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

The message

[wdr1]

... before it gets slashdot'ed ...

Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 03:15:49 +0000
From: ORBZ
To: list@orbz.org
Subject: [ORBZ] Shutdown

Here's the email that those of you with forward sight
have been fearing since the inception of ORBZ.

As of this moment, ORBZ is shutting down. DNS zones
are going to stop resolving, the website will disappear
and mail will stop working (so furthur discussion on
this list probably won't work -- use NANAE).

I don't want to disappear in silence like ORBS, so I'll
try for as much description as possible without
compromising my own position.

I received an official court notice this afternoon to
turn over all information relation to ORBZ accounts.
This came from the 10th Judicial District court of the
State of Michigan. It appears that ORBZ may be facing
criminal charges for denial of service relating to the
Lotus Domino issue.

I was happy to try to weather any civil issues that may
have come up, and I was committed to seeing it through.
However, the threat of jail time is too much; I don't
believe in this fight quite that much.

Thank you all for all your support. I sincerely hope
that someone with the goal of carrying on the mission
of ORBZ pops up in another country with a less
foreboding legal system. Anyone who has copies of the
current zones may do with them what they wish.

For those of you stuck without good spam filtering,
please consider ORDB and SpamCop; they both provide
excellent free solutions.

Ian Gulliver
ORBZ