Open Relays, Free Speech, and Virus Propagation

sirsnork writes: "There is a story about John Gilmore running an open relay that is being used by a virus to propagate running over at Newsbytes. His defence? He wants his friends to be able to send email through his server from whereever they are. You'd think he'd know better." Gilmore has been skirmishing with Verio for some time over his open mail relay. Is it a good thing because it promotes the free flow of information? Is it bad for promoting the free flow of spam? Do the ethics change because someone writes a virus that uses the server to propagate? Interesting questions.

Comments

Re:Jackass

[tcr]

I agree.

But weird how the article said Gilmore, a life member of the Libertarian party, has accused Verio of censorship and said he configured the mail server to accept and forward e-mail from anyone in part so that friends could use it while traveling around the world.
(Emphasis mine).

Seems to imply there are other motives...

Let him be free.

[www.sorehands.com]

Allow him to keep an open relay. But also require that he would be liable responsible for ALL spam that passes through his server.

That means that he would have to be paying out large amounts of money to anyone who is a victim of spam through his server.

It is interesting to know that a while back, Verio was scraping the register.com database to spam people who had registered with register.com

Maybe I'm missing something...

[SpookComix]

...by my mail server is not and open relay, effectively blocks Spam, and requires authentication to send through, but I can send email from anywhere I get an Internet connection. I just have to provide my username and password.

Is that too much of him to ask of his users? Or is he just unaware of how and what to do?

Clue me in, folks.

--SC

John Gilmore is lying

[hoggoth]

Come on people! John Gilmore is going on and on about his freedom of speech and how he is running a mail relay for his friends.

He is lying.

If he really wanted to run a mail relay for his friends you could authenicate them on a properly administered CLOSED mail relay. Here are a few ways to do this:
POP before SMTP authentication
SMTP authentication
SSH accounts for his friends
Webmail accounts

And John Gilmore certainly knows these and other methods of properly administering his mail server.
I doubt he is running a spam relay for profit, I think he is just trying to stubbornly make some minor point of personal philosophy, and hiding it with his words.

My email to Darren Grabowski of Verio

[alexburke]

To: drg@NOSPAMverio.net
Cc: gnu@NOSPAMtoad.com, gnu@NOSPAMeff.org, nospam@NOSPAMeff.org

Darren:

Further to my phone call of a few minutes ago, here's a followup email of which I'm also sending copies to John Gilmore and the EFF.

Having just learned of this whole saga (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/07/16232 13&mode=nested&tid=153), here are my thoughts.

I find Mr. Gilmore's behaviour and attitude absolutely abhorrent. He apparently thinks that he has the moral right to run an open relay, and that noone should stop him.

Has he never heard of SMTP authentication (http://www.imc.org/rfc2554)? This would allow his mail server to accept socket connections from anyone, yet only allow his authorized users to send mail through his relay. Most modern MUAs support this.

Now, supposedly, a virus is (or has been) using his relay to propagate. (http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/ven c/data/w32.yaha@mm.html) This in and of itself should be grounds for immediate termination of Gilmore's T1, or at least an ACL entry on your router serving his connection to block all outbound port 25 traffic, until he straightens this mess out by implementing some sort of security on his relay. I understand this is already the case. If not, perhaps it should be?

If this were 1992, one could see how beneficial an open relay might be on the Internet. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case under any circumstances.

Being a paying member of the EFF ([My EFF-registered email address went here]), I am sincerely disappointed that the EFF is taking such an anti-Internet stance as to support the maintenance of an open relay which has, without any doubt, been abused in the past (and will no doubt continue to be). This makes me sincerely rethink my desire to continue to be a paying member, as well as my advice to friends and relatives to make donations to the EFF in lieu of giving me gifts at the holidays.

I find it amusing that Mr. Gilmore himself asks (http://www.toad.com/gnu/verio-censorship.html) for a copy of any correspondence regarding this matter be sent to nospam@eff.org -- how ironic.

Thanks in advance for helping to keep the Internet free from spam and virii, Darren. Knowledgeable Internet users everywhere thank you.

[My sig went here.]