ORBZ Shuts Down

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."

Comments

Sucks for him...

[NeoSkandranon]

If this goes to court, it'll make another good /. story at some point.
A shame though, that he's getting nailed for Lotus's incompetence. Is that looping issue patchable?

This was submitted earlier....

[LiteForce]

2002-03-20 08:58:41 ORBZ shut down in response to legal threats (articles,spam) (rejected)