Barry Shein wrote:
On August 13, 2007 at 10:11 dotis@mail-abuse.org (Douglas Otis) wrote:
On Aug 12, 2007, at 6:41 AM, John Levine wrote:
The problems with domain tasting more affect web users, with vast number of typosquat parking pages flickering in and out of existence.
Domain tasting clearly affects assessments based upon domains. With millions added and removed daily as part of "no cost" domain tasting programs, the number of transitioning domains has been increased by an order of magnitude. Many of these new domains often appear as possible phishing domains. The high number of tasting domains obscures which are involved in criminal activities. This high number also makes timely notification of possible threats far less practical.
This sort of chain of reasoning, one behavior for one purpose might sometimes be a more insidious behavior for other purposes, makes me nervous. I just think it's a treacherous way to make policy, except in extreme cases.
Then again I'm not particularly bugged by people who run these ad-only sites. Seems to me that's between them and the advertisers who pay them so long as it's not inherently criminal. And where it is criminal that should be dealt with, take any advertising medium in existence and you'll find a percentage of fraud.
The real sin here is indicated by the terminology, "domain tasting". Domains should be paid for in advance, not necessarily "by law", but by liability.
That is, if you extend domains on credit w/o any useful accountability of the buyer and this results in a pattern of criminality then the liability for that fraud should be shared by the seller.
I am not sure tasting is criminal or fraud.
This would not be unique, there are lots of real world examples (e.g., if you rented cars for cash and asked for no id's and they were often used in crimes...)
The car rental example falls apart: no ID = no way to track you down if you don't return the car. I don't believe there are any real world examples, where "real world" deals with anything physical. I think this problem only exists in the electronic world, where what is being bought and sold is just a few bytes in a database. Carl K