According to stipulations filed yesterday Penkava and Yahoo! have agreed to go to private arbitration. This will happen before September 1, 2013. Also filed yesterday was an agreement that Yahoo! has until September 7, 2012 to respond to the complaint.
An Alabama resident is suing Yahoo for violating the California wiretapping law. Specifically he’s suing under CA Penal Code section 631. The thing is, this section of the law deals with wiretapping over “telephone or telegraph” wires. That doesn’t seem to apply in this case as Yahoo isn’t using either telephone or telegraph wires to transmit their packets.
Holomaxx tried the wiretapping argument when they sued Yahoo and Hotmail. That case cited a cause of action under both federal law and California law. The wiretapping claim was addressed specifically by the lawyers for the defendants.
Spamhaus announced today they are publishing two new BGP feeds: Extended DROP and the Botnet C&C list. These lists are intended for use inside routers in order to stop all traffic to or from listed IP addresses. This is a great way to impact botnet traffic and hopefully will have a significant impact on virus infections and botnet traffic.
In other news I’ve been hearing rumbling about changes at Yahoo. It looks like they have changed their filters and some senders are feeling lots of pain because of it. It looks like senders with low to mid range reputations are most affected and are seeing more and more of their mail hit the bulk folder. This afternoon I’m hearing that some folks are seeing delivery improvements as Yahoo tweaks the changes.
The Yahoo visualization tool has been a lot of fun to watch. You can see how mail changes, see how subject line changes and even see when commercial mailers do major blasts.
One marketer described it to me as “Total marketing porn.”
I even took a screen shot of someone doing a drop of their “September Account Statement” to customers.