Slashdot Mirror
One Last Spamhaus Warning Before The End
kog777 writes to mention that Spamhaus has released a final warning about an increase in junk email, as they prepare to lose their domain to an Illinois court ruling. From the article: "According to Spamhaus, more than 650 million Internet users - including those at the White House, the U.S. Army and the European Parliament - benefit from Spamhaus' 'blacklist' of spammers that helps identify which messages to block, send to a 'junk' folder or accept. Losing the domain name would make it more difficult for service providers and others to obtain the lists. 'If the domain got suspended, it would be an enormous hit for the Net,' said Steve Linford, Spamhaus' chief executive officer. 'It would create an enormous amount of damage on the Internet.'"
Go to e360's home page. All it shows is information on their frivolous lawsuit. There's nothing to offer their marketing services, to opt in, or even opt out.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"Maybe this will cause the community to complain about ICANN and the American control of the internet?"
Is the US the only country that can compell ICANN to modify the DNS record list? Can't a judge in the UK overturn the US judge's ruling and compell ICANN to reinstate the address? If not, that's insane that US law is the end all of Internet law.
Oh You POS
Spamhaus and other block-list pushers are a solution to spam that's worse than the problem. I understand that it's up to individual ISPs to decide what they do with these block lists, but too many were relying on them blindly to reject email from any source that ended up on a block list. Unfortunately many sources that ended up on these block lists are the common mail servers of other major ISPs, resulting in large volumes of false-positive emails being blocked. Perhaps it's indicative of the arrogant attitude of outfits like Spamhaus that this happened to them. Maybe this will serve as a wake-up call to other block-list operators to act more responsibly, but I suspect they'll ignore it and continue business as usual.
What's stopping them from getting a domain name in a non-US-controlled TLD?
.com, .uk, .de, or .mil. It doesn't matter where the domain is registered.
.de TLD, a U.S. court could fine the U.S. company, order their CEO to jail, or do whatever else it thought necessary in order to force the German part of the company to comply with its orders. The judge might even order a German executive (residing in Germany) to jail for contempt, and when the German doesn't comply, issue an arrest warrant for the German. While German authorities will probably not be willing to act on that warrant (extradition treaties don't normally extend that far), it will be awfully hard for the German executive to travel in the U.S. with an outstanding warrant.
I don't see how a US court ruling could shut down a domain name in another country's TLD; so why don't they just go and get a name in the UK, or Switzerland, or Sealand.
You're not the only person to make this mistake. The judge's order to pull the SOA for SpamHaus's domain has NOTHING TO DO with whether the TLD is
How can this be? Well, SpamHaus is subject to the jurisdiction of a U.S. court. Once a court (any court, not just American) decides that you're subject to its jurisdiction, it can issue an order compelling you to do whatever it wants. It can also issue a court order compelling a 3rd party (in this case, the domain registrar) to take some action in regards to you. It doesn't matter whether one party in the lawsuit, or the 3rd party who isn't involved in the suit, is actually resident in the U.S.
Enforcement of a court order is a slightly different issue. It may be very, very difficult to enforce the order of a U.S. court in a foreign country. It's easy enough in the U.S. because the court can hold the non-compliant party in contempt (and enact fines, jail time, etc.), but these mechanisms don't automatically work overseas. Some countries, under some circumstances, will honor civil court orders from other nations, but usually you would have to sue in the foreign country's courts to effect any action on the part of a foreign body.
An important exception to the above is that many entities have assets or physical presence in multiple countries. If (hypotheticallly) the German arm of Register.com operated the
In short, the Illinois court made a STUPID FUCKING BONEHEADED decision, and the judge or jury should probably be removed and caned, but it is certainly procedurally possible for them to hassle SpamHaus regardless of where you register the domain name.
Please think of this the next time when a court from another country tries to tell you what a US bases company can do. Maybe US citizen should fly to Iran to defend themselves in trial there?
Spamhaus is in the UK. The court in the US. End of story.
I hope ICANN pulls the DNS records; that will be the final sign for the EU and other parties to take control over their own domains.
If Spamhaus is not liked here, have the US build a huge firewall around the country to "protect" itself.
Works the other way too dude.
Let's say that you're posting WWII revisionism on an american website. You're protected by the 1st amendment.
Now the website is browsable from... say... France. France has laws against revisionism, so your post is a crime as far as the french law is concerned. Since your post arrived to france, it falls under french juridiction, your crime -- in your own opinion -- was comitted in France even though there was no crime comitted in the USA (interresting isn't it?), and you could be extraded to France to be judged and put in prison.
Fun isn't it?
Becomes much funnier when you put "interresting" countries into play, like, say, China.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
the service Spamhaus does is done via DNS records
when my email server receive some mail from 1.2.3.4, it looks up 4.3.2.1.sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org and, if the address exists, it closes the connection (so that the mail won't even clog our intertubes). Now, I already changed it to look up 4.3.2.1.sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org.uk, but other 650 MILLION servers still have to do the same. Because if they don't, and this judge thinks it should call, their email load will get up by 20x or so. Got it now?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Despite all the predictions of doom and gloom, and despite the attempts to mitigate blame from Spam blacklists to mail admins, I say that this is the inevitable conclusion to the way broad "spam blacklists" are run. As annoying as SPAM is, it can't possibly compete with the damage that spam-blocker's false positives have on the e-mail system. The company I work for has never sent a single piece of spam, but we routinely find ourselves dealing with problems relating to open blacklists and spam-catching software. You have to understand that when business relies to e-mail as a communications medium, it can't afford to have that vital conduit blocked because some asshat administrator insists that your company spams or is an open relay or whatnot when it is in fact not. Even my ISP's domain is frequently blocked, even though they're one of the largest telecomm companies in Canada. One of two things needs to happen: either spam needs to be legislated out of existence, or a proper organization needs to be set up in order two blacklist spam servers while doing their utmost to prevent false positives. Because when it comes down to it, getting a load of annoying junk in your inbox can't compare with never getting a critical e-mail about your job, family, business, or finances.
But when their data is false? I have a static IP. For whatever reason, it is listed as a Dynamic IP. For again whatever reason, LOADS of people seem to block dynamic IP's even ones not implicated in Spam.
Oh, believe me, I understand the issue. I used to run a mail server on a static IP that was listed as part of a dynamic IP block. Now I run a mail server that is on a dynamic IP (well, semi-dynamic -- it doesn't seem to change more then once every couple of years). I ran my server with direct delivery for a long time, without any trouble, but I eventually had to configure my mail server to deliver via my ISP's SMTP server because too much of my mail was blocked.
I say we should treat all IP's as innocent until proven guilty.
In principle, I agree. In practice, it's those dynamic IPs that generate nearly all of the spam, and it's not that difficult for non-spammers to route their email through their ISP's mail server.
In any case, I still have to say that the problem is with mail admins that misuse the Spamhaus list, not with the list itself. The list doesn't claim to be a list of spamming IPs, just a list of IPs that are likely spammers. Your IP is a likely spammer, even if it isn't a spammer. Personally, I use Spamhaus, but I only use it to add an "X-Listed-By-Spamhaus: yes" header to the messages, so that bogofilter can use that information. I find it increases the accuracy of bayesian filtering considerably.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The problem isn't that they persued the wrong legal strategy, it's that they persued both of them. Either strategy would have worked. But by changing mid-stride, they screwed themselved.
A Canadian business can do business in the US, or in Cuba, but if you do business in Cuba and in the US, US laws let you sue Canadian businesses also operating in the US for damages, such as Cuba's seizure of private property.
So if you want the financial goodies of the US, you'd better think twice about doing business in Cuba, or pay the US's penalty for operating in both.
As a businessman, it's your choice, consider it the cost of doing business in both countries.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Alas, it appears at the moment (at least from where I sit) that spamhaus.org.uk != spamhaus.org - at least in the sense that sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org.uk doesn't appear to be giving out any answers, like sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org does.
I can see how they would blacklist themselves, but removal could be a bit tricky.
I've just sent the following email to the lawyers for e360:
to: amertes@synergylawgroup.com
from: j@ww.com
Hello there,
It seems you are the people responsible for leading the charge on 'spamhaus' on behalf
of your customer, 'e360'.
if you cause spamhause.org to no longer function then you can rest assured I'll do my best to forward each and every spam message received on my servers to yours.
fair warning
It's one thing to play clever lawyerly games, it's quite another to
piss off just about everybody on the net on behalf of some lowlife.
Jacques Mattheij
CEO ww.com
MP3 Search Engine