Spamhaus, the well-known anti-spam organization has been in court, sued by Chicago area bulk mailer E360. A year ago E360 got a default judgement against Spamhaus for $11 million, which Spamhaus later appealed. The appeals court has ruled, and it looks promising for Spamhaus.

CAUCE board member John Levine comments on the latest decision.

Sanford Wallace, a famous spammer from the 1990s is back, in a legal tangle with MySpace, for sending a whole lot of spam to MySpace users.

CAUCE board member John Levine writes about it in his blog.

The following speech was prepared with the intention of using portions of it during the FTC Spam Summit, but CAUCE was not given the opportunity to participate due to time constraints.

My name is Neil Schwartzman. Beyond — as I noted yesterday — representing Return Path Inc. here at this conference, I have a second life, as it were, as the Executive Director of CAUCE in North America. CAUCE is the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, a consumers' rights advocacy group.

I am here today to question. Yesterday we heard how the tenor of the discussion about spam became more mature. How, in the period of time that has elapsed since the last summit, things have developed as an industry.

That may be true, but I question if the discussion at hand here this week is truly a big tent effort.

I see few anti-spammers here. I see only one blacklist operator, and no filtering service providers here. I see no consumer organizations here. Heck, I don't see but one spammer on the panels. I didn't see anyone challenge him during his attempts to cast himself as a legitimate business man, no-one mentioned his attempts to bribe staff at at least one large receiving site to accept his mail, or his efforts to open a school for spammers. Where is former FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle and his "couple of public hangings" when you need him, and them?

N.B. CAUCE Canada and CAUCE participated in the development of these documents.

Best Practices Suggestions Document

Building upon the Definitions and Risk Model documents, the Best Practices document aims to expand past defining what behaviors and consent factors will currently make software potentially unwanted and to focus upon making the marketplace better. This document highlights the sorts of technological behaviors that limit the negative impact of potentially unwanted technologies.

HTML or PDF

Comments can be made at http://www.antispywarecoalition.org/comments/ or by sending email to asc_comments@cdt.org.

The following message was sent in response to ICANN's solicitation of public commentary regarding the concept of obfuscating WHOIS data:

CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail and CAUCE Canada are the leading North American grassroots anti-spam organizations. They are both members of many cross-industry groups including the London Action Plan and the Anti-Spyware Coalition . Both CAUCE and CAUCE Canada are accredited ICANN At Large Structures.

Spam and related misbehavior such as phishing and spyware take a heavy toll on Internet users. Networks large and small devote an ever-increasing part of their resources to anti-spam measures merely to keep their e-mail usable. Phishing and other online fraud cause direct damage to the users who are tricked into responding, and cause all Internet users to be less confident in the Internet and less willing to use it.

WHOIS has always been a key tool for both networks and law enforcement to track and shut down spammers and phishers. Both private and government investigators use it every day to track spammers. Even forged data, which is regrettably common in WHOIS, still allows skilled investigators to link domains to habitual spammers by way of patterns found in the data.

The vast majority of Internet users will never register a domain of their own, and are instead consumers of domains. We are primarily concerned with the interests of the non-registrant majority, but we recognize that some registrants do have privacy concerns, and believe that existing registrar anonymizing servers are adequate to protect them and do not put an unreasonable burden on registrants.

A change to WHOIS that allows criminals a further opportunity to obfuscate their activities by cloaking all WHOIS data will lead to increased levels of privacy violations of by way of spam, viruses and spyware. Removing WHOIS data might provide marginally more privacy to the relatively small number of individuals who register domains, at a disproportionate cost to Internet users at large. We oppose such a change.