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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."
In English, ICAAN can't do anything even if they're ordered to. They don't have the power. However, Tucows (Spamhaus' registrar) may be ordered to take them down.
Custom, hands-free Linux installs. Instalinux
Basically, ICANN says that they've not been ordered to act and suspend the spamhaus.org domain, and even if they had they couldn't do it "because ICANN does not have either the ability or the authority to do so".
They also state that ICANN is not party in the lawsuit and is not involved in it.
They end their posting by stating that only spamhaus.org's registrar or the Internet Registry have the ability and authority to suspend an individual domain name.
They close their posting by stating that this comment was made in response of the community's interest (in the ICANN's position on the matter).
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
e360: wah wah wah
Spamhaus:
e360: wah wah wah wah wah
Spamhaus:
Judge: OK, 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.
Don't Tread on Me
Okay, I think I sort of get it now.
FTFA:
So E360 wanted to get a "client hold" on the domain name, but ICANN refused, saying they don't have the authority to do so.
(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
They actually state that "no order has been issued in this matter requiring any action by ICANN". In a word, they were NOT ordered to take down spamhaus.org, they note that "a Proposed Order referencing ICANN has been submitted to the court" (which would mean that the proposed order hasn't been accepted by the court yet)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
No, what they say is:
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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
Follow the actual story:
1) Spamhaus is used in Illinois court.
2) They APPEAR in court, and request that the case be moved to federal court, as IL does not have jurisdiction.
3) The case IS moved to federal court.
4) Spamhaus stops showing up.
They requested the involvment of the federal district court. In your example, the defendant was never involved. Here, they were. If they had argued that the U.S. has no jurisdiction in IL, they probably would have won. Instead, they argued that the federal court had jusisdiction.
It's a little different than your Hong Kong example.
Simple explanation: Spammers are stupid.
e360 won the default judgement, then did not know enough about the internet to know who controls domain registration. It would be like winning a lawsuit against your brother-in-law, then asking the judge to instruct Citibank to give you $10M.
For reference: e360 IP addresses are: 63.78.194/24 (UUNET), 66.54.187.6 (YIPES)
Just in case you need to update a router somewhere.
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.
And Tucows being a canadian company, I'm not sure of the leverage an Illinois court could have over them to take down the domain of an english spamfighting organization.
Me guess none, but who knows.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Actually, Tucows is not an US-based registrar (it's canadian).
Also, spamhaus already has spamhaus.co.uk, but it's explicitely said that it didn't want to domain-switch, because it'd be detrimental to the users of the existing lists.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Although Tucows is listed on the American Stock exchange, it is actually Canadian based company (non-US based).
Head Office:
Tucows Inc.
96 Mowat Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
"Spamhaus may have waived personal jurisdiction as a defense early on in the case when they not only appeared, but then asked for the case to be removed from state court (where it was originally filed) and moved to federal district court (where it is today). Arguably, and this makes sense intuitively even if you don't understand the finer points of U.S. civil procedure, doing so inherently acknowledged the jurisdiction of the federal court."
A "public service" that they charge for, and that makes them little different than other companies offering blocking lists. You can _no longer_ download their list of blocked IP adresses unless you pay:
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.
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'.
I'm sorry but that's utter rubbish. Spamhaus did no such thing to OpenBSD users. Any OpenBSD user can still query the Spamhaus blocklist. But Spamhaus has to charge for the rsync access to the list, in part for the cost of bandwidth, and in part to help ensure Spamhaus can continue as an organisation (for example, in paying for lawyers!).
Just because DeRaadt didn't want to re-code his app to use DNS instead of a local copy he put this FUD in his commit message.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
> 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.
Indeed one could make a list like that and it would be nice. They could call it http://cart00ney.org/. Other people could then take the list and make it into a DNSBL/RHSBL list and host it at http://cart00ney.surriel.com/