> From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu > ... > The truly interesting question would be: How much of their traffic is > "value-added", and not just acting as a caching name server for the current > root? If they have 150M users, but only 379 of them use it as anything other > than a cache for the existing root, they're no more interesting than any > of the other alt.roots that you label "peanuts". > ... It seems likely for several reasons that spammers would be among the organizations most likely to buy names from the other roots if they were usable or even just popular. Every day I read several 100 unsolicited bulk mail messages that land in spam traps while looking domain names to add to my blacklists. Since I don't use the fraudulent roots, non-colliding names in the fraudulent roots are undefined for me. I rarely find undefined names and do not recall ever seeing a name in ".love" or other bogus top level domain. Almost all of the undefined names I do see are either obvious typos or develop definitions via odd registrars within a day or two. In the last month or two, I've seen only one name that might be in an "alternate" .com universe, and I suspect it is a typo. Because SMTP servers that reject undefined domain names in the Mail_From command, are extremely common, you would expect that not even spammers are likely to be stupid enough to buy a name in one of the fraudulent roots for use with email. It's possible that the "other" domain names would be useful if confined to HTTP, but I suspect that's only a little more likely than the possibility that there is any substance to IPv8. (Note that the names I check in spam are mostly in URLs, and that my traps do collect mail from bogus SMTP sender domains. I check the advertised URLs to ensure that they are not being attacked with a "joe job.") In other words, I think you ought to adjust your kook filters. Vernon Schryver vjs@rhyolite.com