Slashdot Mirror

BrynM writes "According to an opinion published today (PDF), the RIAA has lost its case against Charter Communications regarding subpoenas for the cable ISP's users to be identified for copyright infringement in the Eastern District of Missouri. You may remember that Charter Communications filed a motion to block the RIAA's subpoena back in late 2003. Now Charter has prevailed. Here's the blurb from the Court 'Civil case - Digital Millennium Copyright Act. District court erred in issuing subpoenas on internet providers to obtain personal information about the providers' subscribers who were alleged to be transmitting copyrighted works via the internet through peer-to-peer programs; the internet providers' function was limited to acting as a conduit for the allegedly copyrighted material, and Section 512(h) of the Act does not authorize subpoenas in such circumstances; case remanded with directions. Dissent by Judge Murphy. [PUBLISHED] [Bye, Author, with Murphy and Bright, Circuit Judges]'"

mindsuck asks: "As of this Wednesday, my ISP blocked my port 25, leaving my mailserver useless to the outside world as a consequence of spammers and their nasty worms. So I decided to ask the nice people of Slashdot. What can I do now to restore my smtp service, besides changing ISPs, is there a obscure way to run a mailserver off a non-standard port? What about services similar to those provided by dyndns.org for this kind of situations? Pros and Cons of using this services? Should I move my MX to a more 'stable' server than my homegrown one?" This topic was last touched upon in this article, from 2002. It's been over a year since SMTP blocks have become commonplace. Have you noticed a slowdown in your SPAM? Are ISP SMTP blocks really helping the problem? Updated: It looks like Charter is also blocking SMTP. Might there be a way to work with your ISP to get them to unblock port 25 for you, if you can sufficiently satisfy them that you are not a spammer?

Krondor wrote in with a similar query: "Charter Communications (in my area) has blocked outbound SMTP connections. I need to be able to send Email to other SMTP servers, besides theirs, for a number of legitamate reasons. My question is this; How can I either still send SMTP to the places I need to, or how can I convince Charter to unblock outbound SMTP (I can understand blocking inbound SMTP without ACK bit set)? They do provide a relay, but won't my messages get labelled as SPAM if I use that? I am also concerned because, this relay is not encrypted with SSL and I don't necessarily trust Charter with that."