In computer news this week:

Lead: Inside the Internet spam can Part 1

There are many many problems when it comes to regulating spammers on the internet.

When the WWW part of the internet started in 1992, is was regulated - but not owned - by an international board of governors known as icann.org - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This international organization created internet policies.

ICANN at that time designated one company - Network Solutions - http://www.networksolutions.com as the only authorized registrar of internet domain names. If you wanted to have a website, you had to use Network Solutions and pay them a fee to register your website.

It was the responsibility of the internet registrar to ensure all information submitted was accurate and correct, so that in the event someone had a problem with a website, they could look up who the owner was, and contact them. You could do a lookup of any website by going to http://www.networksolutions.com/ and using their whois function to see who owns any website.

It was all supposed to work like clockwork.

If we go to Network Solutions today and look up kpbx.org - we see the correct company name, address, phone number, all the exactly correct information.

But ICANN had created a monopoly which many people, companies, and countries objected to, so after several years ICANN allowed many other companies to become authorized registrars, now around 200 Authorized Internet Registrars .

So now when I receive a spam email, and go to the spam website - www.buy-dns.com - and look it up using the whois function, Inow see obviously phony information.

Administrative Contact:

      zhang, bill  (MIZRSLIKQI)                           luck@hotmail.com

      sunshine

      sh, sh 200000

cn

      1366198 fax: 88888888

and a free hotmail email account.  More on free email accounts later.

I had wondered if opening the gates of registrars had led to the spam problem, but one spam fighter sent me this reply:

"No, Network Solutions was always happy to register domains for spammers. The only thing that has grown worse is that it is now possible to get a new domain name working in 24 hours and things usually work the first time. Network Solutions in the not very old days took most of a week, and sometimes far longer and usually messed things up.

So now with so many authorized registrars, a spammer can set up a phony domain and have the website functional in a day.

There are many websites set up to fight spam and keep track of spammers.

One site is http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/spammers-a.html which maintains an alphabetized up-to-the-minute private blacklist or list of unwelcome domains; known spamming domains; repeat offenders. As of this morning there are 6,653 known repeat spamming domains.

If you receive a lot of spam, and you browse this list, chances are you will find many of the websites you see in your spam emails, and the business names that these domains are registered to.

But one of the existing problems now is that often these domains are registered to bogus names and companies, and all the information is phony.

And this same spam fighter has this very interesting opinion of the whois data, which we'll hear next week.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230