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ORBZ Shuts Down

Posted by timothy on from the click dept.

Tim Jackson writes: "In a depressing development for those wanting to protect themselves against spam, it appears that popular open relay database ORBZ (formerly at www.orbz.org) has shut down effective immediately - see here for the final post from ORBZ admin Ian Gulliver on the ORBZ list explaining the reasons behind the closure. The 'Lotus Domino' issue he refers to is the issue he discovered in the course of running ORBZ and reported to Buqtraq, which means that certain SMTP envelopes (such as those sent by ORBZ when testing for open relays) cause Lotus Domino servers to go into a loop, effectively creating a DoS situation. Unfortunately (but understandably), irrelevant of the merits of the case, Ian doesn't want to risk jail for the sake of spam fighting. Of course, if common sense prevailed, it would be the mail server vendor in court for producing insecure mail server software, not a third party for happening to send requests that unintentionally crash poorly-written servers."

5 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. That was quiet by Big+Dogs+Cock · · Score: 4, Funny

    They should've mailed everyone to tell them.

    --
    "Under the iron bridge, we fist" - The Smiths, Still Ill
  2. Re:Not his problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    stop his client because a specific mail server has poorly written bugs

    As opposed to all those well-written bugs in (say) MS software? *rimshot* :o)

  3. Political correctness taken to the next level! by BierGuzzl · · Score: 3, Funny

    So now, regardless of the fact that I'm doing something completely benign, I have to also be careful about "offending" some poorly administered mail server? I won't even get into how stupid it is to set up a mail server with a local loop -- it's the principle of the matter that really pisses me off. Next I won't be allowed to surf the web with an adbuster because it confuses and even crashes some websites...eghads! What the hell is this world coming to?

  4. Check your logs. by AnotherBlackHat · · Score: 4, Funny

    Seems to me that the majority of the DoS attacks came from 127.0.0.1.
    I suggest the prosecution track down the owner of that IP, and haul him into court instead of orbz.

  5. Re:El Reg by Bilestoad · · Score: 2, Funny

    Gee, it would be terrible if people angry about this turn of events decided to punish those responsible for the demise of ORBZ. It would be awful if IT administrators were forced to get off their fat asses and upgrade to the fixed version of Domino. It would be a sad state of affairs indeed if issues like this forced said IT administrators to abandon expensive, buggy solutions like Domino in favor of free alternatives for enterprise email.

    Just tragic!