Slashdot Mirror
Australian Anti-Spammer Wins Court Case
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian court system upheld the right of internet activists to campaign against junk email in a landmark decision today. Story from The Australian." Sounds like the spammers (T3 Direct, of Perth) were justly told off.
I hope the spammer was forced to pay the defendant's legal costs. The article doesn't say. Especially since the plaitiff was suing for the cost of "replacing" the computer system (according to the original article IIRC), and that is plainly ridiculous.
Also, an important point is that the court found that the plaintiff did not show that contacting SPEWS was illegal. This is good news (in Australia at least), as if the case had hinged on whether he contacted a blacklister or not, it would have a chilling effect on free speech and also anti-spam efforts - you wouldn't even be allowed to tell a third party that you received some email that might, possibly, be spam.
...and I know someone who works for T3 Direct.
Here's a juicy little tidbit: The company actually uses an application running on a Linux box to send out all that spam. It's called SpamIt, and uses MySQL as its backend.
(posting anonymously for obvious reasons)
ok, first off, i am not some ACLU nut. i am not here brandishing my first ammendment rights (i keep that safely in my pocket, out of sight)
i applaud efforts to keep kiddie porn (virtual too... though i realize that virtual porn technically is probly legal... but let us not open *that* can of worms today)
i think the library should carry banned books (like those heinous atrocities, Bridge to Terabitia and Hamlet and others
and i think spammers should rot in that circle of hell that Cerberus pukes all over. (ok, my Dante is rusty, i can't remember which circle, or if i got the puker right.. someone help me here)
but something seems fishy here. the company sued that one guy cos he "black-listed" their firm. the article didn't go into much detail, but it sounds as if that one guy, Joey McNicol, has quite a bit of power. i mean, what if i am a competitor of some company and i can convince Joey McNicol that their IP needs to be banned. as long as Joey McNicol is a true-blue swell guy, there is no way that can happen, but what if he isn't? i am in no way saying we need SPEWS regulated, but i wonder what some rather yucky worst case scenario - long term possible problems could arise from its misuse.
-John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
nah, you dont live here, so you dont see everythign else that happens. i live here, and let me tell you, i would rather not be.
:)
.au and then we'll see if you still have more respect for this country. fuckwit leaders making fucked up policies that have fucked up results. same thing here as everywhere, but here i am affected by it more.
not that i've yet found any other country that i'd like to live in, but every country has got its fucked-up parts
spend a week reading news from
but with the whole bali thing, i dont think there's gonna be much else on the news here - you may not have heard of it yet - i mean, i dont think any americans died in it.
The court found that T3 offered neither proof that Mr McNicol had contacted SPEWS nor that doing so was illegal
So in theory nobody exactly won...for had the T3 posted and/or obtained the information that linked Mr McNicol to the blacklisting, the outcome may have been different. Though they have raised an interesting question as well, personally I'm interested why did T3 say that contacting spews would be illegal?
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
Hopefully, the Australian government and businesses will take new notice about their nation's reputation as a SPAM haven.
.au domain suffix anywhere in the headers...As well as blacklisting entire IP blocks registered in Australia.
I've read NANAE threads where my fellow American Sysadmins have configured their mail servers to deny/bounce/devnull any e-mail with the
Oy...Aussie SPAM is almost as annoying as the crap we get from China and Russia!
Firstly: the decision in this case occurred in an Australian court, so there are no first amendment rights to be brandished anyway (and of course the ACLU has no presence). The merits or otherwise of the US Constitution/Bill of Rights are an unrelated issue - it is a simple fact that they do not apply outside the US.
I would say though, that censorship is usually a Bad Thing - it is just that a blacklisting organisation like SPEWS is not realing censoring - they simply provide a list of spammers to people who want to be able to avoid spam. No one is taking away T3's right to send email, or especially their right to say what they like in that email - but some people would like to be able to choose not to get it.
If a company was unfairly added to a blacklist, they are free to negotiate with the organisation concerned to get their addresses removed. In this case of T3, they are indeed spam merchants, so their chances are happily slim.
I'm not aware of any vaguely popular blacklists that would add an IP/range on the strength of one random unknown person presenting what appeared to be a spam from that IP. That would obviously be ridiculous. Do you really think they would become as popular as they are if they were that stupid?
:)
yea, i agree. but that australian news article didn't really go into detail of how SPEWS decides who stays and who gets banned. after a quick read of the the SPEWS faq it sounds like they have an automated system overseen by several admins. (news flash) and they only target known spammers and spammer friendly sites. and they stress that anyone who uses SPEWS does so willingly and knowing that some legitimate email could be bounced.
so i suppose in this case, i am sure it's probly a pretty benign system. however, like any banning list, there are people that must make the decisions what to ban and what not to ban. yea, overt spammers get banned, but what about the grey area? also, what about the ones who get banned for no reason? (SPEWS admits it happens and even has a full page dedicated to it.
what i was alluding to in my first post was that having any list like this is a form of censure-ship. though SPEWS says it is not:
from the faq:
Q10: Isn't SPEWS censorship?
A10: No, SPEWS is a list of areas of the Internet that some people do not wish to communicate with. Think of it as one group's Consumer Reports review of portions of the billions of Internet addresses. These are the ones SPEWS members have a poor opinion of. SPEWS is not anti-commerce and fully supports the USA's First Amendment and other nation's free speech protections. In fact, the USA's Supreme Court agrees with the SPEWS view. The creators of SPEWS are its main users and who it was designed for, if others decide to also use its data, they are exercising their own rights. No one is forced to use SPEWS.
no one is forced to abide to banned book lists either. in fact the caveat in the above faq answer closely mirrors the caveat in the pabbis banned book site at the link above that says essentially, that pabbis doesn't think books are bad, that is up to parents to decide. they just provide a list. SPEWS doesn't decide that they are bad, they just provide a list of spammers and companies do what they wish.
but like i said, upon further reading of the SPEWS site, i think they are probly a good thing in the end, but i still think that if used incorrectly (just like every single tool and technology ever created... yea, even sporks) it could become a bothersome hassle or even, in some wacko Brave New World scenario, a way to silence the voice of the people. we could have lists to ban IP's from known dissidant factions or unpopular opinions.
but those days are a few decades away still
-John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
First, Joey has no known relationship to SPEWS. T3 deliberately or accidentally confused them because SPEWS does not publish contact info while Joey was visibly complaining about them.
:), the idea just hit me as i read that article.
point taken. also to the rest, i agree, if SPEWS begins to misbehave, it will lose power. i guess what sparked me to comment was my concern of lists of IP's being gathered and distributed in legit ways and the possibility of those lists being misused somehow. no i am not a government-hating paranoid nut
-John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
Australia is vastly different to the USA. Our consitutution guarentees us almost no rights. No freedom of speech, or religion, or of the press. No right to keep and bear arms. No protection aginst unreasonable searches and siezures, or against self incrimination. We have no doctrine of "fair use" under copyright laws, meaning that taping a movie tonight to watch tomorrow is illegal, because our courts never decided we have the right to time-shift anything. We have our own version of the DMCA, with penalties of up to five years jail. Australia is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here. Oh wait, I do.
The website that has been following this issue from the start, http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au, has finally published the decision in pdf format (see it here). On pages 6 & 7, Deputy Registrar Hewitt, in paragraphs 15 & 16, says the following:
"15 Counsel for the plaintiff suggests that it would be unfair to end this action at this stage without giving the plaintiff the opportunity to further explore this case using the interlocutory processes now available to it in these proceedings.
16 I do not agree. The plaintiff has commenced an action which appears to me to be speculative and based on propositions which it knew to be incorrect (see my earlier discussion regarding unfounded). If not an abuse, the action is akin to one."
In other words, the Deputy Registrar feels that T3 and Mansfield's bringing this suit forward was as close to abuse as they could get without the action being prosecuted as being frivolous and without just cause! What a maroon!
I read NANAE regularly; this whole T3 Direct saga has been nothing but the highest entertainment to me. It's even better than watching circus clowns!
Rich
Why are we happy when something that should be handled by new technology gets taken care of by the legal system? To me all it this says is that nobody is serious enough about SPAM to come up with a smart solution.
If it was your job to come up with a technological solution to SPAM, what would it be? Come on people, we don't have to sit around and wait for government action to "fix" this.
Maybe part of the solution could be a service where mail servers could freely send timestamp, IP address, and maybe checksum on the last 10 lines of incoming emails. If there is a high percentage of matches that are milliseconds apart, it's probably spam, and the service could send out "probable spam" warnings to the servers that sent the checksums. The servers could then act on the info as they please. The mail servers could delay delivery for maybe 7 minutes to see if they get a "probable spam" warning (remember, email was not designed to be an 'immediate delivery' service).
This was off the top of my head, and yes, I see numerous holes in it (legitimate mailing lists not withstanding), but this could be part of a solution in conjunction with other ideas.
So, what would you suggest?
A spanish person ((thor.)compuocasion.com & ventasdirectas.net) who kept trying to spam me used a SUSE box server.