US Web Firm Described As "Phantom Registrar" Haven 161
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller directs attention to ongoing investigations of more than 40 phantom registrars linked to The Directi Group, including PDR, one of the 10 worst offenders on the Net. According to KnujOn, an additional 19,000 domains advertised through spam have been hiding their ownership behind PrivacyProtect.org, which The Washington Post has outed as Directi-owned. Directi claims it suspends illicit domains, but KnujOn provides documentation suggesting that Directi reports the registrars suspended and then reinstates them at another IP address. 'There has been some outcry about all this from the ICANN At-Large Committee, but as of this writing there has been no response from ICANN's Tim Cole,' Heller writers. 'Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that LogicBoxes, a Directi-owned registrar, has sponsored ICANN meetings in L.A. and Delhi.' Directi has since issued an official response to the allegations."
Phantom Corporations (Score:3, Informative)
In the Directi response, "# The report claims that âoe48 ICANN-accredited Registrars (affiliated with Directi) ⦠do not seem to exist and are phantom.â
This statement is factually incorrect, and was completely unverified by Knujon. Knujon did not even bother to contact ICANN in this regards to get the right facts. The truth of the matter is that all 48 companies which belong to Directi and its clients, are in existence and are duly incorporated and validly existing under law."
IANAL, but I don't think phantom corporations are illegal in the USA. There seems to be plenty of corporations that exist only as a name on a piece of paper. So, yes, given this, they are right in saying that they validly exist. That does not address the fact that the companies may in fact be phantoms and appear to be a rather inappropriate way of doing business.
DirectI's reply (Score:2, Informative)
Disclaimer: DirectI is the wholesaler for my micro registrar company, http://gopedro.net/ [gopedro.net] , which I have discussed here in Slashdot in the past.
Yesterday DirectI issued a rebuttal to these accusations:
http://blog.resellerclub.com/2008/09/04/our-official-response-to-malicious-reports-which-falsely-implicate-the-directi-group/ [resellerclub.com]
The privacy protection for WHOIS is a necessary evil. I am tired of getting letters from the "Domain Registry of America" telling me that I need to renew my domains, usually at triple of what I actually charge my own customers. With privacy protection in place, this kind of scam dies.
I have zero knowledge of what any spammers may or not have done while customers of DirectI, but my personal, first hand experience is that this is a company that has never let me down in over four years, have always been prompt with their technical and billing support and have been nothing but pure joy to deal with.
Re:Use the information against the spammers? (Score:1, Informative)
it sounds like you have your features (privacy protecting registrar or not, dynamic ip or not, and TTL value)
you have large data sets in both of your classes: you have a corpus of known spammers and can probably generate a whitelist of non-spammers for your domain.
sounds like you have everything you need for writing a Bayesian classifier. If your accuracy and recall are high with your known data, you probably are on to something. Write a paper about it, or see if the Zdziarski (DSPAM), or the SpamBayes guys are interested in incorporating your work.
Re:The Reason This Will Never End (Score:3, Informative)
I beg to differ and site conservation of energy as my reason. Something tells me that you have flaws in your notion of how a body is designed. The calories you take in are from component chemicals - carbohydrates generally provide 4 calories per gram, fat 9, protein 4, alcohol 7calories/gram. All bodily activities from your basal metabolic rate (energy burn for homeostasis at rest) to exercise require energy provided by these substances. If the total energy expenditure in sum exceeds intake YOU WILL LOSE WEIGHT. This is a fundamental principle. I don't know what you mean by its "possible to kill yourself by using your 'simple' equation", but starvation does cause death my friend. If your body "refuses" to release fat for energy use that would indeed make exercise difficult. There is usually a delay between your body releasing fat and its utilization, but it does happen. Anything else would be a fairly horrendous disease - see lysosomal storage diseases for more info. Moreover, failure to release basic fats would likely lead to very early death as it would be necessary in pretty much any fasting state.
take a quick look at the wiki page on cardiac muscle and look at the basal energy useage - its fat.
The distribution of the food between compartments of the body is irrelevant to this basic concept that occurs in everyone and all energy consuming systems. Compartment models are only relevant when assessing quantities within one compartment - say serum potassium levels. Intake and output are only part of the equation. most body potassium lies intracellularly and thus movement into and out of this compartment must be accounted for.
I suggest that before you claim someone is "absolutely wrong", you should know the subject matter a bit better.