US Web Firm Described As "Phantom Registrar" Haven

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller directs attention to ongoing investigations of more than 40 phantom registrars linked to The Directi Group, including PDR, one of the 10 worst offenders on the Net. According to KnujOn, an additional 19,000 domains advertised through spam have been hiding their ownership behind PrivacyProtect.org, which The Washington Post has outed as Directi-owned. Directi claims it suspends illicit domains, but KnujOn provides documentation suggesting that Directi reports the registrars suspended and then reinstates them at another IP address. 'There has been some outcry about all this from the ICANN At-Large Committee, but as of this writing there has been no response from ICANN's Tim Cole,' Heller writers. 'Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that LogicBoxes, a Directi-owned registrar, has sponsored ICANN meetings in L.A. and Delhi.' Directi has since issued an official response to the allegations."

Comments

The Reason This Will Never End

[imyy4u3]

Quite simply, even if they shut Directi down, another company will take over the job of hiding the spammers for one simple reason: money. The spammers can afford to pay a company to hide them because they are making bank. Amazingly, about 1% of all spam emails actually result in a sale! So if you send out 1,000,000 emails, you can expect 10,000 sales! If people would just stop buying shit from spam emails, this wouldn't be a problem.

Now on the other hand, why do we even bother to try to pass spamming laws? Talk about another waste of time and money. If we pass a law saying all spam email must contain the words "unsolicited email" in the subject line, everyone will set their servers to block such email and therefore the spammers will certainly not put that in the subject line. So now we have to spend even more money to try and track the spammers down, which in essence we can't do because they pay companies like Directi money to hide their domains, IPs, etc.

Bottom line, this is an endless loop, and if anyone has any REAL suggestions on how to get rid of spammers, or how to force companies to stop hiding them and their domains, I'd love to hear it.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[thermian]

If people would just stop buying shit from spam emails, this wouldn't be a problem.

And if people stopped eating burgers, no-one would be fat. Alas you cannot stop large numbers of people doing things just because you think they're being stupid, the world doesn't work like that.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[Anonymous Coward]

If people would just stop buying shit from spam emails, this wouldn't be a problem.

And if people stopped eating burgers, no-one would be fat.

You're an idiot. Seriously.

Please don't post here anymore.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[Anonymous Coward]

Decriminalize murder. It will cut costs significantly.

Same thing with drugs. Legalize them all. That will cut the profit motive and reduce crime, as well as reduce police/prosecution/incarceration costs.

Prostitution? Same thing. Why is it illegal?

Most of the laws in this country are stupid.

Vote Libertarian.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[Angostura]

Someone has modded you insightful, but just have a look at point 1:

Make all advertisement, solicitation, marketing, etc , etc via email illegal. No exceptions.

My 2 year old daughter is having a birthday party. Can I tell people about it and mention what particularly cheap gifts she might like?

Preposterous - Of course I can - you didn't mean that.

OK. How about her pre-school who is holding a Christmas fair, entry 50p. Can I mail the parents of the children? The local newspapers?

Of course - you didn't mean that.

What about if I forward a Red-cross chain main asking for donations following the destruction of Hurricane Hannah. Of course, that's OK.

The only way this might get rid of spammers, is by convincing them that there is more money to be made in the law - arguing about the definition of solicitation, marketing and advertisement.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[riggah]

why not create a law prohiting credit card companies to make payments on products / companies which have used spam to addvertise their products or services.

How exactly would that work? We're talking about something that crosses international borders; who enforces the law? How would the CC companies know when spam generated the income? When does it cross the line and, say, make income from junk snail-mail illegal to make or receive payment?

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[halcyon1234]

If people would just stop buying shit from spam emails, this wouldn't be a problem.

You're right. Spamming is easy and profitable. If you take away the easy, then it will deter some spammers, but will just encourage others to find an easier route. Spammers treat legislation like damage and route around it...

The consumers, on the other hand, are a finite resource. There's only so many of them (though it doesn't seem it). They buy stuff from spammers out of ignorance, greed, lack of fear of getting scammed/harmed, or by just being a chump.

But they wouldn't if there was enough compelling education out there to show that purchasing spammed products is harmful to your health. Think about any food recall in recent times, from e. coli tomatoes to Listeriosis contaminated deli-meats. The harm-to-humans is often very, very low-- a dozen or two at the most-- but the public reaction against the product is immediate and massive. DON'T EAT THAT MEAT! People will wrap themselves in unjustly paranoid levels of caution over what amounts to a statistically tiny chance of something happening to them.

So the trick to stopping spam is to get rid of the customers. And the trick to getting rid of the customers is to, well, get rid of them.

Legislation doesn't work because if you get rid of one spammer, ten more pop up. But it is possible to track down a spammer. Pick a few good-sized spammers. Hire a mercenary company to track them down, kill them (painfully or not, depending on your budget), and seize their customer list. Then mail out to every customer a free sample of V!@GREA. Except instead of the blue pill, you ship out blue-colored cyanide pills. Bam, hundreds to thousands of customers dead in an instant. Then you leak to the media that they were all customers of spam. Let the media hype it up in the way they do best, and within a day you'll have headlines everywhere that SPAMMERS ARE KILLING YOU AND YOUR FAMILY! Once the lowest common denominator gets wind that the magic blue pill from the internets will KILL THEM, they'll stop being customers.

No customers = no profit = no spam (or at least significantly reduced levels). You can then clean up the spam-stragglers with law enforcement and mercenary companies, as there won't be ten people waiting to pop up to replace them.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[russotto]

Well, if you can create anti-spam laws, why not create a law prohiting credit card companies to make payments on products / companies which have used spam to addvertise their products or services.

There are any number of problems with this (where's that standard form), but susceptibility to joe jobs is probably #1. The day after this law passed, the Microsoft dirty tricks division would spam for Apple, Coke and Pepsi would spam for each other, and a good number of Linux fans would spam for Microsoft.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[daemonburrito]

Spammers treat legislation like damage and route around it...

That's actually pretty interesting. When I use the "route" quote, I'm thinking of the internet as full of useful free expression and accurate data. But the miasma routes around damage, too.

The rest of your comment is pretty far off of the mark, but that sentence is something.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[Macthorpe]

Absolutely impossible, of course, that a rival company could send spam advertising for one of their competitors and use the completely reasonable revenge tactics you just espoused to trick you into knocking them off the internet.

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[corbettw]

Yes, the War on Drugs has worked tremendously well, let's try the same approach with spam. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:The Reason This Will Never End

[billcopc]

You mean like how you can be flagged as a terrorist organization if you sold meat that went into a suicide bomber's sandwich ?

The legal and privacy ramifications of what you're suggesting are very good reasons NOT to follow that path. I hate spammers as much as the next guy, but I'm cynical enough to know that more legislation is not going to solve the problem.

Re:Use the information against the spammers?

[SirJorgelOfBorgel]

I have actually built a similar system to that a year or so back, and ran it on our mail servers. Obviously, because it was just for testing, it only tagged spam and didn't block anything, and only for preselected accounts.

If I say so myself, it worked extraordinarily well. It took a lot of tweaking, but it's hit-rate was nearly perfect, if you of course ignore the spam from legitimate domains (which would subsequently usually be picked up and tagged by the SPF filter). False positives were virtually non-existent (one in many thousands), and after investigation all of those proved to be from people running their own mail servers at home without 'proper' domain names and records.

The project was put on hold because one of my other projects suddenly went through the roof in sales (yay!), though as things seem to be calming down on that front a bit (work-wise, not sale-wise), I'm still looking at options for continuing that work. The big problem here is of course that the anti-spam market is filled with products, lots of 'em free, and I don't easily see a way to break in there. I like doing it for the tech side, but the business side of such things is really not something I enjoy doing...

On a side-note, I wouldn't use low TTL's for detection...

Re:Privacy hinders law enforcement

[mi]

Did Bill Ayers ever try to kill anyone? I thought all he did was help blow up a statue?

WordNet defines "terrorism" as (emphasis mine::

The noun terrorism has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts) 1. terrorism, act of terrorism, terrorist act -- (the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear)

Belonging to a terrorist organization makes one a terrorist too, even if one is not (unlike Ayers) directly involved in any actual terrorism — take Hassan Nasrallah, for example.

Although per the definition above, simply threatening violence to attain certain goals is terrorism, Ayers' organization were planning to blow up an Army NCO club next. Fortunately for most concerned, they blew themselves up instead — the organization changed strategy to try to avoid casualties after this incident... But were also armed robberies (with fatalities) — a revolution always needs cash... (Interestingly, Joseph Stalin's first job in the Communist Party was to "rob the robbers" — what do the owners of "Democracy Now!" have in store for us?).

Just take Ayers' own words, spoken not during an interrogation, and not decades ago, but to the media this year: "I don't regret setting bombs, I feel we didn't do enough."

Whether he actually killed anyone is not relevant to his being a terrorist — only to an additional charge of murder, which, according to his "memoir" he may also have committed, but nobody knows for sure: "''Is this, then, the truth?,'' he writes. ''Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me.''"

But his organization's ideology, as summarized by him back then was: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at."

Back to my original point — although the scumbag's guilt is undeniable (and, indeed, not denied), he avoided any punishment, because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against them...

So, yes, Ayers was a member of a terrorist and otherwise criminal organization, and a terrorist himself — committed to this day to terrorism...