The government of Chattanooga seems to be doing just fine. Probably more fair to say that it's the people who run government that is the issue, not government in general.

You mean because of the torrent option? Can't speak for others but personally I don't fall into the hyperactive content consumer category. With a little priming of the queue, it's easy to plan to ahead and just get the disk instead of messing with a seedbox or other vpn option. And if I mess up and don't get a disk for Friday night, there always seems to be something worth watching via streaming for an hour or two.

So for less than $20 a month including the streaming option it's a pretty good deal for access just about every movie or series out there. Especially for cord cutters (raises hand).

I doubt a registrar would sell their internal customer billing database to an entity whose sole purpose is to take their business away. If you want to speculate, try this. When DROA scraped whois for targets, they filtered by Godaddy customers instead of Fabulous or Moniker. The thought being that more average Joes use GD and therefore easier to fool.

On the other hand it doesn't mean they didn't target the lesser known registrars. I've gotten plenty of DROA scam letters targeted toward my domains in the small registrars.

IOW, I don't think you can draw a conclusion that they filtered by registrar. If they did target, it would make sense to blanket those whois records with an organization name (i.e. formal businesses). And the bigger the better so it has a chance of hitting AP in accounting. Getting a $500 renewal on 5 years is much more likely to happen in that scenario.

Heh, you're more devious than me. No, there's no limit but I suspect there will be some blowback if you start doing that. I just wanted a simple way of breaching their defenses, winning a battle vs. the war so to speak. Like the last act of defiance. Most people see the fake caller id, put a post on 800notes, and figure there's nothing they can do.

And it should be noted that this really only works against business services like merchant processing and SEO, getting past Rachel's defenses is probably different. That scam has a simple goal of getting the credit card number at all costs. Once they've got it they've succeeded; I suspect there's little need to field incoming calls.

But a crowdsourced project towards gathering target numbers/info about Rachel would be interesting. Like what anonymous does, with the sole purpose of exposing her inner sanctum.

Bullshit. I was talking about adopting critical mass by the general population, not wall street.

In 95 when Netscape was climbing there was nothing but negativity. The media was saturated with stuff like what's the internet good for, the stock price is absurd, browsers are clunky and crash all the time, any search engine was limited to a small set of sites (rings), usenet is a haven for porn/bins, I'd never trust putting my credit card in a browser. Probably another 10 things on top of that.

Even Ebay was surrounded with extreme negativity when it IPOed in late '98. Why would anyone want to pay for someone else's junk and pay shipping to boot? Amazon was criticized as never being able to compete against bricks and mortar, why pay for a book to be shipped when I can go to the mall and buy it now?

The negativity among the general population slowly waned during 98-99 when the infrastructure was built out enough for people to realize that really useful stuff could be done on the internet. That was the point of the analogy in my original post.

If you're the type willing to spend time messing with them, consider adding this to your arsenal:

If you have Callcentric or another VOIP provider, you then have the option to create call treatments for forwarding a good percentage of telemarketing calls to any number you want, including the telemarketers themselves.

For example, one of the ways I get target numbers to forward to, is by responding to the Google SEO guys then pretend to be cut off mid conversation. When they call back since they think they have a good lead, the caller ID (surprisingly) is almost always a valid number to the call center. That's the target number. Even just faking an emergency and asking for their number so you can call them back usually works. Once you have that, Bob's your uncle since there's not much reason for them to change their block of unpublished incoming numbers.

Then it's simply a matter of going into the dashboard, creating a forwarding treatment of all obvious caller ids (i.e. any 800*, anonymous, +1, etc.) to the target number and voila, the call center gets hit with all my forwarded telemarketing calls transparently. And of course forward the target number back to itself, or even better, another target.

The best way is if you can whitelist your incoming calls and simply forward any non-matching numbers, especially since most telemarketing calls these days use a random out-of-area code caller id number. Not realistic if you're running a business but for personal lines you can whitelist the area codes you might expect valid calls to come from.

Obviously this doesn't work all the time. But when it does, it's pretty satisfying to check the online report at the end of the week to see all the forwarded calls that transparently went to Raj and Rachel. My way of paying forward the opportunity to lower their interest rates.

Well said. There was the same kind of negativity back in the 90's when the internet as a whole was taking off. The ones who missed out gradually turn from whining to reluctantly adopting, then it went mainstream like it was perfectly natural from the get-go.

The same will happen with digital currency. The mentality is not unlike the stock market. The ones who whine the most are the ones who didn't expend the effort to understand stuff early and therefore missed out. It's happened before and will happen again, there's a perfect example right here in this thread.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

It looks like that is specifically tied to using false whois info if there is a subsequent copyright or trademark infringement, not if Joe Average decides to put 123 Main St. as his contact address. Seems like the law is a tool that can be used to help prosecution of Lanham violations (there probably aren't many criminals who keep their whois info up to date ;)

Here's the text copied from wikia:

http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Fr...

"Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act, Tit. II of the Intellectual Property Protection and Courts Amendments Act of 2004, Pub. L. No. 108-482, 118 Stat. 3912, 3916 (Dec. 23, 2004).
Overview Edit

This Act increases criminal penalties for those who submit false contact information when registering a domain name that is subsequently used to commit a crime or engage in copyright or trademark infringement."

If it's broader than that then please correct me (IANAL).

There's no law per se, but there is a recent ICANN requirement called "Whois Accuracy Data Specification". It requires registrars to contact the registrant and click an emailed link as validation that their whois info is correct. The domain can be suspended if the validation isn't done within 15 days.

The intent is good but the implementation is pretty mindboggling. They're expecting every owner of a domain name to check that the email sent to them is not a phishing attempt...how that's supposed to work reliably is anyone's guess.

So, yeah, owners are supposed to verify to the registrars that the info is accurate which you could say is "ICANN's law". But not legally. Here's one of many articles that goes deeper into the issue:

http://blog.easydns.org/2014/0...