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?

Comments

Re:What'll happen if spamhaus disappears from DNS?

[Kelson]

I'll put them in my hosts file.

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!

Go ahead - there's ALWAYS a workaround

[The Blue Meanie]

So go ahead and pull their domain from the DNS hierarchy.

# cat >> /etc/named.conf
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!!

Um, the problem was that they switched horses...

[Mr. Protocol]

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.

Re:What'll happen if spamhaus disappears from DNS?

[TCM]

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>;
};

Re:Jurisdiction

[McDutchie]

From here: (and elsewhere with a trivial search). http://news.com.com/5208-7350-0.html?forumID=1&thr eadID=21191&messageID=184631&start=-91

And yes, Spamhaus is a a non-profit corporation, yes, but it pulls in millions and millions of dollars a year from internet providers in PROFIT which is paid out to the executives every year.

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.