Domain Renewal Fraud - 1st Quarter 2007
Come on warm weather! I live in Atlanta because I like it hot and this cold has to go. You Eskimos out there can have the cold.
I have a mix of good things and bad things in this quarter’s ClearPoint.
* Good News: We have a new spam filtering service and it works
* Bad News: Fraudulent domain renewal activities still abound…we have a warning for you
* Good News: Pandora is one of the coolest ways to identify and listen to the music you like
* Bad News: The music industry lawyers and our government may kill it
Focus on the good and enjoy!
Neal
New Way Of Identifying Spam
Clearbuilt has implemented a new spam filtering service that has an interesting way of identifying spam. Typically, spam filters use computer algorithms to calculate the likelihood that an email is spam. The spammers know this and carefully construct their spams to pass through the computer algorithms undetected. There are other equally geeky methods employed by the typical spam filters. Our new service, Mail Foundry, has a novel approach….use humans.
When the Mail Foundry humans find a spam in their email, they are trained to mark the identifying factors in a database that is made available to subscribers every few minutes. Now before you get concerned about them reading all of your email, understand that they are reading their own emails. Just like the average person with email, their email addresses make it on the spammers’ lists by putting them on websites, entering them into web forms, having a ‘friend’ enter their email address into a web form to forward you a link to that page, etc. This means that if there is a spam out there, they’ll see it and set up each subscriber with the information to block it.
We have been using the service since December and the results have been beyond our most ambitious expectations. Very few spams make it through. Before using the service in November 2006 I received an average of 1672 emails per day of which most were spams (I’m popular, but not that popular). After using the service during February 2007, I received an average of 218 emails per day. That’s an 87% reduction! Mike’s reduction was the same percentage, from 7957 emails per day down to just under 1000 per day (most of those are sent from our computers, he’s not that popular either).
I was spending around 1 hour per day dealing with spam. Now it is down to approximately 3 minutes a day. Hmmm…if they could only improve my honey-do efficiency by that much.
So far, it appears, the spammers have not found a way to crack this system. It may happen, but given the humans in the loop, I do hold out some hope.
Domain Renewal Fraud Alert
If you have NOT received one of the official looking domain renewal “invoices” from Domain Registry of America (DROA) or Liberty Names of America (LNOA) then you have never been associated with a domain name in any fashion or you need to improve your social status. DROA and LNOA send out invoices frauding people into paying them for what they claim is a domain renewal, but instead is totally unnecessary domain transfer to their overpriced service. Often the transfer does not go through, but their terms indicate you still owe a non-refundable portion of the fee you paid.
There are numerous reports against these companies for their practices at the FTC, Better Business Bureaus, and other groups. Your favorite search engine will deliver a multitude of sites with the greatest of ease. You’ll quickly learn that this has been going on for far too long.
If you receive an invoice from either company, then take my advice and throw it in the trash. My trash cans are full of their unopened mail. And watch for new companies who try to ride this wave of fraud by knowing who you are paying. The “invoices” they send are very realistic, and have fooled many smart folks. As always, if you have any questions about a domain name, then you should contact your trusted provider. If you are a Clearbuilt client, then please don’t hesitate to contact me with any domain related questions. A couple minutes answering an email (especially now that we can more easily find it!) is much better than weeks/months of frustration undoing a fraud.
Pandora
If you like music and you haven’t heard of Pandora (www.pandora.com), then you are in for a treat. Pandora has developed a truly unique way to listen to the types of music you like and find new music of the same style that you are bound to like. I’m not talking about unique in the same way that MP3’s and iPods are changing music listening habits. It is much, much more. But you better start enjoying it soon, because lawyers for the status-quo-challenged Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are trying to put it, and anybody like it, out of business.
What is Pandora?
Pandora is a website where you can create an advertising-free radio station of music that you like (or will like) and listen via your computer. What makes it so special is the way you configure your station. You simply tell Pandora what songs or artists you listen to and Pandora establishes your playlist. You can further refine your playlist by marking a song that is playing or just played with a thumbs up or thumbs down.
Wow…A Playlist. That’s the Big News?
The genius is in how it goes from you entering a couple songs or artists to your playlist. The music professionals at Pandora have been working for over 7 years to identify the attributes of songs and store them in a database. This process is known as The Music Genome Project. By looking at things like melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics and more, it can then go through the database of songs to find other songs with similar attributes. They have almost 400 attributes of music that can be set for each song and used to determine the music you like. This is a great way to discover new music that you won’t hear on the airways.
The US Government
The record companies have proven incapable of embracing innovation such as Internet Radio Stations and have instead chosen to maintain the status quo with the same vigor that a paramedic would use in reviving a person that is not breathing. They have somehow been able to retroactively change the royalty fee structure paid by companies like Pandora and potentially wipe out all of the Internet Radio Stations. One collection of eleven independent Internet music stations out of San Francisco, Soma-FM, reports that the new fee would be an increase from the $22,000 paid in 2006 (based on the rates regular radio stations use per song per listener), to over $1 million in 2007 (which is 3-4 times what they hoped to raise in 2007). I guess the record companies will need the extra profits to pass on to the radio stations to cover the payola fines they just agreed to (read about payola). Perhaps the record industry’s biggest concern with the Internet Radio Stations is they are too decentralized to effectively bribe.
The music industry is changing rapidly. Innovation like Pandora and The Music Genome Project should be encouraged. Pandora is a fantastic use of technology and one of my favorite entrepreneurial efforts on the web. Check them out. Enjoy the music. If you want it to continue, then let congress know.
Visit www.savenetradio.org for more information.
Filed by nb on March 28th, 2007 under ClearPoint
