Re: [Asrg] Assume perfect knowledge by domain registry provisioners, s

At 11:09 PM -0400 5/8/03, Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
> Would registering more junk domains mean that the spammer will be 
> spending more money on sending spam? Wouldn't eventually that create 
> a big enough expense for the spammer which would be comparable with 
> the cost of postage for sending a regular letter? That would lead to 
> higher cost of sending spam thus
Given that some spammers already work this way, I would say not. 
Assuming that you post several million (at least) messages per 
domain, and domains cost about $10, I don't think it qualifies as a 
significant expense.
> Also, if the ICANN rule about having correct WHOIS information would 
> actually be enforced with some kind of fines or penalties, wouldn't 
> that force the registrars to have better ID procedures on who 
> actually registers domain names thus reducing the overall number of 
> junk domains? This is part of the overall
The question is (as with any identification system), what would you 
do with the information?  Would you block based on physical address? 
And is it really possible for a registrar to validate an address when 
it comes from another part of the world?
There are also some practical considerations.  Unfortunately you 
can't do a whois query on every incoming domain.  The registrars have 
some limit on the number and type of automated queries you can do 
from a single IP address (in part to keep out spammers, but there are 
also general scalability issues).  You could try round-robinning your 
requests, but it turns out the different registrars return different 
formats.  The only real solution is to purchase the entire database 
and do periodic downloads (Network Solutions supposedly sells 
it--although they never responded to our queries--but other 
registrars do).  So while it's a good solution for a spam filtering 
service, it's not really useful as a generic tool.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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