In case you’ve checked some of your spam mails recently you might’ve discovered how a large amount of them include links to sites using seemingly very random names in the domain names. Like hjsdhjerrddf.com or qwetyqfweyqt.com and so on. Hammering-the-keyboard looking names.
The explanation behind these is quite simple and sad: ICANN allows for a “tasting period” before you pay for the domain. Thus spammers register all sorts of random names, spam the world with mails referring the users to these domains and then they return the domain names again before they’ve paid anything, and go on to the next names.
With a large enough set of people and programs doing this, a large amount of names will constantly be kept in use but not paid for and constantly changing owners.
Conclusion: wherever there’s a loophole in the system, someone is there to exploit it for the purpose of sending spam.
I’ve already previously expressed my deepest dislike with where the HTML5 work is going, and just yesterday two new internet-drafts appeared on ietf.org that spurred up discussions all around. They’re claimed to be “part of our effort to remove from HTML5 sections that are more appropriate elsewhere” but I’m thinking they’re rather inappropriate everywhere…
The first one named Content-Type Processing Model hits a subject that I’ve been over before, namely the stupidity of having web browsers guess the content based on what it looks like. IE introduced the “I really mean it property“, the HTML5 team wants to standardize the way of the guessing. Personally, I think the world of web will become a better place if the browsers would instead become stricter and more closer follow what the servers actually say the contents is, and then all users would complain to the site admins if things are wrong and then things should be fixed.
Guessing content types allows for sloppy behaviors, it makes it harder to write browsers for the web and it still features a significant risk of guessing wrong.
The second draft propagates for the new HTTP header “Origin”, which according to the authors would help to guard servers against CSRF (“Cross-Site Request Forgery“). The main author says 3% of users on the Internet gets their Referer header stripped while virtually none gets Origin stripped. I claim this is a bogus argument since they strip Referer beacause it is a known and established header and Origin is not. I also completely fail to see the goodness of this and based on several of the other responses on the ieth-http-wg mailing list I am not alone…
tech, open source and networking
