Ian Lamont writes "Anti-spam service Knujon has released reports highlighting how certain registrars in the US and abroad have consistently failed to live up to certain WHOIS-related obligations under ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) — specifically, the requirement that people or company registering domains provide valid contact information. Now the firm is requesting that ICANN shut down the worst alleged offender, Xinnet Bei Gong Da Software. According to Knujon, none of the WHOIS records in a sample of 11,000 alleged spam sites registered through Xinnet and reported by Knujon to ICANN's Whois Data Problem Report System were corrected in a six-month period ending in May 2008 — and the Chinese registrar continues to register about 100 spam sites per day. In many cases, says the Knujon document (PDF), Xinnet does not have 'any Whois record data for review while the sites are still active' and the spam sites further promote 'seal abuse' by posting bogus BBB, Verisign, and other trusted industry seals. ICANN says it is investigating. ICANN has just posted a draft revised RAA that is open for public comment until August 4. However, the wording of Section 3.7.8, governing registrars' obligations to check and correct domain owners' contact information, hasn't changed."
wow did the mental giants who first thought up using an inline graphic to portray legitimacy ever consider that someone may.... save... said graphic and re-use it.
You know you're living in the 21st century when "seal abuse" does not involve clubbing large numbers of adorable baby amphibious mammals in the Arctic.
Sure seals are amphibous. They're just not amphibians.
Unless you're talking about water-soluble seals, but those have to be protected from rain too, not just from full immersion in water. But I don't know of any material used for sealing things, that is water-soluble.
If the seal is valid you can click on it and get an information page about the site.
If you get a page about another site or the seal isn't a link then the site isn't legitimate.
A faked verisign seal on a web site is a great clue that they're not the right people to shop with. It also makes spotting phishing sites a lot easier.
As it stands, I have observed some common practices of simply blocking traffic going to or coming in from IPs from certain foreign nations. For some businesses, this practice alone reduces a tremendous amount of spam without affecting normal business flows. It would also make sense for users and businesses to restrict all communications with peers outside of their borders if, in fact, it has no adverse affect to their business flows.
Ultimately, this could lead to a segmented internet where entire nations find themselves effectively cut off by policy.
I am undecided about whether or not this is a good idea, but if China and Russia won't stop their criminals, perhaps they shouldn't have a presence on the global internet. The message? Play nice or you won't be allowed to play at all! My guess is that internet sanctions would have much faster reaction than economic sanctions.
Well, I'd be all for a segregated internet if it could keep all the American spam comments advertising drugs, loans, insurance and porn off my blog. Remember the USA is still the biggest spam producer. It would be nice if you could only spam yourselves.
Sorry, it's hard to hear you when you're speaking from atop such a high horse.
That's a pretty condescending attitude on your part as well.
We may have more spammers here, but at least we have a history of prosecuting and convicting at least some of them. I don't really know whether China/Russia have ever convicting anyone of spamming, but TFA refers to a registrar that is either incompetent or complicit dealing with spammers and located in China. Sometimes it's ok to criticize a country other than the USA. Just let that sink in a little.
We may have more spammers here, but at least we have a history of prosecuting and convicting at least some of them.
What difference does that make to me, sitting here with an inbox full of American spam?
Actually, in the case of the particular properties listed in this report (PowerEnlarge, VPXL, Canadian Healthcare, Wondercum) the sponsor for all of those sites is known as SanCash, which is operated jointly out of India and New Zealand. It recently changed its name to ETranz.mu. They list their corporate offices as being located in Mauritius, a notorious offshore location for underground activity.
The mailers who send you this crap are more than likely located in the US, but the ones who profit from it the
You're aware that the US is still, by a factor of almost 4, the number one spamming nation on Earth? But don't take my word for it:
http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso [spamhaus.org] [spamhaus.org]
Now, you were saying? Sorry, it's hard to hear you when you're speaking from atop such a high horse.
Does this take into consideration a large portion of the bots in the US being controlled by forces outside of the country? It's a pretty well known that just because a computer is spamming and its origin is with
I've not really notice China/Russia being any worse for SPAM than elsewhere, but one thing I did notice is that they seem to be much more often the source of cracking attempts against my boxen both at home and work. Even if a lot of it is just SSH password-guessing (sorry losers, I don't allow root-level SSH so you can stop trying that username), a large portion of the IP's involved in this seem to original from China and Russia. Still, I couldn't tell you how many are direct, deliberate attempts and how ma
The problem is that this ISP takes international registrations from spammers everywhere so blocking by a nations IP blocks is not going to help at all. Xenophobia may be comforting but is no help when the many of the criminals are likely to be in your own nation, it's better to go after them directly. As for hampering commerce with major trade partners to slow down some petty crooks that may be next door - implications are worth thinking about.
This is china we're talking about here. You can bet that the chinese government has control over the internet, just like it has control over everything else.
I don't claim the US is innocent, not even by implication. I am only pointing out that blocking out other countries is quite effective unless you're doing business overseas.
And as far as finding it impossible to communicate with people in the US is concerned, you can see the how and the why in action.
Sometimes really bad solutions have to be enacted before people will be interested in fixing the solution better which results in the problem being solved in a better way. Otherwise, it's just easier to do no
And as far as finding it impossible to communicate with people in the US is concerned, you can see the how and the why in action.
No, I can't. I'm trying to contact friends and people I'm doing business with in the US, their ISPs bounce me because I live in the same continent as some spammers. And it doesn't stop spam to any extent anyway.
But I'm well aware that the majority of spammers are in the US.
So why did you say "China and Russia won't stop their criminals" when the criminals Are American?
Nothing wrong with the protocols, they work work just fine. In fact they work so well that around the world they are capable of handling millions of messages a day across a constantly changing network with an incredibly small failure rate. Perhaps what in fact need to be fixed is the people and the businesses they run, may I suggest a crowbar or other suitably large piece of metal.
RespectMyPrivacy.com [respectmyprivacy.com] is a service provided through NearlyFreeSpeech.Net [nearlyfreespeech.net] that allows users to put up proxy contact information with which people may still contact you. Snail mail and faxes are forwarded to their addresses, and when they receive any snail mail or faxes addressed to your domain, they will ask you whether you want these forwarded to yourself. There is also a proxy email that forwards to the email account that you used to register. All of this (allegedly) complies with ICANN regulations, since the information can be used to contact you. The simple solution is the one provided by RMP.C, and it doesn't compromise anonymity.
Perhaps the situation is not as bleak as you make it out to be.
I know it chews CPU time when a spammer blasts you, but that happens with all services connected to the Internet. Changing a protocol is only going to cause incompatability issues.
There's been a formal study of bad WHOIS data by the Government Accounting Office [gao.gov], the investigative arm of Congress, titled "Prevalence of False Contact Information for Registered Domain Names", on this topic. They found at least 8% of contact info in WHOIS to be totally bogus. They also, as a test of ICANN, submitted 45 "WHOIS information problem reports", of which 11 resulted in correction and 33 did not. But GAO didn't break down the data by registrar.
We've been interested in this issue at SiteTruth [sitetruth.com] for some time. We take a broader view of "bad" web sites than most; we consider any commercial site that lacks valid business name and address information to be bogus. Over 35% of Google AdWords advertisers fail that test. [sitetruth.net] For advertisers whose ads appear on Myspace, the ratio is much higher.
Originally, we tried to get contact information from WHOIS data, but the data quality
was so appallingly bad that we had to develop another approach. We have a system that looks for contact info the way a user would, looking at pages with names like "About", "Contact", and such, trying to find a user-readable street address. We also have some big databases of business addresses to check against. This turns out to work much better than looking at WHOIS data when the goal is to find the business behind the web site.
(You can see this info using our AdRater [sitetruth.com] plug-in for Firefox. Download our plug-in to see the ratings for each Google advertiser as the ads go by. Unless you're already blocking all such ads, of course.)
The problem with a lot of this is, WHOIS records themselves invite SPAM (conveniently having your email address available to spammers) or other issues. Personally, I'd rather not have some internet eTard with a hot temper and righteous indignation at something I posted online coming to hunt me down via my address in a WHOIS entry...
This could cause a Chinese/USA diplomatic incident. The Chinese upset ''because ICANN (a branch of the government of the USA) is exerting unfair control over the Internet''.
This is one reason why ICANN should be made completely independent of the USA government.
The US doesn't exactly own the internet. ICANN however is supposed to be the central authority on DNS naming(someone has to be and they're the ones who started it), whether you agree with this or not is really rather immaterial.
However as this isn't really an issue of the US overriding China's rights on the internet it's not really all that important.
The registrar, who happens to be in China, but could be anywhere for all that it matters signed an agreement with ICANN to follow its rules regarding domain registration. One of those rules it that valid contact information has to be present for all domains. It doesn't as far as I can see have to lead to the person who runs the address, or to any individual involved in the domain(so it's not really an ID card), it simply has to lead to an actual someone who is responsible for that domain. That person is free to decline any requests for information regarding the actual users of their domain, and even to not collect said information at all. They are also entitled to allow said users to continue any activity which doesn't breach the agreement they signed with ICANN or any laws which are applicable to them(ie US law does not apply to a Chinese registrar, but the registrar's agreement with ICANN does). Yes there are potential issues of censorship and you might argue that requiring an individual to be responsible for the registration is wrong, it is however the agreement which the registrars signed in exchange for being able to give out registrations which will be honoured by the internet as a whole and so therefor they're responsible for holding to it.
It's ironic that they want domain owners to provide valid contact information in the belief that this will stop spam.
Before I moved to a registrar who provided free anonymous registration, I provided fake contact information specifically to prevent spambots from looking up my information in whois.
It's ironic that they want domain owners to provide valid contact information in the belief that this will stop spam.
No, actually it really isn't ironic at all. The mechanism makes sense when one considers how many more internet users there are than internet domains. The purpose of requiring valid contact information is so that there is a valid mechanism for contacting the owners of domains that are being spamvertised. The reasoning behind this is simple - if the companies that benefit from spam are required to make their true contact information known, then a mechanism to take action against them is available.
The only real solution, but not perfect either, is to send a physical confirmation letter (snail mail) to the address in question. The letter would contain a confirmation code that needs to be used to activate the account. Until that happens the account and domain would be reserved for one month before it is returned to the void.
What would be interesting is whether it would be possible to add some intelligence into the DNS server, which checks the whois database to find out who the registrar is. You could t
I don't think SMTP usually involves DNS. But spam-listing all the registrar's domains would be possible. Almost every spam email contains links. That is the key.
I can say from my own experience with spam that there are plenty of bad registrars in China, even when only considering which ones are spammer-friendly. Most of the spam email that I receive as advertising for illegal sales of drugs or pirated software is sent on behalf of domains sold by Chinese registrars.
A few Chinese bad apples:
HKDND
yesnic
easydns
paycenter
And these are just a few bad registrars that I find by searching through a short collection of my spam.
So if they shut down the registrar, wouldn't that invalidate all domains currently registered through them? I'm assuming some of those belong to legitimate non-spammers....
Yes, it will. And those legitimate domains can get themselves transferred to a new registrar. Of course, in order to do that, I'd hope that they'd have to provide proper contact details, which would sieve out all the spammers.
Funny how all the spam I receive is from Chinese servers but advertising for US products only available for purchase in the US and leading to US websites.
A lot of the spam from China is from US spammers: throwaway domains are very useful, to duck blacklists. It's really an international problem, and tends to fester due to companies like this, which ICANN is typically unable or unwilling to disconnect.
Their eyes are a little bit too slanted for my taste.
Actually, if you're going to taste them, it's best to remove them from the eyelid entirely. At that point, they're really indistinguishable from European eyes, but much more flavorful.
After an hour or so, though, you need to eat another one.
In other words (Score:4, Funny)
seal abuse (Score:4, Insightful)
wow did the mental giants who first thought up using an inline graphic to portray legitimacy ever consider that someone may.... save... said graphic and re-use it.
Re:seal abuse (Score:5, Funny)
You know you're living in the 21st century when "seal abuse" does not involve clubbing large numbers of adorable baby amphibious mammals in the Arctic.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Reminds me of this short joke:
A seal walks into a club ...
Re: (Score:2)
At least, that's what the poacher claimed.
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Sure seals are amphibous. They're just not amphibians.
Unless you're talking about water-soluble seals, but those have to be protected from rain too, not just from full immersion in water. But I don't know of any material used for sealing things, that is water-soluble.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes they did.
If the seal is valid you can click on it and get an information page about the site.
If you get a page about another site or the seal isn't a link then the site isn't legitimate.
A faked verisign seal on a web site is a great clue that they're not the right people to shop with. It also makes spotting phishing sites a lot easier.
Re: (Score:2)
My prediction: Internet segmentation (Score:4, Insightful)
As it stands, I have observed some common practices of simply blocking traffic going to or coming in from IPs from certain foreign nations. For some businesses, this practice alone reduces a tremendous amount of spam without affecting normal business flows. It would also make sense for users and businesses to restrict all communications with peers outside of their borders if, in fact, it has no adverse affect to their business flows.
Ultimately, this could lead to a segmented internet where entire nations find themselves effectively cut off by policy.
I am undecided about whether or not this is a good idea, but if China and Russia won't stop their criminals, perhaps they shouldn't have a presence on the global internet. The message? Play nice or you won't be allowed to play at all! My guess is that internet sanctions would have much faster reaction than economic sanctions.
Re:My prediction: Internet segmentation (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I'd be all for a segregated internet if it could keep all the American spam comments advertising drugs, loans, insurance and porn off my blog. Remember the USA is still the biggest spam producer. It would be nice if you could only spam yourselves.
Parent
Re:My prediction: Internet segmentation (Score:5, Informative)
"If China and Russia won't stop their criminals..."
You're aware that the US is still, by a factor of almost 4, the number one spamming nation on Earth? But don't take my word for it:
http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso [spamhaus.org]
Now, you were saying? Sorry, it's hard to hear you when you're speaking from atop such a high horse.
Parent
Re:My prediction: Internet segmentation (Score:5, Insightful)
We may have more spammers here, but at least we have a history of prosecuting and convicting at least some of them.
I don't really know whether China/Russia have ever convicting anyone of spamming, but TFA refers to a registrar that is either incompetent or complicit dealing with spammers and located in China.
Sometimes it's ok to criticize a country other than the USA.
Just let that sink in a little.
Parent
Re:My prediction: Internet segmentation (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We may have more spammers here, but at least we have a history of prosecuting and convicting at least some of them.
What difference does that make to me, sitting here with an inbox full of American spam?
Actually, in the case of the particular properties listed in this report (PowerEnlarge, VPXL, Canadian Healthcare, Wondercum) the sponsor for all of those sites is known as SanCash, which is operated jointly out of India and New Zealand. It recently changed its name to ETranz.mu. They list their corporate offices as being located in Mauritius, a notorious offshore location for underground activity.
The mailers who send you this crap are more than likely located in the US, but the ones who profit from it the
Re:My prediction: Internet segmentation (Score:5, Informative)
I think the Russians are actually more effective than the Americans - they murder their Spam King Pins [theregister.co.uk]!
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
No, I think there retarded meme posts you.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Does this take into consideration a large portion of the bots in the US being controlled by forces outside of the country? It's a pretty well known that just because a computer is spamming and its origin is with
Re:My prediction: Internet segmentation (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a list of the most prolific spammers in the world - aka. the people controlling these bots:
http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/index.lasso [spamhaus.org]
They're mostly american.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
But do you count the "origin" as the spammers country or the location of the servers?
I see allot of spam coming from china but it appears to be mostly linked with US products.
Spam yes, how about attacks? (Score:2)
Re:My prediction: Internet segmentation (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is china we're talking about here. You can bet that the chinese government has control over the internet, just like it has control over everything else.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't claim the US is innocent, not even by implication. I am only pointing out that blocking out other countries is quite effective unless you're doing business overseas.
And as far as finding it impossible to communicate with people in the US is concerned, you can see the how and the why in action.
Sometimes really bad solutions have to be enacted before people will be interested in fixing the solution better which results in the problem being solved in a better way. Otherwise, it's just easier to do no
Re: (Score:2)
No, I can't. I'm trying to contact friends and people I'm doing business with in the US, their ISPs bounce me because I live in the same continent as some spammers. And it doesn't stop spam to any extent anyway.
But I'm well aware that the majority of spammers are in the US.
So why did you say "China and Russia won't stop their criminals" when the criminals Are American?
B
anti-spam kills anonymous speech (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet again, "ID cards" are proposed as a method to curb spam, at the expense of anonymous speech.
When are we going to actually fix our protocols?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing wrong with the protocols, they work work just fine. In fact they work so well that around the world they are capable of handling millions of messages a day across a constantly changing network with an incredibly small failure rate. Perhaps what in fact need to be fixed is the people and the businesses they run, may I suggest a crowbar or other suitably large piece of metal.
Re:anti-spam kills anonymous speech (Score:5, Informative)
RespectMyPrivacy.com [respectmyprivacy.com] is a service provided through NearlyFreeSpeech.Net [nearlyfreespeech.net] that allows users to put up proxy contact information with which people may still contact you. Snail mail and faxes are forwarded to their addresses, and when they receive any snail mail or faxes addressed to your domain, they will ask you whether you want these forwarded to yourself. There is also a proxy email that forwards to the email account that you used to register. All of this (allegedly) complies with ICANN regulations, since the information can be used to contact you. The simple solution is the one provided by RMP.C, and it doesn't compromise anonymity.
Perhaps the situation is not as bleak as you make it out to be.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
What's wrong with email as it is?
I know it chews CPU time when a spammer blasts you, but that happens with all services connected to the Internet.
Changing a protocol is only going to cause incompatability issues.
Contact info is better found on the web site. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's been a formal study of bad WHOIS data by the Government Accounting Office [gao.gov], the investigative arm of Congress, titled "Prevalence of False Contact Information for Registered Domain Names", on this topic. They found at least 8% of contact info in WHOIS to be totally bogus. They also, as a test of ICANN, submitted 45 "WHOIS information problem reports", of which 11 resulted in correction and 33 did not. But GAO didn't break down the data by registrar.
We've been interested in this issue at SiteTruth [sitetruth.com] for some time. We take a broader view of "bad" web sites than most; we consider any commercial site that lacks valid business name and address information to be bogus. Over 35% of Google AdWords advertisers fail that test. [sitetruth.net] For advertisers whose ads appear on Myspace, the ratio is much higher.
Originally, we tried to get contact information from WHOIS data, but the data quality was so appallingly bad that we had to develop another approach. We have a system that looks for contact info the way a user would, looking at pages with names like "About", "Contact", and such, trying to find a user-readable street address. We also have some big databases of business addresses to check against. This turns out to work much better than looking at WHOIS data when the goal is to find the business behind the web site.
(You can see this info using our AdRater [sitetruth.com] plug-in for Firefox. Download our plug-in to see the ratings for each Google advertiser as the ads go by. Unless you're already blocking all such ads, of course.)
Whois invites SPAM (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't want my real physical address listed on my domain for the world to see, and I don't have a P.O. box.
We get that a lot. Now go read California Business and Professions Code Section 17358 [sitetruth.com], which applies if you sell to California, and the European Electronic Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) [sitetruth.com], which applies if you sell in Europe. Anonymous businesses are illegal in most of the developed world. Deal with it.
California prosecutors have used B&P code section 17538 [state.ca.us] when dealing with complaints agai
Diplomatic incident (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one reason why ICANN should be made completely independent of the USA government.
So the US owns the internet? (Score:2)
Not to be more anti-american than I have to, doesn't this show that the United States, in some sense, "owns" the internet? If not, why?
Re:So the US owns the internet? (Score:5, Informative)
However as this isn't really an issue of the US overriding China's rights on the internet it's not really all that important.
The registrar, who happens to be in China, but could be anywhere for all that it matters signed an agreement with ICANN to follow its rules regarding domain registration. One of those rules it that valid contact information has to be present for all domains. It doesn't as far as I can see have to lead to the person who runs the address, or to any individual involved in the domain(so it's not really an ID card), it simply has to lead to an actual someone who is responsible for that domain. That person is free to decline any requests for information regarding the actual users of their domain, and even to not collect said information at all. They are also entitled to allow said users to continue any activity which doesn't breach the agreement they signed with ICANN or any laws which are applicable to them(ie US law does not apply to a Chinese registrar, but the registrar's agreement with ICANN does). Yes there are potential issues of censorship and you might argue that requiring an individual to be responsible for the registration is wrong, it is however the agreement which the registrars signed in exchange for being able to give out registrations which will be honoured by the internet as a whole and so therefor they're responsible for holding to it.
Parent
It's ironic. Don't you think? (Score:4, Informative)
It's ironic that they want domain owners to provide valid contact information in the belief that this will stop spam.
Before I moved to a registrar who provided free anonymous registration, I provided fake contact information specifically to prevent spambots from looking up my information in whois.
Not really (Score:3, Insightful)
It's ironic that they want domain owners to provide valid contact information in the belief that this will stop spam.
No, actually it really isn't ironic at all. The mechanism makes sense when one considers how many more internet users there are than internet domains. The purpose of requiring valid contact information is so that there is a valid mechanism for contacting the owners of domains that are being spamvertised. The reasoning behind this is simple - if the companies that benefit from spam are required to make their true contact information known, then a mechanism to take action against them is available.
Whi
Physical confirmation (Score:2)
The only real solution, but not perfect either, is to send a physical confirmation letter (snail mail) to the address in question. The letter would contain a confirmation code that needs to be used to activate the account. Until that happens the account and domain would be reserved for one month before it is returned to the void.
What would be interesting is whether it would be possible to add some intelligence into the DNS server, which checks the whois database to find out who the registrar is. You could t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure if its even the worst (Score:3, Interesting)
A few Chinese bad apples:
- HKDND
- yesnic
- easydns
- paycenter
And these are just a few bad registrars that I find by searching through a short collection of my spam.Shamelessly stealing previous joke (Score:5, Funny)
If spam is a "whopper" of a problem, and burger king's "whopper" is a cheeseburger, then...
ICANN has cheezburger?
Funny aside: my captcha is "verified", something which these domains were not.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:GASP and SHOCK! (Score:4, Interesting)
So if they shut down the registrar, wouldn't that invalidate all domains currently registered through them? I'm assuming some of those belong to legitimate non-spammers....
Parent
Re:GASP and SHOCK! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Spam from China? GASP!
Funny how all the spam I receive is from Chinese servers but advertising for US products only available for purchase in the US and leading to US websites.
pot. kettle.
Re:GASP and SHOCK! (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of the spam from China is from US spammers: throwaway domains are very useful, to duck blacklists. It's really an international problem, and tends to fester due to companies like this, which ICANN is typically unable or unwilling to disconnect.
Parent
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Spam from domains registered in China. Not at all the same thing.
Re:I don't trust the Chinese (Score:5, Funny)
After an hour or so, though, you need to eat another one.
Parent