Slashdot Mirror
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...
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
...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.
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.
Oh please, for the love of God, I plead with you not to abuse the internet resources of e360insight. These good people are concerned about YOUR personal freedom, which you'd know if you went to their webpage to read their material. Please don't flood their contact page with insults and don't post random email addresses. I don't want people to put a huge loan on their web server -- I simply want each and every person at Slashdot to make up their own mind, based on their own exploration the information on their website
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:
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.
Just a quick note ... their contact form script requires a valid email address. Why not use nospam@360insight.com ... or admin@360insight.com, etc.
Please, oh please! In the memory of my dear departed Aunt Myrtle please don't abuse their contact page! If you want to provide them with insightful (heh, I said insightful again) commentary, it is only reasonable to provide them with a real email address so they can reply! Using a random fake email address when you contact them would just be wrong. These freedom loving people are fighting for your rights!
I recently started bouncing all the spam my filters can detect to a GMail account. After 1 week of operation, here's what GMail is reporting:
"You are currently using 839 MB (30%) of your 2776 MB."
"isn't there be an easier way to get rid of the pest at the source itself?"
Yes: a good rifle.
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.
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.
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?
And please, people, take care not to use their https server instead as that would not only use up extra CPU on their server but would also reveal that they're running RHEL and that some chopper has left the port open.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
I was going to ask them if they were interested in C|@l!s tabs. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity, so maybe I should write a script to tell them a few thousand times?
bang goes my karma... again...
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.
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/
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".