Biography
Books
|
|
|
|
|
Blog
John's blog posts are hosted at:
http://weblog.johnlevine.com/
http://weblog.johnlevine.com/
A thought about not-quite-ASCII Top Level Domains
November 18 2009
ICANN has opened their new fast track process for "countries and territories that use languages based on scripts other than Latin" to get domain names that identify the country or territory in its own language. It's not clear to me what the policy is supposed to be for countries whose languages use extended Latin with… read moreNovember 08 2009
At its recent meeting in Seoul ICANN announced with great fanfare that it's getting ever closer to adding lots of new Top Level Domains (TLDs). Despite all the hype, as I have argued before, new TLDs will make little difference. There are two mostly separate kinds of new TLDs. One is TLDs for countries in… read moreHow do you do secure bank transactions on the Internet?
November 08 2009
Banks love it when their customers do their transactions on line, since it is so much cheaper than when they use a bank-provided ATM, a phone call center, or, perish forbid, a live human teller. Customers like it too, since bank web sites are usually open 24/7, there's no line and no need to… read moreOctober 31 2009
(Thanks to Chris Lewis for permission to adapt this) Everyone who uses e-mail needs spam filtering, and some filters definitely work better than others. Some people we know were trying to design tests of filter quality, which turns out to be extremely difficult. What one might call 'filtering quality' assessment, should be… read moreHelping banks fight phishing and account fraud, whether they like it or not
August 21 2009
On Wednesday, Project Honey Pot filed an unusual lawsuit against "John Does stealing money from US businesses through unauthorized electronic transfers made possible by computer viruses transmitted in spam." Their attorney is Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group, who is one of the most experienced anti-spam lawyers around, with whom I have worked in the past. The goal… read moreAre phishing and malware separate threats?
August 16 2009
Phishing is when bad guys try to impersonate a trusted organization, so they can steal your credentials. Typically they'll send you a fake e-mail that appears to be from a bank, with a link to a fake website that also looks like the bank. Malware offers another more insidious way to steal your credentials,… read moreWhy can't we make the Internet secure?
August 08 2009
In a discussion about a recent denial of service attack against Twitter, someone asked Some class of suppliers must be making money off of the weaknesses. Anybody out there have a prescription for the cure? Sure, but you're not going to like it. The Internet was originally a walled garden, where its… read moreHow unconscionable is the profit that Verisign makes from its registry?
July 11 2009
Verisign makes a great deal of money from the .COM and .NET registries. Can we tell how much they make, and how much that might change if the CFIT lawsuit succeeds? It's not hard to make some estimates from public information. The largest gTLD registry that Verisign doesn't run is .ORG, which was transferred… read moreVerisign fires back at CFIT and sets a trap for ICANN
July 05 2009
Last month the Ninth Circuit revived CFIT's anti-trust case against Verisign. On Thursday, Verisign filed a most interesting petition for rehearing. As you would expect, they offer a whole bunch of arguments about why the original decision to dismiss the case was right, and the appeals panel was wrong to reinstate it. Many of them are procedural,… read moreJuly 04 2009
The DKIM standard has been out for two years now, and we're starting to see some adoption by large mail systems, but there's still a lot of misunderstanding about what DKIM does and doesn't do. A DKIM signature means a message isn't spam Any a mail system can add a signatures to… read moreJuly 02 2009
Yesterday I said that the original motivations for adding new TLDs were to break Verisign's monopoly on .COM, and to use domain names as directories. Competitive registrars broke the monopoly more effectively than any new domains, and the new domains that tried to be directories have failed. So what could a new TLD do? Get… read moreJuly 01 2009
ICANN's Sydney meeting has come and gone, with the promised flood of new top-level domains claimed to be ever closer to reality. Does the world need more TLDs? Well, no. Way back in the mid 1990s, it seemed obvious that Internet users would use the DNS as a directory, particularly once early web… read moreAppeals Court revives the CFIT anti-trust suit agaist Verisign
June 05 2009
Back in 2005 an organization called the Coalition for Internet Transparency (CFIT) burst upon the scene at the Vancouver ICANN meeting, and filed an anti-trust suit against Verisign for their monopoly control of the .COM registry and of the market in expiring .COM domains. They didn't do very well in the trial court, which… read moreJune 04 2009
Phishing, stealing personal information by impersonating a trusted organization, is a big problem that's not going away. Most antiphishing techniques to date have attempted to recognize fake e-mail and fake web sites, but this hasn't been particularly effective. A more promising approach is to brand the real mail and real web sites. See more ... read moreMay 15 2009
I got a note from a college friend via Facebook yesterday, telling me about the clever 282.im domain. Gee, it looked just like Facebook, like, you know, a phish. Uh oh. See more ... read moreAlso find John on:
Buy Direct and Save
©2009, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (707) 827-7000 / (800) 998-9938 All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners. |
About O'Reilly
Academic Solutions Authors Contacts Customer Service Jobs Newsletters O'Reilly Labs Press Room Privacy Policy RSS Feeds Terms of Service User Groups Writing for O'Reilly |
Content Archive Business Technology Computer Technology Microsoft Mobile Network Operating System Digital Photography Programming Software Web Web Design |
More O'Reilly Sites
O'Reilly Radar Ignite Tools of Change for Publishing Digital Media Inside iPhone O'Reilly FYI makezine.com craftzine.com hackszine.com perl.com xml.com Partner Sites InsideRIA java.net O'Reilly Insights on Forbes.com |