2016 J.D. Falk Award

André Leduc received the 2016 J.D. Falk award this week at the Paris meeting of M3AAWG. He was recognized for spearheading two distinct projects.
The first was the Operation Safety Net – Best Practices to Address Online, Mobile, and Telephony Threats  This 76 page report was written by global security experts. One of the major goals of the report was to discuss security in language accessible to policy makers and management. The report, newly updated in 2015, is available at the M3AAWG website. Making technical language accessible is, to my mind, one of the most important parts of getting security recommendations implemented.
In addition to his work in making security recommendations accessible, André was the lead architect behind the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation. This legislation has greatly reduced the amount of spam received by Canadians. According to Leduc, CASL has improved permission practices by senders outside of Canada.
Congratulations to André.

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2016 Mary Litynski Award

The Mary Litynski Award is presented by M3AAWG to people who have done extensive work outside the public eye over a significant period of time. At the Dublin conference the award was presented to Rodney Joffe. A lot of other people will talk about Rodney’s accomplishments, including his role in the founding of Genuity, his work with the DMA in the early days of spam, his efforts against SMS spam and his efforts to secure the Internet infrastructure. But I have a much more personal perspective.
Rodney was seminal in changing my life and career path. Back in 1999, Rodney asked Steve to look into some DNS creativity he was testing. A few months later, Rodney invited Steve to join a new company he was founding based on that DNS creativity. We moved out the the Bay area and Steve started working for UltraDNS in early 2000.
Moving out to the Bay Area triggered my career shift into anti-spam and anti-abuse. I started working at MAPS (now Trend Micro) in their experimental consulting service division. We were the “carrot” end of the equation, where our job was to help companies minimize the abuse coming out of their networks.
After MAPS went through a round of layoffs in 2001, Rodney started recommending me as an email consultant to some of his connections in the marketing world. This work was a success and directly led to the founding of Word to the Wise and everything that flows from that.
M3AAWG has published a video where Rodney discusses his role in the history of spam and some of the other things he’s done to fight junk advertising (both fax and SMS spam). He sued junk faxers in small claims court. He was instrumental in getting SMS spam covered under the TCPA. He wrote the first global opt-out list supported by both the DMA and the ISPs and proved that global opt-out would never work. He literally pulled the plug on spamming customers.
Rodney says he’s “Not smart, just the guy who carries the bags of money and helps the smart people get things done.” I certainly don’t believe that is true. He has done things on the global scale to make the Internet a safer place for end users. But my appreciation is much more personal. I will forever be grateful to him for starting us on this path and the help and advice he gave us so many years ago.

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And… we're back from London

The Email Innovations Summit in London was a good conference. Much smaller than Vegas, but with a number of very interesting talks. I got to meet a number of folks I’ve only known online and we had some interesting conversations at the conference and at the pub-track in the evenings.
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I had so many grand plans for doing some work while in London. So many plans. And then I actually mostly disconnected and ignored anything I “should” be doing.  Instead, Steve and I did some touristing, some relaxing, some family time and some connecting with his college friends. We also (over)heard a lot of conversations about the US Election. One night at dinner every table around us was talking about our candidates and what they thought of them. It’s always interesting to hear what non-Americans think about our country.
In addition to missing two debates, it seems we missed some online news, too. I think the biggest thing was another large DDoS attack against that took out many major websites. I’m starting to see some comments that spam levels were down during the attack, too, but haven’t dug into that yet.
I did have an article published in the Only Influencers newsletter last week: Marketers Can’t Learn from Spam. All too often marketers think spammers are better at unboxing because they see spam in their inbox. But spammers are just more criminal and spend a lot of effort trying to bypass filters. These aren’t lessons marketers can learn from.
Unfortunately, due to our London trip, we are going to miss M3AAWG in Paris, which starts today. Two weeks between conferences was exactly the wrong time for going to both. Never fear, many folks will be tweeting what they can using #m3aawg38.
We’re both slowly getting back into the swing (and timezone!) of back to work. Blogging will pick up over the next few days. And I have new castle pictures to share.

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The J.D. Falk award 2013

M3AAWG awarded the second J.D. Falk award today in Montreal. The winner was Gary Warner from the University of Alabama.
Gary has been involved in fighting abuse and online crime since the 1990s. He developed the Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research at the University. This is an education program that not only teaches students about online threats and how to fight them, but collaborates with both industry experts and law enforcement.
You can check out Gary at his blog or on twitter.
 

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