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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.
Is it a good thing because it promotes the free flow of information?
Information wants to be free, but my mail client does not want to be chock-full of herbal pot alternative spam.
If this were still the 'net of the pre-WWW days, I would see the point of running an open relay for friends. It's not, though. The vultures are here. And they really want to sell penis enlargers.
--saint
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...
Information wants to be beer.
someone would use a little common sense. Perhaps his "friends" need to do what the rest of the world does and get a shell account or a webmail account. If the janitor of a school left the door unlocked so that his wife could come in after hours and drop off his dinner and a bunch of kids came in through the unlocked door and trashed the place, the kids would be at fault, but the janitor would be guilty of neglegence. If the janitor didn't lose his job, he probably would be smart enough to leave the door locked in the future.
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
Verio has every right not to sell Internet service to people who want to use it to run open mail relays. John Gilmore has no right to demand Internet service form Verio.
MAPS, ORDB, ORBZ, and the other blackhole lists have every right to tell me that John Gilmore is running an open relay. John Gilmore has no right to gag the blackhole lists' truthful speech about him.
I have every right to refuse to accept email from John Gilmore's open relay. I may do this on my own information, or on the advice of a blackhole list. John Gilmore has no right to force me to allow him or his traffic on my property.
So everyone's right, as long as everyone stays within their rights.
I suppose he leaves his front door unlocked too so his friends can watch cable whenever they like?
:[
I've done this plenty of times. I guess that's why the last time I came home my air conditioning was set on 50, the oven was still on, and all my french bread pizzas were gone.
Jokes aside, there are sometimes that you just have to take responsibility for something. And this is one of those times. His refusal to close it is just plain a) apathy b) want for attention c) pathetic.
Ok, maybe his defense is the same of that used by file sharing programs, which unfortunately might make hypocrites out of a lot of us who complain, but anybody with common sense would know how to handle this situation. Don't be rude, Gilmore, close the damn relay!
So basically, you're saying that instead of going after the people that are breaking the law, we should go after the people that are facilitating it? It's not his fault people are using his service illegally, just like it's not the fault of Morpheus or Kazaa, as I've heard justified many times on this forum. Perhaps we should outlaw computers, because after all, they enable people to break the law. Same for cars, right?
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
Fight Spammers!
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
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
The gentleman in question has a home page here He also has an e-mail address of gnu@toad.com and gnu@eff.org so you can e-mail him here and here
May I suggest instead of bitching on slashdot you take a second and send an e-mail to the John and let him know how you feel. Practice your first amendment rights. Visit his web page as well. Perhaps the "slashdot affect" can do some good. Take a second and stop being so apathetic and send John Gilmore an e-mail.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
My provider allows anyone to use SMTP, provided that they have first made a successful POP connection. Once the POP connection is made and the user authenticated, then their IP address is added to the relay, for a period of time (a few hours, I think).
Why doesn't Gilmore implement something like this? Then his friends could still use his relay from anywhere in the world, but spammers wouldn't be able to.
I'm inclined to agree with the comment in the article at Gilmore is "being a stubborn old fool for leaving his mail systems as open relays"
HH
You're missing the point, already. Verio has a ton of spammers that it knows about -- spam complaints keep flooding in, SPEWS/SBL keeps tightening the noose, independent sysadmins keen adding them to their own private lists. Verio should of gotten a clue by now... and it hasn't. It's forgotten.
However, to address your question: Only in a few states is it illegal to spam, and even then the spam has to violate a few basic rules. Fortunately, spammers are stupid (Rule #1) and spammers lie (Rule #3). There is no federal anti-spam statue because our (USA) goverment is that slow! (The only good thing they're doing about spam is prosecuting the fraud that results from the spams to begin with. Eh, as much as we can get, we'll take it).
BUT, the entire Internet community has said "Close your servers, they are being abused." The guy hasn't. It's being abused. Negligence? Aparently so. Conspiracy to spam? Maybe. The server's listed on blocklists. The guy hasn't fixed it yet. He's virtually required, or his ISP gets wind. His ISP is Verio. They've been sent notice. Neither he nor Verio has fixed the problem in a timely matter. The only recorse is to block all of Verio, because they're not playing nice.
Now, you say about outlawing the tools. Is Napster/Gnutella commiting copyright violations? No, they make software that shares files eazily. Any file. Every file. You configure it. It's a *general purpose tool*. It's like a car or a computer. That's ok, we shouldn't outlaw that. We should outlaw *specific purpose tools* -- programs which have only one or two functions which allow the user to break laws. Spamware falls under specific purpose tools. E-mail gatherers/spiders fall under specific purpose tools.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
A herd of anonymous cowards and email harvesters whooshing to the open relay...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
ISPs are out there to make a living, like the rest of us. The reality is that spammers are people who don't care about inflicting what we call a "negative externality" on everybody else. That means they are inflicting a cost on those who have to read through spam, or figure out how to block/filter it, and the ISPs who have to carry large volumes of unsolicited commercial email. While ORBZ, MAPS, etc. may be annoying, these organizations do serve a function. Gilmore is free to run his open relay on his T1, but it's akin to parking your Ferrari in the middle of Harlem, with the keys in the car, and the driver's side door open. Technically, you may not be legally responsible, but ethically, if somebody walks into that car and goes joy riding and gets into a crash killing/maiming others, well, what the hell did you expect?
Society does get to set rules about permissible behavior, and we do get to enforce them by exclusion. Hell, if 40% of ISPs (by volume, or by number, I don't know) use MAPS, ORBZ, by their own choice it's probably for a reason. And frankly, I'd rather use an ISP that does, because I don't want to be on the receiving end of any more spam than I already get.
Gilmore may be right that RBLs are not the correct long term solution. I've heard it said before, so I won't take credit for it - the correct solution is a change in Internet standards - make it more "costly" in some way (bandwidth or other) to send bulk emails. This would bring the economic cost back to the spammer and remove or reduce the negative externality. Make it so it doesn't pay to spam. And no, I don't have the solution to this problem, but I could imagine alternatives to SMTP/mail routing procedures that address the problem. Of course somebody might argue that this just reduces the utility of email. Ah well. Until then, for god sakes, close your open relays.
Refusing to provide Internet service to an open mail relay is not "blocking of service on grounds of content." The attribute of being an open mail relay is a formal property of a mail server. It is defined without reference to the content of the messages transmitted or rejected by that mail server.
If Verio were blocking every message that contained the word "spam", then they would be blocking on the basis of content. If they were refusing service to John Gilmore because of the political views he expresses using that service, they would be blocking on the basis of (intended or past) content. They aren't doing that. They aren't inspecting the content of the messages at all -- just the formal (and thus content-neutral) attributes of the transmitting host.
Let's say Verio goes into the bookselling business, and promises to sell any book regardless of its content. I publish pornographic novels, and you publish travel books. One month, we both decide to publish books of our respective genres which weigh one ton apiece and are the size of a small car. Verio chooses not to sell these particular books, on the grounds that they will not fit on its shelves and will cause damage to its facilities due to their weight.
I then complain that Verio lied, and is not selling my pornographic book because of its content. Is my complaint valid? No, it is not. The decision wasn't on the basis of the content of the book, but its form. Verio chooses not to sell books which weigh a ton, regardless of their content, be they travel books or porn.
Gilmore is a true Internet pioneer and activist, a dedicated supporter of free speech. A short list of his accomplishments is available here, including being one of the first employees at Sun and helping found the EFF. In addition he was an early activist in getting the Usenet alt. groups going as an alternative to the rest of the hierarchy where tight controls were in place. He has been active in supporting free access to cryptography, helping found the Cypherpunks and participating in a number of law suits and FOIA actions to get the government to reduce restrictions on crypto. He has funded the FreeSwan effort to build transparent point to point crypto into the Linux kernel.
He also founded Cygnus Support, probably the first company to prove that you could make money off of open source software. The company was sold to Red Hat in 1999 for $674 million.
John Gilmore was fighting for free speech and the right to communicate before most of us had ever heard of the Internet. If his actions seem out of step with an increasingly paranoid and closed Internet community, I suggest that we not be so quick to assume that everyone else is right and Gilmore is wrong. History has shown him to be a far sighted thinker who has been on the right side of virtually every issue.
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.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Isn't it obvious that the reason he wants to keep his relay open is so that his cypherpunk friends can send less-traceable e-mails? A noble goal, even though it has unfortunate side-effects regarding spam and this new virus.
/., surely the hypocrites here can retract their heads from their asses long enough to see the adantages of a static open relay for helping to safeguard the privacy of e-mails. Does it have unwanted side effects? Yeah. Freedom always does.
In this day and age of government snooping, Carnivore, shutting down anti-globalization websites, justifying mass surveillance of all citizens under the rubric of anti-terrorism, and the other atrocities reported every damn day on
Look, let's be frank here: spammers will always find open relays in Asia. Always. China's recent baby steps forward notwithstanding, you know that this is true. This is part of the spammer's job. If spammers couldn't find open relays, they'd just purchase ISP accounts, start flooding out of their own servers, and move on when they get cut off. They sometimes do it now, even though open relays aren't hard to find.
Toad, on the other hand, is just a way for the privacy conscious to have a little conrol over how their e-mail gets routed without having to work like a spammer to keep up-to-date lists of Asian relays. It's just an added layer of obfuscation. Shutting it down won't curb spam or viruses, it'll just take away a privacy tool.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus