Mail-order wife site silences critic with UDRP

A dating service has failed in a second attempt to hijack a domain name on the basis that the corresponding web site uses its “hot Russian brides” trademark in its directory structure.
Romantic Tours, which runs hotrussianbrides.com, filed a UDRP claim against agencyscams.com, claiming its URL agencyscams.com/why/hotrussianbrides infringed its trademark.
It lost the case, with the National Arbitration Forum arbitrator quite reasonably noting that “proceedings under the UDRP may be applied only to domain names”.
As noted over at Domain Name Wire, Romantic Tours tried the same ballsy tactic with jimslists.com, and was similarly unsuccessful.
Jimslists.com and and agencyscams.com are run by the same person. They’re basically gripe sites naming and shaming allegedly dodgy dating agencies and the allegedly dodgy women who use them.
While Romantic Tours may have lost its UDRP case, it appears to have got what it wanted anyway.
The offending URLs are no longer active on either site, and detailed references to hotrussianbrides.com appear to have been yanked, resulting in 404s.

Cheaters’ dating site wins 101 typo domains

You’d think a web site that enables married people to cheat on their partners would have difficulty taking the moral high ground on any issue. Apparently not.
AshleyMadison.com, which offers an “Affairs Guaranteed” promise, has just won 101 typo domain names under a mass UDRP claim against a single respondent.
The disputed domains included everything from zashleymadison.com to aeshleymadison.com. Two were PPC pages, the remainder apparently remained unused.
Judging from the National Arbitration Forum decision, this was an open-and-shut case of typosquatting.
The registrant was hiding behind a Bahamas-based privacy service that declined to close his true identity.
He did not respond to the UDRP filing.

ICANN closes .xxx forum after 14,000 comments

ICANN has finally shut down the latest public comment period on the proposed .xxx TLD, and now faces the task of finding the few dozen grains of wheat in about 14,000 pieces of chaff.
It’s general counsel John Jeffrey’s task to provide the round-up on this, possibly record-breaking, public comment period, although I understand ICM Registry may also provide its own, alternative, summary document.
I had a quick chat with Jeffrey yesterday. He told me comments were kept open beyond the advertized Monday shutdown because ICANN staffers are allowed to use their discretion when forums are seeing a lot of activity.
He also noted that the comment period was not a referendum on the merits of .xxx; ICANN had solicited feedback on a specific set of process options on how to handle .xxx.
It’s my impression that the 10,000+ identical form emails from the American Family Association may, rightly, wind up being considered as a single comment.

The top ten dumbest .xxx public comment subject lines

The American Family Association is now responsible for something approaching 10,000 emails urging ICANN to can ICM Registry’s .xxx proposal.
On Thursday, the AFA asked its membership to email ICANN’s public comment forum in support of “Option #3”, which would allow it to ignore the Independent Review Panel ruling and kill .xxx for good.
It thoughtfully included suggested text for the body of the email, but encouraged its members to “(Please enter your own subject line)”.
I don’t doubt that plenty of AFA members know what it was they were commenting on, but it’s clear from their chosen subject lines that plenty more had absolutely no idea.
Here’s a Letterman-style rundown of the top-ten least-clueful subject lines I’ve come across so far.

10. How much more sin will God allow?????????????
9. Judgment day is coming
8. Dear Sir!
7. stop the cause of all of the sex crimes commited today!
6. Registered Sex Offenders — You may be next, Please proceed with caution!
5. Don’t let an ADULT bookstore enter my computer! Support option #3.
4. P*rn Channel Explosion – Option #3
3. XXX.com
2. No more porn on TV!
1. (Please enter your own subject line.)

Have you seen any better/crazier ones? Let me know.
The public comment period ends, thankfully, tomorrow.

Christians try new strategy in anti-.xxx campaign

(UPDATED) Anti-porn protesters have changed tack in their campaign to get ICANN to kill the .xxx top-level domain.
The followers of crusading PornHarms.com founder Pat Trueman are currently lobbying ICANN’s public comment forums with messages that make them look a little like the pornographers themselves:

The .XXX sponsor, ICM, never satisfied the sponsorship requirements and criteria for a sponsored Top Level Domain. The ICANN Board denied ICM’s application for the .XXX sTLD on the merits in an open and transparent forum.

The copy-paste letter paraphrases text from ICANN’s process options report in much the same way as the pro-porn Free Speech Coalition’s Diane Duke did.
Trueman’s previous effort centered on the charge that pornography is intrinsically harmful, a subject well outside ICANN’s remit.
The fact that the new campaign is orchestrated by Trueman is revealed by Trueman himself and this comment from a supporter.
So… a vehemently anti-porn group is demanding ICANN rejects .xxx on the basis that it is not supported by the porn industry?
You’ve got to admire the chutzpah.
UPDATE: Another Christian group, the American Family Association, has opened the anti-.xxx floodgates, adding hundreds of new comments to ICANN’s forums in the last couple of hours.
The American Family Association is an unabashed “champion of Christian activism” whose mantra is “We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.”
Not really the kind of people you’d want to be stuck in an elevator with, never mind dictating internet policy.

Did Michael Dell just back ICANN’s DNS-CERT?

Michael Dell may have just backed ICANN’s call for a global DNS Computer Emergency Response Center, in a speech at a security conference.
Techworld is reporting that Dell and/or his CIO, Jim Stikeleather, referred to ICANN’s role in security during an address at the EastWest Institute Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit.
It’s not entirely clear whether the following quote is attributable to Stikeleather or Dell himself; my guess is Stikeleather:

ICANN manages the assignment of domain names and IP addresses, headquartered in California, is heavily US centric. There is a need to have more global participation on domain management as well as the future planning and next generation infrastructure needed to address the changes that will affect the Internet usage in years to come.

On the surface, it looks like a criticism of ICANN, but it could quite easily be interpreted as backing ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom’s recent call for the establishment of a global DNS-CERT to coordinate threats to the domain name system.
The quote immediately preceding it in the Techworld article is starkly reminiscent of Hot Rod’s controversial comments at the Governmental Advisory Committee at the Nairobi meeting in March.
“There is a preponderance of evidence that indicates cybercriminals could inflict major outages to portions of our critical infrastructure with minimal effort,” Jim Stikeleather reportedly said.
He was speaking at a session entitled “How do we build international cybersecurity consensus?”, which is a question Beckstrom has been asking in relation to the DNS-CERT idea.
A public comment forum on the DNS-CERT business case ICANN had presented ended a couple of weeks ago.
If I were to go out on a limb, I would say that a rough consensus emerged that such an entity was probably a good idea, and that ICANN could play a role, but that other bodies, such as DNS-OARC, might do a better job of coordinating it.

UDRP of the day: how-to-roll-a-blunt-with-a-swisher-sweet.info

This is mildly amusing. Somebody, presumably the cigar company, has filed a UDRP claim against the owner of how-to-roll-a-blunt-with-a-swisher-sweet.info.
The domain name was registered last month and, sadly, does not appear to have any content yet. It’s registered to “Gregory Bong”.
In the US, a “Swisher Sweet” is your basic bog-standard convenience store panatela cigar.
A “blunt” is what the registrant was probably smoking.
The .com version of the domain is, unsurprisingly, available, so I can only assume price was a big factor in Bong’s choice of TLD.

ICANN picks Colombia for December meeting

ICANN chief Rod Beckstrom has just confirmed via Twitter that Cartagena, Colombia has been picked for the organization’s December meeting.
Judging from US State Department reports, the country is nowadays not nearly as scary as it was when Joan Wilder made a flying visit to rescue her sister in 1984.
Still, I’m guessing we’ll still see a little bit of that nervousness and paranoia that usually rears its head when ICANN heads for cities with a reputation for violent crime.
Terrorism concerns in Kenya caused many US stakeholders to stay at home and brave unreasonably early mornings participating remotely.
Even the choice of Mexico City caused a bit of a stir last year.
Personally, I’d love to see ICANN hold a meeting in Oakland or Baltimore, just to see what the security advisory looks like.

IP address privacy policy killed

A proposal that would have brought the equivalent of domain name proxy registrations to IP addresses in North America has been dropped after its author had a chat with the FBI.
The policy would have allowed ISPs that take their IP addresses from ARIN, the American Regional Internet Registry, to substitute their own contact information in place of their customers’ details.
Proposing the policy, Aaron Wendel of WholesaleInternet.com initially said that the requirement to publish customer lists into a Referral Whois (RWHOIS) database “runs contrary to good business practices” and allows ISPs to poach each other’s customers.
Wendel publicly withdrew his proposal an hour ago at the ARIN meeting in Toronto, shocking some attendees.
He said he was doing so after a late-night session hearing the concerns of an FBI agent who is at the meeting, as well as conversations with members of ARIN staff.
The proposed policy had also been criticized by companies including Paypal, and many security experts.
RWHOIS allows any internet user to identify the user of an IP address in much the same way as Whois allows domain name registrants to be identified.
It is regularly used by law enforcement to track down spammers and other online crooks.
Unlike Whois, RWHOIS has a carve-out protecting residential users.

RapidShare chases cybersquatters

RapidShare, the popular German file-hosting site, has filed six cybersquatting claims against people with the word “rapidshare” in their domains.
The UDRP complaints are either a sign that RapidShare is cracking down on pirated content, or an example of balls-out intellectual property chutzpah.
My guess is it’s the latter, for two reasons.
First, a search reveals dozens of popular sites with “rapidshare” in the domain, all serving RapidShare links to copyrighted content, none of which have had UDRP claims filed against them.
Second, each of the six domains RapidShare has filed claims for seem to provide links only to files hosted by competing services such as Hotfile.com or Uploading.com.
RapidShare.com is currently the 35th most-popular site on the internet, more popular than Craigslist, according to Alexa.
A German court ruled two years ago that it had to start deleting pirate content, and it has been playing whack-a-mole with the bootleggers ever since.
Now, it wants the World Intellectual Property Organization to help it protect its trademark. There’s irony for you.