funsec mailing list archives

Re: How Tucows Helps A Spammer Cover His Tracks


From: "Fergie" <fergdawg () netzero net>
Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 01:34:46 GMT

I don't think this baseless at all -- but unfortunately, it does
focus on Tucows. I'll leave it for other list readers to comment
on that specifically.

So what about (especially) Joker? Or Yahoo! as a registrar?

These are examples of registrars that have had _serious_ problems
w.r.t. spammers using their services for nefarious (and in many
case, illegal) purposes.

All I said was that this issue needs to brought to the forefront
and iscussed -- because it doesn't appear to be getting any better.

The eMail Battles article can eitehr stand, or fall, on its own legs.

Cheers,

- ferg


-- Tim Wilde <twilde () dyndns com> wrote:
On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, Fergie wrote:

This is nothing new, but more attention to this sort of mess
needs to be brought to the forefront & discussed. Some of these
registrars are in it simply for the money and care nothing about
the "health" of the Internet.

Did they try to contact Tucows?  They have a tiny paragraph at the end 
about the fact that Tucows will yank WHOIS privacy on spammers, but even 
that they spin as a negative.  Tucows are white-hat - a little bit 
clueless, sometimes, yes, but certainly white-hat - their intentions are 
in the right place.  I imagine if they were presented with clear evidence 
of spam involving those domains, which shouldn't be hard if the article is 
true about the volume, they'd yank the WHOIS Privacy in no time flat.

Tucows' WHOIS Privacy (and other registrars' similar services) are 
important, some would say necessary, exactly BECAUSE of the spammers. 
Yes, spammers will try to use them to hide as well, but it should be a 
trivial matter to get a truly white-hat registrar to pull away the privacy 
in the case of spam.  And if the registrar isn't white-hat, they're 
probably not going to do anything about the spammer's domain ANYWAY, 
privacy service or not.

Seems like a factless, baseless, possibly libellous, attack on a 
well-meaning and generally-responsive registrar, to me.  Nothing to be 
excited about or pointing out as a shining example of anti-spammers 
sticking it to the man.

Tim

-- 
Tim Wilde
twilde () dyndns com
Systems Administrator
Dynamic Network Services, Inc.
http://www.dyndns.com/



--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg () netzero net or fergdawg () sbcglobal net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/


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