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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.'"
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