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Perspectives on Spamhaus's Dilemma
The Illinois court that told Spamhaus to stop blocking the spammer filing suit against them — an order which Spamhaus ignored — is now considering ordering ICANN to pull Spamhaus's domain records. While Gadi Evron, whose blog posting is linked above, urges everyone to beat the judge with a clue stick, a guest writer on his blog counsels much greater restraint. Anti-spam lawyer Matthew Prince explains how Spamhaus got into its current pickle — apparently by following conflicting legal advice at two points in the process — and what they might have to do to get out. One spamfighter of my acquaintance says that Spamhaus's SBL and XBL blocklists knock out 75% of the spam at his servers before it hits and requires more CPU-intensive filtering. If ICANN is ordered to unplug Spamhaus from the DNS, and does so, is the Net prepared to deal with a 4-fold increase in spam hitting MTAs overnight?
Um... you are aware of how Spamhaus's list is distributed, right?
You convert the IP address of the server you're trying to check into a host name, such as W.X.Y.Z.sbl.spamhaus.org, then do a DNS lookup on that hostname. The result you get indicates whether the original IP is liste or not.
Trust me, you don't want to put 4 billion records in your hosts file!
So go ahead and pull their domain from the DNS hierarchy.
/etc/named.conf
# cat >>
zone "spamhaus.org" in {
type forward;
forwarders {216.168.28.44; 204.69.234.1; 204.74.101.1; 204.152.184.186; };
};
^D
# pkill -HUP named
All fixed!!
"I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." -- Tom Lehrer
According to the article by the John Marshall Law School lawyer, the problem is not that Spamhaus ignored the initial TRO. The problem is that they didn't. They appeared in state court and asked that the case be moved to Federal Court, which it was. By doing so, they implicitly agreed that the Federal Court had jurisdiction.
Then they claimed it didn't.
I can't think of anything more likely to P.O. a judge than to ask to get into his courtroom, then call him a buffoon.
In the end, as the article says, ICANN may be forced to pull 'spamhaus.org', but ISPs that use it are savvy enough to move to using 'spamhaus.or.uk' or something similar, outside the court's control. But the individuals affected by the order may be unable to set foot in the U.S. for the rest of their lives, even to change planes.
Hell, NO!
You would be trying to use their DNS server as a recursive resolver. DON'T do that! It wouldn't work and you'd be an annoyance to them.
I suggest you read about DNS before doing things of which you don't understand the impact.
What could work is running BIND and doing something along the lines of
zone "spamhaus.org" {
type forward;
forwarders <their ip address>;
};
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
They just should be careful enough to widely publish their new .co.uk address before the hammer hits
It's spamhaus.org.uk.
spamhaus.co.uk is an unrelated site flogging antivirus software
That is libelous nonsense. The post, which sounds like it was written by a spammer, probably refers to Spamhaus' Data Feed service for ISP's and large organizations. You can easily see with the price check on that page that the costs per year, even for large sites, are nowhere near such amounts and are simply designed to cover the costs of the operation (including their free public DNS query servers). Don't believe something just because some kook posted it in a discussion forum.
I'm the head of the email security team on a network with several million mailboxes. I have to set you straight on spam filtering and free speech. I won't talk about free speach, b/c I have no idea what that might be.
/dev/null, or otherwise prevent that sender from getting to my inbox, that sender has no cause for complaint, damages, or anything else. No right exists to send me email, not in the Constitution, statutory law, common law, or just common sense.
The network belongs to the company who built and operates it. No one else has any rights on that network. If you're buying bandwidth/an email address/hosting, etc., your contract with them may give you certain rights, but those rights are arbitrary and may or may not include any amount of freedom of speech, and are certainly not secured by the Constitution. The contract usually also gives them the right to unlitaterally change it, either any time they feel like it, or at least at renewal. If you don't like the levels of rights (actually, privileges) they give you, your sole option is to vote with your feet.
Second, freedom of speech, as detailed in the Constitution, has no relation to private organizations whatsoever. It is only about the government. The First Amendment limits the government's ability to limit speech. My employer, on the other hand, may limit my speech in any way it likes, at least when I'm on company time, and on my own time as well to the extent that I cannot reveal confidential information without facing the consequences if caught, or publicly defame the company (at least if I value my job).
Third, *no one* has a right to send email to anyone else, period. We own our network, and we are the sole authority on what may or may not traverse it. If we choose to trust the opinions of Spamhaus or any other third party to assist us in making that judgment, that is our prerogative. If we choose to ban a netblock, a domain, a sender address, or even a country (I wish I could, in a couple of cases), we are the sole authority on that. If that harms our business, that's our problem, but no one who can't send us mail has, or should have, any recourse. If I don't want to receive email from someone, whether I consider that person to be a spammer, or just someone I don't like, and I bounce,
I've been hearing bogus arguments like this for the entire 8 years I've been involved with email security, and it amazes me that even though such arguments always fail and are always thoroughly debunked every time they pop up, they nevertheless continue to appear like mushrooms in my lawn.