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Judge Rules In Favor Of Spamhaus
Waylon writes "U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras has ruled in favor of The Spamhaus Project. e360 Insight responded on its homepage, saying the judge's ruling was 'a devastating loss of personal freedom for all U.S. citizens'. As opposed to shutting down a voluntary service which tries to mitigate the millions of unsolicited emails that e360 Insight pumps out every single day." From the article: "In his order, Judge Kocoras wrote that the relief e360insight sought is 'too broad to be warranted in this case' and that suspending the domain name would 'cut off all lawful online activities of Spamhaus, not just those that are in contravention' of the default judgment. He also called e360insight's motion one that 'does not correspond to the gravity of the offending conduct.'"
Way to go down kicking and screaming inanities...
I really think that the judge realized that more was at stake than just SPAM. It has set an important precedant regarding the Internet and jurisdiction. Even though the US controls most of it, it is important to realize that the Internet is an ethereal place without solid jurisdictional boundaries. If the judge had signed away on pulling the domain name, it would have casted a devastating taint on how Law treats 'where' the Interent exactly is.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Let's see, a bunch of guys puts together a database of known spammers, which people then use for RBLs. This is quite unfair to the spammers! Anyone with at least a peanut in the noggin should have called bullshit on the lawsuit before it even got legs.
Actually, if the judge had ordered ICANN (an American corporation) to pull the plug on the domain, it most definitely would have affected them, regardless of the physical jurisdiction of the court. The amount of power the US could potentially have over the Internet is rather frightening--which is why there is an Internet governance debate. The biggest sticking point is the lack of an international checking body--a sort of UN for the Internet--that could intervene and stop a US court order from overstepping its bounds, as a shutdown order here would be.
Un-bloody-real
Well, they can contact me at dream-freaking@on.com - that's the one I gave when I posted the following comment to what they had on the link supplied:
Just a quick note ... their contact form script requires a valid email address. Why not use nospam@360insight.com ... or admin@360insight.com, etc.
If the US started doing that, it wouldn't take long before the rest of the world stopped using ICANN's top-level domain, and effectively put the whole US on a subnet of some even higher level non-US domain.
Actually, if the judge had ordered ICANN (an American corporation) to pull the plug on the domain, it most definitely would have affected them, regardless of the physical jurisdiction of the court.
Actually, even if the judge ordered ICANN to suspend their domain, ICANN would not be able to comply, because it is not within ICANN's power to do so.
The judge could order the registrar to pull the domain though.
The amount of power the US could potentially have over the Internet is rather frightening
The US has minimal power over the internet. The internet is a set of standards for computer networks. The US has some power over some domain names because the companies that manage these domain names are located in the US.
And should the US abuse its position, I'm sure other countries will compensate. Why does ICANN have such power? Because internet users say that they do. Why are the DNS roots authoritative? Because internet users say that they are. Should a critical mass of internet users disagree, then they lose this power.
Despite all the bitching about ICANN, generally speaking, they do a decent job. Certainly far better than the UN/ITU proposals to bring it under the control of the dictator's debating club on the east river.
All that Spamhaus has "won" is not getting their domain registration pulled. That's great, but the current situation in the US courts basically says they need to pay up, and nothing so far except their location has said otherwise. They may have to fight it, in an appeals court, in the US (where they will have to pay their own legal fees even if they win) and that could be... bad.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Sure you could have handled it, To be honest Spamhaus is mostly using other peoples dnsrbl's anyway. I get alot more out of tqmcube.com or cbl.abuseat.org than the Spamhaus's.
Plus you should never be rejecting from these lists anyway, just scoring and allowing your users to decide what should be rejected.
The freedom of speech also means the freedom to NOT listen to speech.
This is a win for those who believe in property rights.
My servers. My rules.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Not really. A lot of spam these days comes from zombied/trojaned machines, which are already well covered by other blocklists, like CBL. Were spamhaus to go away, chances are spam levels would remain about the same for people not using the tools. Spammers just don't care if they're blocked or not, all things considered.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I clicked on the "contact us" link. ANd what's the first thing it did? They wanted my EMAIL address.
.tld, .ab.cd, etc) instead.
Well, yeah; presumably they think you want to contact them so as to set up a dialogue with them, not a monologue. They may be stupid, no good lowlife spamming shits, but expecting an email address as part of a contact form is perfectly reasonable. (Not that I'd give them mine, of course, but that's beside the point)
Well, they can contact me at dream-freaking@on.com
This was one of my biggest pet hates a couple of years ago - people using syntactically-legal addresses on real domains that are nothing to do with them. Same goes for the guy who used an address at yeahright.com, which is also a registered domain.
What if that's an actual, valid email address and you've just condemned some poor schmuck to even more spam? If you wouldn't trust a site with your own email address, don't trust it with a potentially valid one either; use a "fake but possible" tld (such as
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Here in Iowa, my employer pays Spamhaus multi thousands of dollars a year to be provided zone transfers of the xbl and sbl. I'm sure there is someone in Illinois doing the same. Would this not be considered doing business in Illinois?
Excellent question. The question of where does a transaction occur is an old one, and there is a great deal of legal precedent to determine the answer.
Did your transaction take place in Iowa or the UK? Is Spamhaus in Iowa? Is Spamhaus licensed/registered to do business in Iowa? Does Spamhaus collect Iowa sales tax? On the other hand, Spamhaus is registered to do business in the UK, and collects UK sales tax. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the transaction took place in the UK, and the goods were exported from the UK to Iowa.
Further, if you read the fine print on your agreement, Data Feed is a service supplied and maintained by an independent contractor licensed by The Spamhaus Project to sell and provide access by subscription to Spamhaus DNSBL data, so that further suggests that Spamhaus does not do business in Iowa. Even if the transaction did occur in Iowa, it would be the independent contractor who does business there.
As irritated as they may well be, in the context of the IT industry its not their trademark and _never_ has been. Their trademark on "SPAM" only applies to food.
Hormel Foods arent entitled to defraud or threaten anyone via invalid or false trademark claims. Please dont encourage them to do so, and please dont propagate the lie that their trademark applies to all industry segments.
My users put that authority in my hands, they dont want to deal with it and they dont have the time.
I use the blacklists because it makes them happy, and they dont care if that single email is blocked, because only an idiot would rely 100% on email for something major.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis