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If there were a lifetime achievement award for losing lawsuits for being annoying, Sanford Wallace would be a shoo-in. Fifteen years ago, his junk faxing was a major impetus for the TCPA, the law outlawing junk faxes. Later in the 1990s, his Cyber Promotions set important legal precedents about spam in cases where he lost to Compuserve and AOL. Two years ago, he lost a suit to FTC who sued his Smartbot.net for stuffing spyware onto people's computers. And now, lest anyone think that he's run out of bad ideas, he's back, on the receiving end of a lawsuit from MySpace... more»
Computer scientists, Geoff Voelker and Stefan Savage, from UC San Diego have found striking differences between the infrastructure used to distribute spam and the infrastructure used to host the online scams advertised in these unwanted email messages. This discovery is believed to help aid in the fight to reduce spam volume and shut down illegal online businesses and malware sites. While hundreds or thousands of compromised computers may be used to relay spam to users, most scams are hosted by individual Web servers. more»
News breaking out today is that Google has acquired GrandCentral for something around $50 million. GrandCentral is a service that gives you one phone number that can ring multiple numbers, provide one common voicemail - and all sorts of the other features (see "howitworks" for a list of features)... So will we ultimately see voicemail inside of Gmail? One would assume that we will eventually see integration with GoogleTalk... more»
A Brooklyn man has pleaded guilty today for sending spam emails to over 1.2 million AOL subscribers in a scheme that foiled the Internet company's spam-filtering system. Reuters reports: "Adam Vitale, 26, pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to breaking anti-spam laws. He was caught making a deal with a government informant that sent spam e-mails advertising a computer security program in return for 50 percent of the product's profits, prosecutors said." more»
Forwarding e-mail is so easy that it must be legal, right? Not everyone thinks so. Ned Snow at the University of Arkansas recently wrote A Copyright Conundrum: Protecting Email Privacy that argues that forwarding violates the sender's copyright rights, so it's not. The article is quite clever and is (as best I can tell, not being a legal historian) well researched, even if you agree with me that its conclusions are a bunch of codswallop... more»
Next to offshore outsourcing, spam is the other thing that has become synonymous with China.
Ranked second after the United States as the source from which spam originates, China faces an uphill battle in keeping spammers off its networks. more»
Recently, I wrote about the Spamhaus Policy Block List (PBL), suggesting senders encourage their network/connectivity service providers (whomever they lease or purchase IP addresses from) to list their illegitimate email-sending IPs as a step towards improving the overall email stream on the internet. The initial PBL was seeded with listings from the Dynablock NJABL ("Not Just Another Bogus List"), which at the time of the cut-over was at more than 1.9 million entries... more»
From "Last Call for Whois Comments", a recent opinion piece by eWeek's Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer: "It's not a good sign when the criminals and the lawyers are on the same side of an issue; there may be no good solution to the problems of Whois service rules. Who would have imagined that so much business and so much abuse would center around Internet domain names? Certainly not the designers of the system, including those of the Whois service, which reports on ownership and some other data on domain names... more»
Antispam blacklist service, The Open Relay Database (ORDB), has pulled the plug after five and a half years because of spammers' growing sophistication. ORDB was designed to deal with a technique in which spammers used SMTP proxy servers to flood the internet with junk e-mail. more»
Spam volume soared another 35% in November, an e-mail security vendor said Thursday, and the month saw spam tactics that reduced the efficiency of traditional anti-spam filters. ..."from 31 billion spams a day on average in October 2005 to 63 billion in October 2006. But in November, we saw two surges that averaged 85 billion messages a day, one from Nov. 13 to 22, the other from Nov. 26 to 28. more»
In November, Mark Mumma, who runs a little design firm at webguy.com, lost an appeal in the Fourth Federal Circuit. He'd filed suit against cruise.com and their parent Omega World Travel under CAN SPAM and an Oklahoma anti-spam law. Omega countersued for defamation. The court threw out Mumma's case, and allowed part of the defamation case to proceed. At first blush, this looks like a big win for spammers. more»
Last week the Federal Trade Commission settled a lawsuit against Yesmail, a large ESP (Email Service Provider). The facts of the case are not in dispute, but their meaning is. Yesmail, like most large ESPs, has absorbed a number of its smaller competitors over the years including a company called @Once. Back in 2004, they screwed up their incoming mail so that a whole lot of bounces and opt-out requests were erroneously filtered out as spam. As a result, thousands of people who'd told @Once to stop sending them mail kept getting mail anyway... more»
The United States and China remained atop the list of countries spewing spam for the third quarter, U.K.-based security vendor Sophos said Monday, and the former had the dubious honor of extending its lead in the battle for spam share. more»
Starting next week, about 1,200 diplomats and technology ministers will gather at a hotel in the outskirts of Athens to resume a debate that has often pitted the Bush administration and a handful of its Western allies against Brazil, India, China and African countries. Officially, the inaugural meeting of the United Nations' Internet Governance Forum is designed to explore topics like free speech, security, spam and multilingualism... more»
Microsoft has made the Sender ID framework specification for email authentication available to users at no cost and with the guarantee that it will never take legal action against them. more»
