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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?
On the plus side, that might convince the judge to rethink the order.
Can ICANN even pull a second level domain? .org is managed by Public Interest Registry. One would imagine all ICANN could do would be to put a halt on the org TLD...
That's a perfectly reasonable attitude, provide you are aware that the chinese business will, therefore, win their lawsuit in a chinese court. If you have no assets anyplace that a chinese court could get to, then you are fine. Just don't miscalculate, ignore them, lose to a default judgement, and then remember that you do have stuff in China!
Also, you have to be careful HOW you ignore them. For example, if you start to defend yourself on the merits, and then say "screw this...you don't have any jurisdiction over me, so bugger off" and THEN start ignoring them, that initial defending on the merits might be seen as conceding jurisdiction to the court. That's bad, because then when the winner comes to your country to collect, there is a decent chance your country's courts will recognize the debt as a valid debt, and then it is a simple matter for that Chinese business to get a judgement in your country to enforce the debt.
The bottom line: ignoring a court anywhere in the world is not something to take lightly. You need to at least get a lawyer with experience in the laws of your country to tell you HOW to ignore the foreign court so that you won't accidently open yourself up to a nasty surprise.
A reckless decision by this judge to crap on the internet over an uncontested U.S. based trial will be a huge motivation to wrest DNS control from U.S. control/jurisdiction.
.us domain to play with and left the rest to people who understand how serious this stuff really is.
If U.S. judges think they have carte blanche to impose their laws on foreign entities using domain listing as a weapon then we absolutely MUST get DNS control the heck out of U.S. control, i don't care what DARPA thinks they invented decades ago. The status quo currently is bad enough as it is, but if one person in a robe is going to single handedly eliminate the backbone of the international anti-spam war when the service is based in a foreign country, run by non-U.S. citizens and it's a voluntary subscription service then something drastic needs to be done.
The notion that the U.S. can 'summon' foreigners to defend themselves in U.S. domestic courts is deeply flawed to begin with. It's just amazing that anyone can mock the Chinese for their 'great firewall' when the U.S. is prepared to yank a site from the ENTIRE WORLD, and think they can just because it's domain name is published on a U.S. machine when that is mandated by an historical quirk.
Is it time we gave the United States their little
Lets look at the facts:
1. Spamhaus isn't in Illinois
2. Spamhaus isn't even in the US, no business presence on US territory at all.
3. Spamhaus only connection to the US is US companies utilize the service.
Based on that Illinois can only go after companies that use the database, not the provider overseas. They don't market or have any presence in the US. The court likely could go after these companies. Will they?
Now what I'd love to see is Illinois try and go after everyone in the US using the database... go ahead and try. I'll keep using it because it's a good effective database.
I've got a feeling there's money behind this ruling. It just sounds to fishy to be legitimate.
Reconfigure your MTAs NOW.
- Use IP numbers or
- host a domain resolution for spamhaus in a local name server and configure your MTA to hit that first. (Have your nameserver serve as an unofficial secondary pointing to their primaries, and squirrel a dump of their name service just in case the court gets their primaries shut down.)
Then ICANN can pull the record and it won't do squat.
For your convenience (from nslookup):
> server 204.74.101.1
Default Server: udns2.ultradns.net
Address: 204.74.101.1
> set type=soa
> spamhaus.org
Server: udns2.ultradns.net
Address: 204.74.101.1
spamhaus.org
origin = need.to.know.only
mail addr = hostmaster.spamhaus.org
serial = 2006100802
refresh = 3600 (1H)
retry = 600 (10M)
expire = 2419200 (4W)
minimum ttl = 3600 (1H)
spamhaus.org nameserver = udns2.ultradns.net
spamhaus.org nameserver = udns1.ultradns.net
spamhaus.org nameserver = ns8.spamhaus.org
spamhaus.org nameserver = hq-ns.oarc.isc.org
ns8.spamhaus.org internet address = 216.168.28.44
(I'm presuming that the spamhaus.org domain contains the
servers in question. But if not, perhaps someone who
actually administers an MTA using their services can
follow up with the necessary info.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way