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ICANN Grants Temporary Reprieve to Spamhaus
daringone writes "ICANN released a statement that says they "...cannot comply with any order requiring it to suspend or place a client hold on Spamhaus.org or any specific domain name" They do, however leave the door open for the registrar that registered the domain name to then be forced to turn the lights off for Spamhaus."
Can somebody explain that in English please?
Judges aren't required to know how technology works, they just make rulings that affect it.
Custom, hands-free Linux installs. Instalinux
politicians aren't required to know how technology works, they just make laws that affect it.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
ICANN cannot execute the court order because they do not have the authority to do so, and they are claiming that the court would have to go after the registrar through which the domain was registered, as they would have the contractual obligation with spamhaus.org.
Also, they posted this message as a response to community interest.
Bravo ICANN. Well executed.
If Ted Stevens can teach me how to be sent an internets by my staff, I do believe that judges can say pretty much anything they want on any technology as long as they don't know jack about it.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
(If you haven't been following the 360 Insight vs Spamhaus thing then you'll have no idea what's going on here!)
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
We should add a few letters to ICANN's name, therefore making it "ICANNOT." They literally supervise domain names and the IP space, however that's about it.
Now if Spamhaus registered the domain with GoDaddy, all 'e360' needs to do is say the site contains some severely questionable content and down the domain will go. GoDaddy has a good history with that...
Instead they demonstrated an admirable restraint and intelligence, in a situation where both the Judge and Spamhaus have failed to do the same.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Main idea IMHO is that in this way ICANN can say, nicely, NO to US court ruling. If they agreed they would actually gave up their independence and would become easy target for more attacks from US jurisdical system.
In this way they effectively explained themselves from executing court orders.
Good job for freedom of speech ICANN!
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
The pity here is the media circus surrounding it which has made this the big mountain it isn't.
10 Second History
Spamhaus listed E360 as spammers
E360 sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus said that an Illinois court has no jurisdiction and didn't show up.
E360 won a default judgement because Spamhaus didn't show up.
Spamhaus still said the court had no authority and ignored the judgement.
E360 filed for an injunction, asking the court to order either ICANN or the domain registrar to block the Spamhaus domain because Spamhaus ignored the judgement.
This Story
ICANN is saying leave us out of it. We don't have any part in it and can't do anything about it.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Thanks.
So what do you think the judge should have done in this case, given that the defendant gave the court de facto jurisdiction and then failed to make an appearance? If you fail to follow courtroom procedure and get censured for it, that's your own damn fault (in this case Spamhaus). Besides, if the judge does use e-mail, I'm sure the judge also knows what spam is.
But keep raging against the machine.
The judge made the right decision.
It's an adversarial system. If there's no defendant, the plaintiff wins. Blame the law. Not the judge.
Better yet to send snail mail to the judge. Seeing how he's ruled on this case, I doubt he would even have an email address.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Also I want that judge to decalre the "do not call" list created by the US Govt illegal. If someone talks to you, you have to drop everything and listen. If someone sends you a piece of junk mail, you must read it.
How asinine can any judge get?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What did the judge do?
I just glanced over the thing, and it says that at a certain point Spamhaus' laywers stopped showing up to court, so the judgement defaulted to the plaintiff. I'm pretty sure the judge didn't have a lot of leeway to do any judging at that point.
(oh yeah, great job using "mail", "judge", and "bomb" together - enjoy being an enemy combatant... ah crap! I'll see you at Gitmo...)
sic transit gloria mundi
The judge is just following the law, and, indeed, the constitution. This has nothing to do with "freedom of speech". Spamhaus asked for a civil suit to be moved to Federal Court, and then failed to defend themselves. Wham. Default judgement.
It doesn't matter whether Spamhaus is being sued for describing Ted Kaczynski or "Spamford" Wallace as a spammer. It doesn't matter if this is Spamhaus or SPEWS. It doesn't matter if spam is a nuisance or welcomed by millions of people across the world. They failed to turn up. They're subject to a default judgement and legal sanctions to prevent them from continuing the offense.
That's what the law and constitution says is the correct response, and therefore, while it might be unpopular, this is the correct thing for the judge to do. For all the criticisms of judges "legislating from the bench", it seems that the majority of people would rather they do that than follow the law. (Witness SCOTUS's response to the Connecticut eminent-domain thing. For some reason, everyone decided it was SCOTUS at fault. The real problem was a vague phrase in the constitution, an out of control local government, and state and Federal legislatures who'd failed to impose legal limits. But everyone blamed the judges.)
The judge needs to follow the law, even when it's unpopular. The legislature needs to be told to deal with this fiasco. And Spamhaus needs to be more careful and less stupid and contradictory in their ways of dealing with courts.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
In many ways, I am very happy about ICANN's decision. They are recognizing that the internet should not be controlled by politics or a single country/government. If ICANN had blocked the domain, politicans would start to think that they controlled the internet (although some do think that way...)
ICANN's contention seems to be that even if ordered to remove the record, its not technically possible for them. Only the registrar (TUCOWS in this case) could remove the registration.
Is this accurate? Don't the glue records get published through ICANN, and couldn't they remove them?
Of course I am in favor of Spamhaus and against SPAMers...I'm just curious if this is a legal ploy on ICANN's part to help Spamhaus (which I would applaud), or if its just ICANN telling the truth (which I would also applaud...I'm easy to please).
Also, if true, couldn't Spamhaus just move their registrar from TUCOWS (Canada?) to a registrar in a less US court friendly country where any order to remove the registration could be ignored?
Courts should really be required to do at least a little research prior to passing judgement. As it stands right now the average corporate environment has around 80% of outside mail blocked because it is spam. Some of these companies are processing upwards of a million outside mails a day and even after filtering out 80% of the messages their mail servers are hammered. Knocking out a company like Spamhaus would cause every corporation to small business in at least north america to invest in 3-5 times more hardware to handle all of the spam.
The thing that really cracks me up about this whole scenario is this is one of the types of court cases that people still joke about. "You ever hear about the guy who fell through the skylight and broke his leg when attempting to rob the house. And how he won the lawsuit?". If anything our whole law system needs to be reworked.
I think the likely choices are either Tucows (as the registrar) or the Public Interest Registry, who is the actual maintainance organization for the .org TLD.
I'm not sure how PIR is structured and how responsive they would be to a U.S. court order -- a lot of their board of directors seem to be European, although their mailing address is in Reston, VA, and I'm not sure where they're officially incorporated -- but Tucows is probably in a position where they have a lot to lose if they ignored it.
Still, can a registrar really "pull" a domain? It's the PIR that maintains the root DNS servers for the TLD, so if they decide to just not delete spamhaus's DNS entry, then the domain stays active. Tucows basically sends requests to the PIR to add new DNS records when someone registers a new domain, but they don't (at least, I don't think they do) actually operate the servers themselves. What is Tucows supposed to actually do?
It would be interesting if PIR just said "no" to the order, once it goes to them from Tucows, and refused to do it. There could be some very interesting precedent as a result of this: should a U.S. court have the authority to pull a domain belonging to a non-U.S. corporation or citizen? Should a German court be able to order a domain for a U.S. corporation or citizen pulled? How about a Saudi Arabian court?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Tucows will be subject to the Federal court's jurisdiction, because they maintain business offices in the US (Starkville, MS, according to their website). So if Tucows is ordered to suspend/place on hold the domain registration, they'll be forced to comply.
12 Second History
4
Spamhaus listed E360 as spammers
E360 sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus said Illinois court has no jurisdiction, take it to Federal courts.
E360 sued Spamhaus in a Federal court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus doesn't show up to Federal court, despite having accepted their jurisdiction.
E360 won a default judgement because Spamhaus didn't show up.
Spamhaus still said the court had no authority and ignored the judgement.
E360 filed for an injunction, asking the court to order either ICANN or the domain registrar to block the Spamhaus domain because Spamhaus ignored the judgement.
Check out this Illinois lawyer's take on the matter for the full(er) explanation:
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/66
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
spamhaus.org. 172800 IN NS hq-ns.oarc.isc.org.
/. said I failed a "lameness filter". What a lame filter.
spamhaus.org. 172800 IN NS udns1.ultradns.net.
spamhaus.org. 172800 IN NS udns2.ultradns.net.
spamhaus.org. 172800 IN NS ns8.spamhaus.org.
ns8.spamhaus.org. 172800 IN A 216.168.28.44
udns1.ultradns.net. 86400 IN A 204.69.234.1
udns2.ultradns.net. 86400 IN A 204.74.101.1
hq-ns.oarc.isc.org. 3600 IN A 204.152.184.186
hq-ns.oarc.isc.org. 3600 IN AAAA 2001:4f8:0:2::41
I tried to post all the nameserver info for sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org also, but
Yeah!!!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
For a while now, the EU and other bodies have been grousing about ICANN being under the control of the US (Dept of Commerce, IIRC). I wonder if this stance *against* a US court will somewhat mollify those objections? ICANN's hardly a US puppydog if it distances itself from the US court system...right? Maybe?
I realize they aren't acting in defiance of a court order (they haven't even been contacted by the court yet, if I understand the press release), but at least they're toeing the "We're independent and neutral" line.
Just junk food for thought...
No, all it will mean is that no-one on a consumer internet connection will ever be able to run a MTA (for whatever reason) ever again, even if they have a legitimate reason to (e.g. genuine list server). The ISPs will just say, 'You should use our mail relay,' despite the fact that it's craply configured and slow, and then jump up and down on you whenever you try to send the same e-mail to more than 20 people at once (something I occasionally have to do).
And the same stupid restrictions will no doubt be extended to business connections as well...
Pirate Party UK
Spamhouse chose to fight in a federal tribunal and then defaulted the ruling to e360. The ruling is a federal mandate, not statal.
My other OS is the MCP!
The plaintiff is still required to state a valid claim.
The only party that can do so would be Tucows, who registered Spamhaus.
.org TLD. If Tucows wanted to pull the spamhaus.org domain, they'd basically just be submitting a request to PIR anyway, so it would seem like the most direct route if you wanted to go after the domain, would be to order the registry to do it.
.com and .net, PIR has .org, EduCause has .edu) can be forced at any time to deep-six a domain, it basically means that the entire non-country-coded internet is part of U.S. court jurisdiction. While I think that's preferable to it being, say, under Chinese or Iranian jurisdiction, I can imagine it might not please a lot of people in other countries to know that if they don't defend themselves in a U.S. court, their domain can be killed if it's in one of the top-level (non-cc) TLDs.
Actually I think the party that could actually do so would be the Public Interest Registry, who maintain the
That's where things really get dangerous in my mind. If the TLD organizations (there are different ones for the various TLDs, VeriSign has
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The judge ordered a judgement against a UK company from the US, and is trying to force a Canadian company to comply to a US judgement. That's what.
It's very simple:
The United States is not the United Kingdom or Canada.
No matter how many USians think they have the right to police the world, US law stops at the US border.
This judge is trying to force US law into the UK. That's braindead and wrong.
End of story.
It is interesting that you think you don't have the right to shout fire in a theatre. You do have the right to do it, in fact you have the right to say anything you want to. But, you have to deal with the results too. With rights come responsibilities. Shout "Fire" in a theatre, and if there's no fire, bad things will likely happen to you. Say something about someone with malicious intent and you can be sued for libel. You're perfectly free to do those things, but there are consequences because we as a society have decided that some speech in certain cases is not acceptable and therefore, there will be consequences.
e360 is annoyed that they are identified as a spammer. Tough noogies. They have the right to send as much spam as they want; well, I have the right (and according to my boss, the responsibility) to shut them down. If e360 wanted to pay us for the time it would take our users to sort through their spam, I'm sure we could come to an acceptable agreement, but, unless they accept responsibility for their actions, I have to and the solution to that is to block their mail.
"It's real and we can touch it, so least we know where we stand." - Jack Burton
The claim was:
Defendant has specifically asked for District court jurisdiction
Defendant has published his IP address as a spammer
Plaintiff is not a spammer
This has caused financial harm to plaintiff.
Based on balance of probabilities, why would any judge rule against this?
I say that the server location is where courts or governments should have jurisdiction.
The problem is, most people/courts/governments are of the opinion that the server is somehow projecting out to the clients location.
Lets reverse that, and look at it as the client visiting the server. Your web client establishes a session on a foreign server, the server doesn't just randomly broadcast out data to the Internet in general. You have to take the initiative and GET the data.
I'm open to comments here. Is this a horrible idea or does it simplify the mess that we're quickly getting into?
(Witness SCOTUS's response to the Connecticut eminent-domain thing. For some reason, everyone decided it was SCOTUS at fault. The real problem was a vague phrase in the constitution, an out of control local government, and state and Federal legislatures who'd failed to impose legal limits. But everyone blamed the judges.)
The judge needs to follow the law, even when it's unpopular.
Reminds me of the Dread Scott v. Sandford case. I think it was Chief Justice Taney who was a die hard abolitionist (anti-slavery) but sided with the majority as, while he didn't believe in slavery, he believed the constitution and laws pertaining to the case supported it. Which, turned out to be a severe blow to the abolitionit movement.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
e360: wah wah wah
Spamhaus (prior to firing legal team): We request this civil case be moved to a federal court.
Judge: No problem and thank you for accepting juristiction of the US courts.
e360: wah wah wah wah wah
Spamhaus:
Judge: OK, Spamhaus asked for this and then failed to turn up. I guess you win, e360.
Spamhaus:
e360: Judge, please suspend their domain name until they pay us!
Spamhaus:
ICANN: Not my problem, man, go talk to the registrar.
If Spamhaus had just ignored the entire thing, there would be no problem. Now Spamhaus have a fight on their hands.
IANAL (big suprise), but the judge still had discretion over the actual penalty. He could have just issued a big fine and said 'good luck collecting from them', but he instead went for a more severe approach. Spamhaus not showing up was incredibly stupid and probably got the judge a little be upset and partially caused the severity of the penalty.
Couldn't an independant organization just register the name and direct it to spamhaus's servers? Wouldn't that make it impossible to revoke the domain name?
Here's an idea if Spamhaus ends up deciding to comply with removing e360 from their spammer list.
Create a "People Who Sued Us" list. Make this list functionally similar to the normal ROSKO list, allowing IT admins to choose to use the PWSU list for e-mail filtering purposes. Chances are that anyone on the PWSU list is a known spammer, since only a known spammer would have to resort to shady legal practices to get removed from ROSKO. However, the PWSU list is based only on the easily provable fact of someone suing Spamhaus, meaning that nobody on that list could complain that they were being treated unjustly.
If Spamhaus does end up switching to a non-US registrar, I wonder how casually ICANN will be able to brush off responsibility then. It's dangerous ground, and any resulting US vs ICANN battle would set one hell of a legal precedent either way.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't ICANN only responsable for maintaining the Root level servers and TLD's?
.whatever is run by the registrars..
.org tld is managed by Network Solutios under a contract from ICANN (Verisigan whatever they are this week)
Everything under
Now I believe the
I wonder if the court might pick on NetSol next.
A prevous post noted that spamhaus.org is registered through Tucows.. a Canadian registrar.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
The judge, I can see, but Spamhaus? How do you figure? Their position is that since they neither live nor operate in Illinois, or anywhere else in the U.S. for that matter, then spending money to fight this legal battle is pointless and stupid. Remember, Spamhaus is largely a volunteer effort. Who do you think has more money for lawyers--an alleged spam outfit or a volunteer organization trying to perform what is essentially a public service?
On the contrary, I think Spamhaus is showing a great deal of intelligence and restraint.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Ginen nothing else, I see two optios:
1) They are a spammer
2) They are not a spammer
50-50.
Plaintiff said they're not a spammer. Unfortunately the way the whole balance of probabilities works is that unless the defendant says "They are a spammer", there is more evidence that they are not.
Just an FYI.
In these situations things just keep on coming and coming.
Judges and the judicial system are set up so that court orders can be enforced. Usually against reluctant subjects, so dealing with whiners is not new to them.
Even in civil cases you can get a cop with a gun to go into a business and help you settle things up if the judge orders it. Unless anti-spam people think tucows is going to arm its US office and start shooting people, they are going to comply with this order.
Spamhaus had an easy out, make a special appearance and talk about jurisdiction. Or they could have moved it to federal and fought it on the merits, which would have likely established a positive precedent in the US for voluntary opt-in to these types of published opinion blacklists. Instead they try to game the legal system in the US. That's fine, but they are likely to lose their ability to work within the US by doing so.
Spamhaus appear to have been expecting action against their domain name, as on 14 September they registered the domain spamhaus.org.uk, over which US courts have (one hopes) no jurisdiction at all.
They might have some means to do the removal of a DNS entry. However, it seems this would be against the rules/regulations/american laws under which they supervise the Internet.
If the contract between Spamhuis and Tucows was not done under US contract law (likelly, since Tucows is a Canadian company and Spamhuis is based in the UK), wouldn't Tucows be liable for breach of contract if the unilaterally terminated the contract since only Canadian courts can order a termination of the contract?
Even if IANAL, it seems logical that a court in a country cannot order the termination of a contract done under another country's law - otherwise it would be a widespread scam to engage in a contract to recieve services, recieve said services and then pay some judge in some currupt 3rd world country to order the termination of the contract (before payment).
Until some l33t hax0rs get into the e360 servers and send a few 100k "not-spams" to the judges offering them ch33p v14gr4.) " for the same ?
Or in fact, anyone starts sending them "Special Unsolicited Commercial Email (that-isn't-spam-since-the-judges-ruled-it-wasn't
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." Lily Tomlin
I'd say a boycott of any registrar who suspends their domain name. All in favor?
There has been an arms race between spammers and admins, in many senses of the word. Spammers learned long ago that they will have an edge if they operate anonymously, either relaying through insecure relays in the old days, or more recently taking control of insecure PCs and servers and operating a fleet of zombie nodes. Their origin is masked. Or they might purchase services through dirty middlemen who then purchase services through dirty ISPs. Either way, spammers try to hide.
But the admins who fight spam often do not hide, usually because they are part of a reputable organization and are well respected by the community, and proud of their work. Also, the way blacklist technology is used (RBL, DNSBL) makes it difficult to conceal who you are. Unfortunately this makes organizations like Spamhaus vulnerable to DoS attacks, harassment, and frivolous lawsuits (remember that spammers call themselves 'internet marketers' and pretend they are legit businessmen). Other organizations like SPEWS are somewhat better at hiding their operation.
There are ideas floating around, however, on ways to harden blacklists agaist attacks of various sorts. The idea proposed in that 2004 paper would conceal the blacklist publisher, and use distributed resources to serve the list, kind of like how spammers use a fleet of zombies (except spammers steal those resources).
Spammers are a dirty bunch, they fight dirty. Maybe it's time we look more seriously at protecting the blacklists and their operators from various types of 'attacks'.
A far more effective method would be to just close the internet tubes running to spamhaus. Thereby reducing the amount of material in all the other tubes, allowing me to receive my internets in a more timely fasion.
http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2006/04/14/294/
Relevant comments, too, INMNSU(unbiased)O.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Everyone keeps ranting about how the "illinois Court" has no jurisdiction in this place or that place. That's wonderful except,as I understand it,the case was moved to higher court before there was a judgement. So now there is a default judgement in a FEDERAL COURT.....not an Illinois Court so STFU about what an Illinois court can and can't do...maybe RTFA or the other 10 million posts about the story here on /.
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
14 Second History
Spamhaus listed E360 as spammers
E360 sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus said Illinois court has no jurisdiction, take it to Federal courts.
E360 sued Spamhaus in a Federal court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus doesn't show up to Federal court, despite having accepted their jurisdiction.
E360 won a default judgement because Spamhaus didn't show up.
Spamhaus still said the court had no authority and ignored the judgement.
E360 filed for an injunction, asking the court to order either ICANN or the domain registrar to block the Spamhaus domain because Spamhaus ignored the judgement.
????
Profit!
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
The Illinois court agreed that did not have jusrisdiction.
The federal court accepted jurisdiction at Spamhaus' request.
Then Spamhaus changed their minds and decided to ignore the federal court.
This is no different than some AOL user signing up to an opt-in mail list, changing his mind, and pressing the 'Mark as SPAM' button to get off the list.
That AOL user has a right to control his email, but he used the wrong procedure to do it. Spamhaus has the right to argue jurisdiction, but they used the wrong procedure. Both the court and the mail list operator are reaching for the clue gun. So far, Slashdot readers appear to understand the legal process about as well as AOL users understand how email works.
Fascinating idea there, distributed RBLs. Thanks for the link. I think of RBLs as simply another case of what should be an unfettered exchange of information & opinion between mutually consenting parties. It's unfortunate that so many obstacles to this sort of thing are accumulating, but if it means the start of hardened protocols to fend off interference, then I suppose it's a Good Thing in the long run.
// ;-)
I've had similar thoughts about using a distributed protocol for nym servers, and building a pseudonymous repute system thereupon that's (hopefully) hard-to-spoof, trace or interrupt.
Anyway...
void parent()
{
score += int.MaxValue(informative);
}
Pi Ran Out
they control the tubes
-m10
Look, ICANN is an American organization, but notice they arn't bowing to the American courts. That alone should make people happy, this whole case is ridiculous but there's no reason for ICANN or anyone who is providing services to the internet to have to bow to an American judicial system if the offender is in England. At the very least there should be a form of Extradition to take the issue of an internet business before this court, rather then this kangaroo style court.
It might not be great Americans have control of the internet but at the very least we haven't abused it to the point where it has to be taken from us.
No. The judge has to follow the law. The law says that they have no jurisdiction. The judge does not need a defendant's presence to say "No, someone that is not american and not an american corproation can not use the US courts to sue a non-american organization that has minimal (if any) presence in the US."
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Block all requests from US...
That way - it will satisfy the US court rulings while providing services to the rest of the world.
Then let's see what the US court, government or agencies will do.
The plaintiff said that the court had jurisdiction. The defendant said that the county court had no jurisdiction and that therefore it was under the jurisdiction of the district court. If both sides state that it's under the courts jurisdiction, then what is the court meant to say?
What you've confused here is the right to do something and the ability to do something. You are, presumably, able to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater, but if you had the right to do it, you wouldn't get in trouble for doing so afterwards.
And if you can hook me up with a way to have that right when there's not a fire in the theater, let me know, please?
Why doesn't someone just crush e360 with a super DOS attack on their servers?
> Is this accurate? Don't the glue records get published through ICANN, and couldn't
.org TLD to be delisted, ICANN would be the outfit to contact.
.com registry was run, last I recall, by Network Solutions. (That may have changed, because I haven't paid attention recently, but whether .com is still run by netsol is not really germaine to the discussion.) Assuming that that is still the case, then the root domain servers, over which ICANN has charge, will basically say that for .com you consult the nameserver over at Network Solutions, and for .uk you consult the nameserver of some UK outfit that runs that one, and so on.
.org in the case of Spamhaus), and that would be a much more weighty thing to do. However big a deal you think it would be to delist Spamhaus, take that up a couple of orders of magnitude and you start to get an idea how big a deal it would be for ICANN to delist a TLD.
> they remove them?
Unless I am mistaken, no.
ICANN is responsible for the *root* domain servers, i.e., the ones that tell you which (other) domain servers have authority for various *top-level* domains. So if the court wanted the
However, the individual domains _within_ each TLD are the responsibility of certain key registries who run the authoritative servers for those domains. For instance, the
To get a specific site's domain delisted, you'd have to go to the people who hold the domain the next level up, i.e., the people who run the nameserver that authoritatively lists the domain you're trying to get delisted. You can't go to ICANN and say, "please delist galion.lib.oh.us", for instance -- you'd have to go to whoever currently runs the nameserver with authority for the lib.oh.us domain (which was OARNET last I knew). If ICANN were to act, they'd be delisting the whole TLD (.us in the library's case, or
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Watch out for that tree!!
Spam is bad.
justin-trash-1+slashdot.org@sephone.com
It took me a while to find E360's site, as it has a PageRank of 0 (compared to Spamhaus' 7). Interestingly, the site has no content other than a record of the case, highly biased:
The "Illinois court" that most people are referring to is the one after it was transferred to federal court. It's a federal court in Illinois, not an Illinois state court. But the jurisdiction stuff applies to any US court (federal, state, or otherwise) when you're talking about a UK company. (Which is further complicated by Spamhaus' original appearance in the lower court implicitly agreeing to US jurisdiction.)
.org is managed by pir.org
I can't give you the address of the judge, but e360insight would like to hear from you - "We want to hear from you so we can learn more about your needs."
Go to http://www.e360insight.com/contact.php and provide them with your views on this matter. I, for one, would like less spam in my inbox. How about you?
I believe this has a lot to do with net neutrality as well. If ICANN pulls the plug they would be violating it.
I run my own MTA on a dynamic IP. Acountability exists the same way accountability exists for websurfing. My ISP logs all the information to whom they lease each IP. Spammers are businesses. They are not hidding, otherwise they wouldn't be able to do business and profit! It's a legal problem not a technical one! (BTW, I receive daily relay test messages by my ISP, so running open relays does get noticed, and I am sure my ISP would have taken action!)
What if SpamHaus, in order to avoid being in "comptent" would decide "unilaterally" to stop providing their services to US customers.
Maybe it would have an sufficient effect to make "someone" notice.
And after dusting off some old fax machine or uucp modem/software the power that be would make a "friendly visit" to e360.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that 4* more spam would actually be such a drag on the Internet, I do every morning my "religious duties" (show unread message, alphabetically sorted, erase bunch of similar junks) and having 4* more would probably not significantly slow me down.
As for the overal bandwith, I suspect that with the popularity of video blogs, and community sites, the percentage dedicated to mail went significantly down.
Therefore I believe it is fundamentally not an issue of efficiency, or method, but only an issue of what rights are the US claiming over foreign content providers on the Internet.
Either the US claim that: I do not like that site that is visible on the Internet it has to either GO or be Invisible.
In that case there is no moral difference between the US and Chine/Saudi/Iran (choose your favorite "contry wide firewall manager"), at least on the "right to information".
Or they have to go sue a site that they do not like IN THE COUNTRY WHERE IT IS "really" OPERATING (ther really part can be quite tricky if it is a money gaming site incorporated in eastern molnavia, with a gaming server in denmark, a payment platform in Turkish Cyprus and a virtual cash server in the bahamas.)
And accept that some country just might have laws that differ from the US laws.
I don't think the judgment against spamhaus is an issue. The real issue is wether US courts have the jurisdiction to shutdown domain names registered outside the U.S.. If they do, then who doesn't? What if a european court revoked an address registered in the States? What if a court in Iran decided that whitehouse.gov had to be shutdown? Certainly they can only effectively enforce their rulings in the U.S.. In other countries they would have to rely on friendly authorities cooperating, which will probably at least demand some judicial approval.
I don't doubt that spamhaus was acting foolishly by (implicitly) accepting US federal court jurisdiction and then later turning around and saying that they don't have jurisdiction. That is their problem. When the judge tries to enforce his rulings outside of his domain then its *our* problem. Where does it stop?
Of course, their are precedents in the world. In Belgium you can be convicted of war crimes committed anywhere in the world. Still they can only enforce that in Belgium. I know I'm comparing civil vs criminal here, but its about the enforcement not the infraction.
Ok so Tucows appears to have offices in the States which places them at least partially under U.S. law. This isn't always going to be the case. Are foreign registrars in danger of being accused of non-compliance with U.S. law without even being under U.S. law?
e360insight.com's netblock is 63.78.194.0/24. Block it at your border, your firewall, your spam appliance or anywhere else that suits you.
Ahhh,ok....So it's a Federal Court located in Illinois not just some state court.I couldn't tell from they way everyone was talking about it.They kept saying a "Illinois court" instead of a "Federal court located in Illinois".I wish people would be more clear when they post...I lost karma over all this :(
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Taking what law into their own hands? Please show us the code chapter that requires that mail servers accept mail from all comers, with no right to block mail. A mail server is private property, and as such, the owner is not breaking the law when he/she chooses not to accept mail from a specific party. If the owner decides to delegate that decision making to another person, that's their right, as well. There has grown up around the world the misconception that email is a right, and that service providers and mail server owners cannot interfere in the right of others to send any message that they choose. It surely sucks that you're finding it hard to make a living by sending special marketing emails. But that's life. I'm also not going to allow you into my house. So sue me, demand your right to enter my house at will and leave your marketing materials on my coffee table. I dare you. Comment by Dave -- October 7, 2006