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Internet Vigilante Justice, SPAM, and Copyrights
pdw writes "An interesting article about how vigilante justice on the Internet by anti-spam advocates can be just as threatening to the Internet as those proposed for copyright advocates."
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His mail server is an open relay, and he still doesn't realize it.
His mail problem is that he doesn't understand what an open relay really is.
He says "I block SOME relayed mail, so therefore my relay isn't completely open, so therefore it's not an open relay."
Well, if a door is ajar, are you going to argue that it's not open? If it's not closed, it's open.
If you subscribe to New Architect, this guy wrote a followup article to this one after receiving a boat load of mail pointing out the he was in fact running an open relay. He admitted to being behind the times, etc, said he was sorry. He still doesn't take back the fact he's mad at the vigilantes out there. Sorry, there's no link yet, I think NA has a lag between the print and web editions.
:-)
Point being, if they can forge a header to get on your computer, a spammer can very easily do the same thing. An interesting thing on my campus is the technology department regularly scans and tries to hack into FTP sites running on campus, and sends an e-mail to the admins if they're successful. Some students got mad, but the moral of the story is, better to have someone trustworthy find your weakness rather than someone who's going to exploit it. This seems to be a new effective form of security that's emerging, since we can't depend everyone to stay up to date with the latest security issues, such as the Mr. Faussett in the article. I think vigilante is the wrong term, these blacklist ops are doing everyone a favor by helping to clean up insecure sites, which in the end saves everyone money. I propose we call them "Freelance Security Advisors" or something like that.