Some DNS Requests Ruled Illegal in North Dakota

jgreco writes "A judge in North Dakota has just ruled that requesting a zone transfer from a public DNS server is criminal activity within the meaning of the North Dakota Computer Crimes Law. A zone transfer is a simple request that a DNS server hand over information in bulk, and a DNS server may be configured to allow or deny such requests. That the owner of a DNS server would configure the server to allow such requests, and then claim such requests were unauthorized, is simply stunning."

Comments

DNS illegal now? Read again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Might want to read the actual court ruling instead of the populistic and alarmist comments surrounding it. As I read it, the defendant already had been told by the court to stop bothering the plaintiff, and he then proceeded to ignore that. In and of itself the ruling doesn't outlaw dns requests, altough the judge's grasp of the technology clearly could stand improvement.

Re:DNS illegal now? Read again.

[autocracy]

TFA really sucks. The linked judgment is much more useful to read. I'm kind of saddened by the judges focus on "zone transfers," but it's clear that the issue is not about zone transfers. The issue is a pattern of malicious activity that the defendant had an injunction placed on him for. He violated that injunction. It was corporate cyber-stalking harassment, really. I'd say that the zone transfer was illegal in context, especially with an outstanding injunction to stay off the company's servers.

Re:consequence of bad computer crime laws

[jvkjvk]

No, it's not completely ridiculous. We can talk about generalities as long as we want but they are nothing but straw men. This is a specific case, and it appears to be a special case, where the defendant had an injunction against him to prevent him from harassing the company in question.

Essentially, the judge ruled that the injunction did indeed include the DNS servers the company had. Imagine that, he got that one right!

IOW, even if the company was running a web server on port 80 and require no authentication, it can easily be assumed that --- the defendant would still be barred from making requests to that page. No, not people in general one specific individual who was barred from interacting with the company.

To rule otherwise is nothing but pure stupidity.

Re:Unbelievable

[orclevegam]

There's actually a good deal of information in there if you read between the lines a little. What I gathered from it and one of the sites linked by it, is that this guy is well known in the anti-spammer circles as a spam investigator that can compile loads of detailed info on spammers. Apparently Sierra (the plaintiff) is notorious for spam and also for suing anti-spam activists. During the course of compiling evidence against Sierra, this guy performed a DNS Zone transfer (most likely to prove that the source of some spam was actually a server hosted by Sierra). Sierra then sued him claiming the zone transfer wasn't authorized by them, and therefore it was illegal (not going to argue if that's logical or not, just summarizing here). Up to this point any technically minded person would probably think the plaintiff was on pretty shaky ground. However, the defendant screwed himself over it seems by annoying the judge various ways. According to the findings, the defendant gave false testimony on several occasions. It may or may not have been false testimony, it's sometimes hard to say when lawyers get involved, but the judge perceived it as such and that's what counts. Much worse it seems, is that the judge ordered the defendant not to perform certain scans of Sierras network, but he then proceeded to ignore those orders. This action seems to be the one that really blew the case for him, as it's apparent the judge was really not happy with him for that one.