Is the .to (Tonga) domain completely rogue and should be removed?

Jay R. Ashworth jra at scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us
Fri Oct 2 00:15:10 UTC 1998


On Thu, Oct 01, 1998 at 08:14:47PM -0400, Barry Shein wrote:
> On October 1, 1998 at 19:43 jra at scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us (Jay R. Ashworth) wrote:
>  > Damnit, Barry:
>  > DID YOU MAKE THE CALL?
> 
> You know, you're being boorish Jay but I'll answer anyhow because you
> seem so fascinated with this train of thought it's made you blind to
> the obvious:

No, actually, I've been being merely logical.

> As fast as one of these .to domains is shut down the domain hijackers
> open another .to domain, apparently within minutes, and continue
> spamming with that.
> 
> So it's not doing a lot of good asking tonic to shut down domain a.to
> when that just results in seeing spam shortly thereafter advertising
> b.to and then c.to and d.to and e.to and f.to etc.

This suggest that you'rve called them, but as someone noted earler,
you're being awfully cagey about it.  A simple "yes, I called them; it
didn't help" would help your case immensely, Barry.

> One major problem is the mismanagement of the .to domain, and to what
> purpose (apparently not to serve the Kingdom of Tonga as a national
> TLD) remains fairly mysterious, other than "for money" and whatever
> damage it does to others be damned.

This exact argument could be aimed at NSI about the opening of the
.net TLD to non-network-management machines, actually.

> It's like a site which won't close an open mail relay. Sure, it's
> ultimately the spammers exploiting the open relay which are the actual
> perps. But if all the open mail relay will do, for example, is block
> the one domain from relaying so the spammers just jump to another
> domain and use them as an open relay again, and again, and
> again...well then just informing them of the latest domain on an
> hourly basis isn't really doing it.

Ok.  But, as far as I can see, you haven't actually proven here that
the people in question are _actually_ registered in the .to domain in
the first place, and not simply forging _that_ address too.

In which case, of course, it wouldn't be their problem at all.

Could the gentleman who posted from tonic earlier today please
enlighten us as to whetner Barry has actually opened a ticket on this
topic or not?

Cheers,
-- jr 'and you _still_ didn't answer me' a
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     "The net is safer in bad weather: you
The Suncoast Freenet               can't run a backhoe
Tampa Bay, Florida     in a hurricane."  (after Sean Donelan)  +1 813 790 7592

Managing Editor, Top Of The Key sports e-zine ------------ http://www.totk.com



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