "If AOL starts losing more mail due to filter refactoring if Goodmail gets popular, even…

How Bad is Goodmail?

• Comment posted Feb 14, 2006 9:36 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  I'm basically in complete agreement and want to emphasize your point that Goodmail is *not* and anti-spam scheme. In a sense, it's an anti-anti-spam scheme for senders. Much of the misunderstanding about Goodmail, the part not based on false charges…

What's Wrong with Domain Names?

• Comment posted Dec 24, 2005 2:16 pm PST — by Larry Seltzer
  The rhetorical question at the end presumes that companies aren't actually buying their own misspellings. As another commentor points out, the number of potential misspellings of 'www.f-secure.com' is immense. Perhaps the company does own many of them. Also bear in…

Verisign Gets .COM Forever, But ICANN Gets a Lobbyist

• Comment posted Oct 27, 2005 7:40 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me from the agreement (http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/verisign/com-registry-agreement-22sep05.pdf) that the ICANN and Verisign fees are recurring annual charges (and you also incur the ICANN fees for a domain transfer). This is a little embarassing,…

We Hate Spam Except, Of Course, When It's Inconvenient to Do So

• Comment posted Jun 21, 2005 8:24 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  It sure is odd that a classic vanity site would be on a commerce server, but Steve Atkins' post certainly seems to clear that up. BTW, Yahoo! has been perhaps the top host for phishing sites for a while as…

• Comment posted Jun 21, 2005 5:55 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  I have been trying to investigate the data in this article and can't get it all to add up. A post in an otherwise typically silly Slashdot thread duplicates my quandry. What happened, am I looking at this wrong or…

So, Who Really Did Invent the Internet?

• Comment posted May 03, 2005 10:38 am PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  I invented it and my patent for it has just been approved. Details to follow…

Phish-Proofing URLs in Email?

• Comment posted Apr 22, 2005 4:10 pm PDT — by Larry Seltzer
  First, for the best banking phish you've ever seen read this page: http://www.antiphishing.org/phishing_archive/04-19-05_BOA/04-19-05_BOA.html It seems to me that MUAs and e-mail-aware security programs like A/V should be in the business of looking for HTML links where the body of the…