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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.'"
That's a relief, I really don't think I was ready to handle all that spam.
Philosophy.
Way to go down kicking and screaming inanities...
Please, for the sake of fairness, please go to the e360insight website Read for yourself what they have to say. Consider it carefully, go back later to gain additional insights. (Heh, I said insights.)
It's true! Our constitutional right to not be able to get a dns lookup on spamhus.org has been torn away from us. Why oh why does Judge Kocoras hate us so much?
Oh well, it is nice to see that over rules and regulations sometimes common sense and the people behind it does not get punished.
All i have to say about it after seeing 568 messages today in my mailbox. Yes, 2 is a valid mail, the rest is buy viagra and get a college degree scam.
cheers
I'd rather not have the other 97% filled with spam.
Good call
...making law from the bench! This one ruling for some fooreen company over a good-old, red, white and blue U.S. homegrown! How dare he! Probably a Democrat and communist, too.
What?
Spam? Yeah, it is good with a little cheese and...
Oh, THAT stuff!? Those guys need to be publically whipped and castrated! There ought to be a law that protects decent citizens from all that perverted material arriving in your mailbox without asking. I mean, one visit to whitehouse.com, fill in one little form and give 'em one little credit card and all of a sudden I get this crap in my mailbox! What if my kid opens my email?
Won't somebody please think of the children?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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 make one thing clear, the original judgment is of no value.
Lindtard, e360 insight lawyer, actually LIED to the court by stating that Spamhaus did business in Illinois. This is patently false.
Spamhaus has stated such to the judge, but the judge chose to ignore that advice and press forward with the case.
Upon seeing that it would not be able to get heard by the court, Spamhaus wisely decided to withdraw completely. Being based in Britain, Spamhaus would not be bound by any judgment that would arise, and since the court chose to be bamboozled by the chickenboning spammers, the judgment rendered would be of no value anyways.
The judge ruled in favour of the plaintiff by default, but such a judgment is ineffective as US judgments do not apply to the UK.
The case redux came about when chickenboning Lindtard drew an amazingly broad order that the judge refused to enterinate, as being "far too broad in regard to the violation effected".
However, given the potential disruption if Spamhaus.org would be suspended, a prominent Chicago law firm has offered it's services pro-bono.
So we can expect the chickenboning Lindtard's gang of e360 insight to have their gonads flattenned pretty quick by the court pretty soon (if not by Angel's Anvil Delivery Service)...
Let this be a warning to spammers: YOU CHICKENBONERS CANNOT EXPECT TO WIN, AND AS PEOPLE ARE GETTING MORE AND MORE TIRED OF YOUR SHENANIGANS, YOU CAN BE EXPECTED TO BE HUNTED AND SEE YOUR SPAMMING OPERATIONS KILLED PRETTY MUCH EFFECTIVELY.
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.
http://www.e360insight.com/index.html
You will notice that, at the bottom of the page, there is a contact us type button.
I think we've all learned something important here today.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The judge denied e360insight's motion to suspend the Spamhaus domain, but that doesn't mean the original ruling against Spamhaus was vacated. As far as I can tell, that still stands.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Marginally irrelevant, but good news on spam: Update on Jeanson James Ancheta, botnet spammer. The short version: he's now Federal inmate number 32392-112 at the California City Correctional Institution.
I'd been hoping something this stupid wouldn't be allowed to stand long...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Wasn't so long ago that another org was fighting this battle vigorously. It wasn't the courts that put them down though. It was the blasted Spammers!
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...
I seem to recall a CAN-SPAM law passing some time back, requiring some firm restrictions on the type of mail sent. This led to the rash of fake names, some of which are hysterical, like "Amelia H. Beehives".
Has anyone "gathered data" by requesting say 10 gigs worth of the email that e360 sends, parsed it to probable 98% which violates CAN-SPAM as being unsolicited, then slam the daylights out of e360?
I know a tiny bit about the technology of bulk emailing. Exactly what would be stopping me from sending 10 million emails to that contact address? It's EVEN SOLICITED!!
One of you SlashDot Lawyers, help me out here. Did someone miss a glorious chance at Eye for Eye justice?
"I hereby sentence you to receiving the opinion of every adult american, by email, all 110 million of them"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
go ahead, ./ers, spam the spamers: their contact.php script is a sad effort. There's no check whether fields are valid.
http://www.e360insight.com/contact.php
E360: I'm the head of network abuse for Arizona's oldest ISP and your IP addresses have been in our filters here LONG before the Spamhaus complaints against you.
There is a very hot spot for you in hell someday.
This decision has nothing to do with Freedom of Speech, it's about scum spammers taking advantage of the legal system.
Spammers: Die In A Fire.
Spamhaus: Keep doing a good job.
For those that think I'm trolling, look at my slashdot ID number, I've been around a long time.
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.
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.
Are you kidding? It is a freedom for all the mail users of the world *not* to have to wade through the tons of garbage that money corrupted companies like yours spew out to the world without a bit of consideration of the wishes of people who spend time and money to access their email. You may enjoy everyday getting ads featuring male member enlargers, Viagra cures, chinese plastic molds, instant insurance, etc, but most of the users don't. But I'm sure you don't care about users. In the freedom you feature all natural reserves, air space, sound space, nature scenary, will be filled with plastic ads. It's the "freedom" to pump to people what they don't want to see wherever they are, whenever you receive money.
If you are a reporter working on a deadline, you can call our media relations department at (772) 971-4816. Select the option to have us paged if you need to reach us immediately.
Anyone hooked on meth tonight and feel like making a few phone calls?
There was no jurisdiction on the court over ICANN. A court can't issue a an order
against a non-party to a case.
In California, that is why there is a joinder in divorce cases, to get the pension plans and such to be subject to the orders of the court.
Fight Spammers!
Instead of sending a stupid note to the spammer, why not send his cellmate some penis enlargment pills and instant cialis tabs? Of course if his cellmate has an erection that last for more than 4 hours they both should get medical attention.
Fight Spammers!
OMG the law works
*hugging judge*
there is no issue with my network
do you suppose those fuckers have a spam filter on their mail server???
and if so is it using spamhaus's list???????
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Let me explain this first. Spamgourmet is an organistion that allows you to give out limited-use email aliases of the form anyname.n.yourname@spamgourmet.com.
-Anyname can be any alphanumerical string (i don't know how long, but be sensible).
-n stands for the number of emails that will be relayed to your own email account (called the "protected account").
-yourname is the alias you gave Spamgourmet to link to your real, protected, email address.
Spamgourmet keeps a counter for each email address. After the counter has hit "n", any further emails are redirected to dev/null. So in the above address to e360Insight I will receive at most 3 emails, after which everything is consigned to the bit-bucket. Neat eh?
Open letter to E360Insight
Dear Sirs,
It may have escaped your notice that your reasoning that somehow US courts would have jurisdiction over the _compilation_ of spammer-block-lists is at fault, as Spamhaus is a UK based organisation and as such immune from US laws (except for such acts as it commits in venues under US jurisdiction). For that reason the proper venue for binging lawsuits agains Spamhaus for _compilation_ of their spam-block-list is the UK.
I would further like to call your attention to the fact that Spamhaus as such does not, in any way or description, block or censor emails. This is an inaccuracy on your part. Spamhaus merely holds available, and distributes on demand, lists of domains and IP addresses that, on the balance of probability, belong to, are under the control of, or fail to take reasonable precautions against, senders of unsollicited bulk email. Spammers in short. It is then up to the system administrators of organisations and/or ISP's to actually block or flag such email. Therefore the proper defendants who are subject to US laws in your case would be the system administrators of individual ISP's or organisations who block your emails or even individual Internet users who _authorise_ their ISP to apply email blocking technology.
I view the phenomenon of unsollicted commercial email (spam) in itself a form of theft since it uses a disproportionate amount of bandwidth and infrastructure (that I pay for through connection fees to my ISP) without proper compensation, and effectively renders unprotected individual email accounts unusable by deluging them with spam. I hope you agree.
Given the awful volume of spam clogging the Internet I consider it unreasonable for organisations that collate spam blocklists, system administrators who use such blocklists, or users who authorise their ISP to use automatic spam filtering technology, to give any possible spammer the benefit of the doubt. Given the known fact that all spammers attempt to disguise their activities, assume a patina of legitimacy, use unprotected email relays, or otherwise attempt to bypass blocking measures, servers and IP addresses must simply be blocked upon a "balance of probability" or "reasonable suspicion". If not this creates an opportunity for abuse that spammers can drive a truck through (or, as is more likely, a load of spam). Unfortunately it would seem that in your case the "balance of probability" does not come down in your favour.
In addition it is my considered opinion that this purely pragmatic consideration trumps all and any "freedom of speech" arguments that one hears against proper filtering. Concerning your freedom of speech argument, I as an Internet user, am perfectly happy not to receive any commercial emails (bona-fide or otherwise), I have absolutely no difficulties with bona-fide commercial emails being inadvertantly blocked, and I am happy to authorise my ISP to block or flag any email that even remotely resembles spam (even if there should be false positives). If I miss an important email (unlikely) I will take steps with my ISP. If I want informat
People keep pointing to the issue that Spamhaus does not "do business" in Illinois as a reason that this lawsuit is bogus. 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? With that said, I've been watching this story with intense interest as my job becomes much harder if something were to happen to Spamhaus suddenly.
www.bleepyou.com
Minor point, "SPAM" is a trademark of Hormel Foods. You mean "spam". They get quite irritated about this.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
[sarcasm]Plese stop those liberal judges. They just did "a devastating loss of personal freedom for all U.S. citizens'[/sarcasm]
I find it even worse when they burninate.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I call bullshit.
Spamhaus doesn't charge (or require "donations") to be delisted.
Provide some proof for your absurd assertions, or STFU.
e360Insight's web site urges us to contact our Senators and Representatives, which is just what I did:
Dear Senator|Representative <XYZ>:
e360Insight, an American company, has recently sued Spamhaus, a British company, claiming that Spamhous's service, which lists the e-mail addresses and domain names of known spammers, has violated e360Insight's rights.
Spamhaus provides an invaluable service. Those of us responsible for administering e-mail services know and love the company. Though most users aren't aware of it, almost anyone who uses e-mail receives less unwanted e-mail because of Spamhaus.
e360Insight, as best I can tell from their website, is a major SENDER of unsolicited and/or unwanted SPAM messages. Their argument is incorrect because only individual e-mail administrators have the ability to block e-mail. Spamhaus has no such ability. We CHOOSE to use or ignore Spamhaus recommendations. If such recommendations compromised the e-mail service we provided, we would quickly stop using them due to user complaints.
A federal court has already ordered Spamhaus to pay $11.7 million (an unenforceable measure, since Spamhaus isn't in the US). e360Insight has also asked that Spamhaus's domain be shut down (which was was rejected by U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras). Please encourage Judget Kocoras and any other federal judges involved to dismiss e360Insight's frivolously lawsuit and protect the rights of American's to use Spamhaus, a valuable service that makes e-mail a usable form of communication.
http://www.house.gov/
http://www.senate.gov/
You can reach David Linhardt at dave@e360insight.com
You can send your personal message of moral support to e360insight here: http://e360insight.com/contact.php I sure did. If enough of the ./ crowd join in, we can make them feel the same way all of us feel every day when we get their spam.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
He's defending your Rights to receive His spam, because you know you want his spam!
e360 Slashdotted!! (eom)
-- QED
It's spelled "N00B13".
;-)
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
The judge didn't rule in favor of Spamhaus but instead, denied e360's proposed order which was an attempt to enforce the court's original judgment. That original judgment still stands against Spamhaus. Although there are obvious issues of enforcement, this may certainly be an impediment against Spamhaus in the future (that is, if they ever expand operations into the U.S. or some other scenario). There is an appeal pending in which the original judgment could be overruled but a brief has yet to be filed.
I am being naive here. I can understand why it may be a bit difficult Joe Spammer who operates from basement and hides hides his identity. But a company like e360 should be easy to target. Right? Should not all we do be
1.) file a class action lawsuit
2.) ask them to show their full "client" email list to a judiciary (under NDA maybe)
3.) check with recipients of randomly selected emails - if they really did ask to be sent all these "advertisements".
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.
Dear Fuckers,
I won't bore you with a legal analysis, nor will I attempt to use such things as "logic" and "reason" to express my views. That shit has long since circled the drain and fallen down the stack. No, if you truly must "understand" what this ruling means to most people, imagine a Jabberwocky. Got that image? Okay, now picture a vorpal blade... now the blade goes snicka-snack.
You see, I hate advertising. In all forms.
Why, you may ask?
Well, that's easy. All advertising is predicated on the idea that you need to be informed of a company's wares because you either a) don't know the company exists, b) don't know the products exist, or c) don't know how much you really, really need those products to be a well-adjusted, happy human being.
And this is really bunk. Most people who actually DO need something either already know where to get it, or are certainly capable of finding out. Your industry predicates its entire existence on convincing people to buy things they don't need, and as such, serves no purpose that we could not easily do without.
And you know what, if people stopped for a minute and thought about it, they'd probably reach the same conclusion.
Your industry pollutes the collective consciousness with meaningless phrases like "Zero Money Down" and "Easy Terms" and "No interest until 2007". Billboards and signs and junk mail and commercials and banner ads blight our landscapes and consign beauty and utility to the gloppy murk of both material and virtual ignominy.
So you will, of course, pardon my lack of sympathy for the "free speech" rights of some company which does its damnedest to make sure that unintelligible crap mail clogs my account. To me spammers are like telemarketers you can't fuck with, and as such the vilest form of creatures. At least a telemarketer has to stand there and go through his spiel while you are alternately telling him or her that your head is made of stinky cheese and that you've filled your pants with a happy poo that smells like teen spirit.
I'm sure that you have no dignity left to protect, but if there is one last little spark of soul left within your shriveled, barren minds, do yourselves and everyone else a favor, and find something constructive to do with your time, and urge all of the protoplasmic waste you call competitors to adopt a similar attitude.
I can only imagine that when all of you are old and gray, and being overcome by some terminal illness brought about by karmic justice, that you don't want to be on your deathbed thinking on your lives and having your one contribution to our sick, sad world to be known as the McDonalds of penis enlargement emails, billions served. Stop... stop now, there is still time to become a productive member of society, to heal your tattered soul, and to once again ascend from the realm of advertising troglodytes to be human.
Sincerely,
Elbo Ruum
360's first mistake was spamming, if they have indeed done that. Their second mistake was trying to sue someone that provides a list of spammers. Spamhaus doesn't block spammers, ISPs block spammers. They should have tried to clean up their act with Spamhaus or went after the ISPs that are the ones that are really blocking them. I don't know about you, but if Spamhaus had gone away I would have put a lot of effort into trying to create a peer to peer type of blocklist. As it is now I am starting to change email addresses on 50+ sites because I am so damn sick of deleting this crap and reporting it to ISPs or SPAMCOP.net. I'm not wasting any more time on it now, I'm just going to work to get as free from it as I can by using email forwards that I can change when I need to and posting current email addresses on my sites that need it for business use.
NielsenTech.com Consultant-Directory.com
http://www.e360insight.com/contact.php
Get nasty!