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ICANN Leaves Announcements List Open
BlueCalx- writes: "ICANN seems to be at it again. Last night, they sent a message to all their potential members at large, and they accidentally left the list open for all its members to post. Between midnight and 10 AM EST, ICANN's members-to-be received a wealth of unsolicited email from fellow members. You can view the text of the emails here." A special tip of the maildump to the Kevin McMaster, the first twonk to actually spam the list with an ad for his site, Alberta Register.
But then I stopped and though, wait a second, all they did was accidentally make the information public; does an error that simple mean that they (ICANN) deserve to be shredded in a court of law?
While it's likely that someone who had to sort through 80,000 emails that day to find an important message that they needed would agree, I have to wonder: Do simple, honest, accidental mistakes which cause a large amount of damage to many people, deserve to destroy the company? Mistakes are inevitable; If we are to sustain any pretense of 'fairness' in our courts-of-law, we can't smash every entity that makes a mistake to flinders; granted lots of people were damaged, but what good would blasting ICANN do? If you were about to say, "Because it would make an example, which cause others to avoid similar miscarriages" think again; this infringement was ACCIDENTAL. There's no way to prevent all accidents... that's why they're accidental! On the other hand, many people were hurt... do they deserve damages? If so, where should those damages come from, ICANN? Because, ICANN could have (hypothetically) easily hurt many more people than it's net worth could pay back; If those people are due damages, should same be paid by the government, should ICANN be bankrupted?
Maybe these are all trivial to a lawyer, but the kernel of the matter, to me, is that
Mistakes will always be made.
With the info era, extremely easy to make mistakes can have dire consequences for large numbers of people.
Regardless of who we blame after the fact, we cannot prevent these increasingly dangerous mistakes, which can harm bystanders.
Maybe the internet _will_ bring on the END... be afraid! woooooooo....
;)
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-- Slashdot sucks.
Of course, Jesus (i.e. God) does disapprove of homesexual behaviour, but there is a big difference between that and "hating fags".
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-- Slashdot sucks.
Mentioning and pointing at Kevin McMaster's site (are you hoping it will get slashdotted and brought down?) reminds me of that movie Midnight Express where the turkish make the guy an example to american smugglers. Bizarre! "Mess with us and we'll slashdot you, buddy!" I hate spam and direct marketing in general as much as the next person, but wtf?
the funniest thing about this is that half of the _replies_ read "have some decency; don't reply, you twits!"
ah, the hypocrisy..
- pal
So we don't like the first guy for spamming his list onto all the members, and his punishment is to have his site linked to Slashdot?! Hmmm.
This is what you get from putting Esther Dyson (aka Lucifer herself) in charge of the Internet. Yeah, I'm really happy to trust these people with the entire domain naming system. Blergh. Seriously, they've been around for years and they've yet to get a single thing right. They have not shown one ounce of willingness to adopt an administrative policy which could be described as anything less than fascist. It's just the cherry on the top that they aren't even able to manage a mailing list -- it's no surprise that the naming system in its current state. I say kill the ICANN; let's get rid of this awful monstrosity once and for all.
(Sorry for the rant, but it really pisses me off to see my beloved network get to this point. Moderators take note: this post was not a troll, flamebait or offtopic.)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
__________________________________________________ ___
rooooar
All I see is posts like:
/dev/nul!"
"OMIGOD the list is open! This is horrible! Spammers will spam us! Close the list!"
"Yes I agree! This is aweful! I will have to filter my mail! Please do not respond!"
"Stop sending 'this is cool' messages! Close the list! I have to redirect to
"OMIGOD the list is open! This is horrible! Spammers will spam us! Close the list!"
etc, etc.
spamming themselves with antispam messages...idiots...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Ok... I am one of the very very annoyed people that are on this list. That said, let me tell you what some fun people are doing...
It seems that some people have figured out that this loophole in the announcement list is a great way for them to gather email address for whatever reason they choose (I believe that these lists are going to be compiled and then sold to companies... oh joy, more spam). The best thing is, these people are sending email to the list and then they want notification that the reciever has read the email.
In case that went by to fast... here's a break down:
1. People sign up for members at large from ICANN
2. ICANN leaves a loophole in the email list allowing "reply to all" to go to every member (12000 accourding to ICANN)
3. People post messages to the ICANN list and then they want to know if the reciever has read it.
4. When people allow themselves to send this email back, thier email address are added to a spam list.
Well, I can say one thing about ICANN so far, it takes some kind of sick mind to create a situation where 1 person can send 1 email to 1 address and in turn get 12,000 email address together for a spam mailing list that companies will pay big money for.
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2000 10:56:04 +0530
From: Bill Gates
Reply-To: weenie@microsoft.com
Organization: Microsoft Inc.
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win95);
X-Accept-Language: en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: atlarge@icann.org
CC: members-announce@icann.org
Subject: ICANN Engineers
References:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-members-announce@icann.org
Precedence: bulk
!seineew era sreenigne NNACI
___
When the MicroBerto reporting service asked why they made such a poorly-engineered list, the At Large Membership Program simply claimed "Because ICANN!"
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
Some people on the list are getting angry about this unusual opportunity for community. Personally, I think that this is an intriguing look at large group communication. What percentage of people on the list respond to the list? What kind of people respond to the list? How many people respond favorably/angrily? eh.
..because someone said, "I wonder what would happen if I clicked reply?".
After seeing the posting on /. a few weeks back, I signed up. Nothing happened. I figured, oh well, it's ICANN, they're just blowing me off.
Well, I wish that was the case. After a few days of not collecting my email, I now have hundreds of messages from moron twinks who felt compelled to tell all other 12,000 members "Geez, I'm so glad ICANN is doing this" and "When will my PIN come?" Then of course is the best "Me too, when will my PIN come"
Can this organization do ANYTHING right? By the looks of it, days went by without anything happening. I posted a message to the list from an account I wasn't even subscribed with. Is there more of a sin in running a mailing list than to allow the public at large to post?
I have zero hope for this organization if they haven't the common sense to properly configure a mailing list. I don't even remember asking to be on the list, nor have they ever sent instructions on how to get off the list. Despicable.
No sig is worth reading.
If you make a mistake that causes someone to be killed, /accidentally/ but it was obviously your fault, you can be charged with involuntary manslaughter and/or reckless endangerment. If you cause somebody to be injured inadvertantly through stupidity or oversight, you can qualify for reckless endangerment.
/I don't think legal action makes sense in this case/, and if I were a judge I might throw it out (IANAL but I don't think there are really any precedents for this sort of thing), but chastising them for this mistake makes an example so that hopefully, ppl will be more careful and check whether their lists are open automatically before sending them to people who did not knowingly sign up.
Leaving a gun lying around where a kid could find it is a "mistake" and the kid finding it is "accidental". But charging the adult for damages has the affect in the future of people thinking "hmmm... maybe I shouldn't leave my gun here" instead of just doing it without thinking. So too with things like leaving a list open--they produced unsolicited mail to 12,000 people, and failed to stop in a timely matter when asked, sustained unsolicited mail being illegal in many states. If they had knowingly subscribed to the list, it would be different. If the list had just contained announcements from ICANN, as it was supposed, it would be different because that would have been solicited by signing up. Now
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
This is obviously a well orchestrated conspiracy organised by the National Security Agency and the CIA to divert public attention from the Elian Gonzalez case.
- Jesus *loves* you -