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NSI to be RBL'ed?
From: Paul A Vixie
Subject: possible RBL event coming up involving NSI
------- Blind-Carbon-Copy
To: interest@mail-abuse.org
cc: rbl@mail-abuse.org
Subject: possible RBL event coming up involving NSI
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 16:02:14 -0700
From: Paul A Vixie
You are receiving this because you are either an interested outsider, or a staff member or volunteer, or a customer of M.A.P.S., LLC. Note our new domain name, mail-abuse.org. (The old maps.vix.com domain name gave some the false impression that MAPS was not a separate company.)
Today we received the letter below from NSI in response to our repeated attempts to get them to stop sending unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail to all domain holders. In this letter, NSI implies that they will sue us for damages and incite entities like Amazon.com to do likewise if we decide to blackhole them, and then go on to say that they have no intention of stopping the current business practice of these which caused our complaints.
They are pretty much daring us to blackhole them. The board of MAPS, LLC will make its final determination in the next few days, and if we do decide to blackhole NSI it's going to get ugly. As an interested party, we want you all to know what's happening.
=================================
July 30, 1999
VIA FIRST CLASS AND
ELECTRONIC MAIL
Nick Nicholas, Executive Director
Mail Abuse Prevention System, LLC
950 Charter Street
Redwood City, CA 94063
Re: Nomination of NSI for Black List
Dear Mr. Nicholas:
Thank you for the opportunity to respond to your email to me dated July 16, 1999, regarding the Realtime Blackhole List ("Black List") managed by the Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC.
Enclosed is a copy of a letter I sent today to Mr. James Wagner, President of Hypertouch, Inc., the complainant who apparently prompted your July 16 email to me. Network Solutions has removed Mr. Wagner's name from its mailing list. As noted in the letter, Mr. Wagner could have avoided receiving the subject email in the first place had he simply followed the mailing list removal procedure specified in an email transmitted to him on March 30, 1999.
There can be no doubt that Network Solutions has an existing business relationship with the administrative, technical and billing contacts for a given domain name registered with Network Solutions. These people are the principal points of contact through which Network Solutions transacts business with its customers. They have been so designated by our customers in their domain name registration agreements with Network Solutions.
These are precisely the types of relationships that the California legislature wanted to shield from the restrictions contained in its unsolicited email statutes. Indeed, the statute's protection of communications between persons involved in existing business relationships reflects the state's determination that such communications are not "spam," but rather vital catalysts to free and open commerce. We are aware of no law that prohibits companies from communicating with their own customers.
We respectfully suggest that MAPS and any other person involved in the compilation and dissemination of the Black List adopt a definition of spam that is consistent with the principles recognized by California. Any more expansive definition is overly broad and may unreasonably restrain trade. Indeed, it is apparent that Mr. Wagner's principal concern about Network Solutions' emails is the competitive threat they represent to his company's ISP business. Those emails reference Internet companies that are competitors of Mr. Wagner's company, Hypertouch, Inc. It appears Hypertouch, Inc. hopes to shelter itself from such competition by combining with those who control the Black List and its technology to restrain such competition.
If inclusion on the Black List will effectively block Network Solutions from contacting 40% of the Internet, as you claimed in your email of July 29, 1999, MAPS's actions would have severe and irreparable consequences on the company's relationship with its customers. Network Solutions has over 5,000,000 customers. Consequently, if you place Network Solutions on the Black List, 2,000,000 (40%) of its own customers presumably would be unable to receive important information from Network Solutions, including invoices and deactivation notices, possibly leading to the revocation of their domain name registrations. You should be prepared to accept the consequences of your actions should a company such as Amazon.com lose its domain name, and thus its e-commerce business, as a result of having its notices and invoices intercepted and destroyed. It is difficult to believe that MAPS would be willing to take such drastic actions based on the self-serving complaint of Mr. Wagner.
Indeed, MAPS's overly expansive definition of spam exposes MAPS and those who own or control the Black List to, inter alia, civil claims of: (1) illegal combination in restraint of trade violating Section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. ? 1; (2) unfair competition; and (3) intentional interference with contractual relationships.
Network Solutions will not hesitate to take all actions necessary to protect its rights and ensure that its channels of communications to its own customers remain open. I hope that such measures will be unnecessary and that you will opt not to include the company on the Black List. p
Please advise me of your decision and do not hesitate to contact me if you wish to discuss this matter further.
Very truly yours,
Jonathan W. Emery
==============
These situations are not equivalent. Recipients of NSI's spam are never given the option to say "no" before they get it. Using the censorware analogy: it's the difference between surfing for porn and constantly getting unwanted porn emailed to you. Well, it's my bandwidth, thank you, and I don't want to waste it on NSI's self-promotion.
--
I have run two ISPs actually. The first one had many issues with spammers coming in. In FACT, in on case we cantact NSI because ALL of their contact information(minus snail mail) was bogus. NSI said that the information supplied didn't matter so long as the mailing address worked and they got paid. So here we are now, and this 'information' which didn't 'count' before now does? I'd have to say they have already set a precedent that they don't care about it. Besides, all participants in RBL are voluntary and are taking 'reasonable' steps to protect themselves from spam. More importantly, they put their trust in RBL so I'd have to say, bring on the court battle. Hell, I'll donate money to the effort if need be. NSI is an arrogant company which needs to be shut down.
Minor detail for clarification:
Sites that use the RBL have chosen to deny their customers access to email. If those customers can't receive email from you, it is because their ISP has chosen not to allow them to.
Guess who pays the bills? (clue- not the SysAdmin) Take another guess who makes more money by limiting traffic to flat-fee paying customers.
Here's a better refinement of the "fake e-mail address" idea I mentioned earlier.
Instead of filling the spam lists with random "chaff" addresses, use this method to put "canary" e-mail addresses on to the spam lists instead. "Canary" e-mail addresses are designed to catch spams, and serve only to receive spam. Automated software attached to the "canary" can then filter spam based on what the "canary" receives. The canary idea is not new, of course.
A more evil idea would be to attach to the address of the "canary" some software (similar to that found on the web site spamcop.net) that traces the e-mail back to the spammer by examining the "Received:" headers. If done in real-time, one could potentially alert an ISP to a spammer's activity in time for them to disconnect a spammer while they were still sending spam.
The best part is that we use the spammers' own resources (collections of e-mail addresses) to fight spam.
---
The only SPAM I like: www.spam.com (The home page of the canned meat)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Right.. like everybody stopped connecting
to rust.net when became known that sanford wallace got his access there?
"And how can this be? For he is the
You knocked that one down real good. Shall I set up another? Would you like it filled with polyfoam, old rags, or the traditional straw?
Of course, the argument for banning spam is not that it is in some vague sense "bad for me". The argument for banning spam is that it constitutes theft of the recipients' bandwidth.
If you want to control spam, find a way of passing the cost on to the originator.
Additional requirements: 1) No added burden on legitimate users of e-mail, 2) The spammer shells out the cash to his victims, not to some cookie jar accessible to politicians and other lower life forms. Extending the junk fax laws to cover e-mail would work, provided that the definition of the prohibited activity is properly crafter.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
That's no answer. By the time spam hits your filter, the bandwidth costs have already been incurred (and, thus, your ISP rates are already forced 20% or so higher than they would be if the parasites were purged).
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Too true. I've had a couple of mailboxes suffer this. They start getting so much spam that they're not worth using. That's what I like about hotmail.
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
NSI had a time-limited monopoly, much like you get with a patent, which the government granted more-or-less by accident. They campaigned like crazy to keep it, but understandably it got taken away.
*blinks*
I have yet to ever sign up to an email service, nor do I know anyone who ever has, who WANTS to receive advertisements.
Usually, the longer people have been on the net,the LESS email they want to receive, especvially since many of them are actively part of various email lists which fill their boxes fast enough as it is.
If I want advertisements, then I'll either hit a search engine looking for company sites on a topic, or watch TV, or, *gasp*, hit the yellow pages. It's worth the effort, not to be bothered by constant spam.
Once again, some part of my brain is making the mistake of thinking that this should be, in fact, patently obvious...that our societal and utter hatred of junk mail should in some way clue people in that nobody in their right mind (ie, the common consumer) wants and enjoys spam...especially the newbies, who have a low comprehension rate about how they can stop it. This isn't a service. And at least you can, to some degree, cut down on the junk mail by making requests to the post office or the sender. No such service often exists on the net except for buggy filters, which often must be added to each and every day as the spam sender finds yet another email service to sign up with...
Customers pay for service. Spam does not serve, it extorts. Thus true service protects from spam.
Todd Erickson
Listen to me Peter, I want this bench. You go sit on that bench over there, and if you're good I'll tell you the rest of
You *answer* your phone? :-)
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
The ironic thing is that your message signature (eating an elephant one bite at a time) answers your question about why it's too much of a hassle to simply delete these mails. Spam isn't going away overnight and will probably never go completely away. But every incremental move to oppose major violators eventually will lead close to the seemingly unattainable goal...
So? It's not my job to clean their marketing
mailing list.
I sent my "remove" request to the MAPS RBL
team, and I hope NSI is RBL'd.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I have gotten plenty of spam from these guys...
IMHO I think they deserve to be blacklisted.
They'll back down and stop sending out bulk
email as soon as their listed.. Either that or
they drag it out in court forever and that hurts
even more.
Nobody can force any system administrator to receive traffic they don't wish to receive -- the essence of the net is that network administrators have agreed to forward packets from certain places to certain other places, and they are under no obligation to carry traffic if they don't want to.
Here's a clue for you: A system administrator is not a god. You're not obligated in any way to serve your customers. But you are obligated to disclose that you're blocking your customer's access to certain materials. To do otherwise and advertise that your service provides 'full access to the Internet' is an act of fraud.
Of course, you may find customers who approve of you doing their spambusting for you. But your 'rights' do not extend to making decisions for other people without their consent.
Justin has set himself up for legal trouble grande by replicating a message sent in private regarding a pending legal action.
Fine, if you don't like the people you paid to provide you full access to the Internet preventing other people from sending you email, sue them. If they didn't let you know ahead of time that they were blocking your ability to receive mail, have them charged with fraud.
Geeks suck. haha.
It's not your bandwidth if you're making the decision for paying customers. It's your bandwidth if you're running your own little mail server just for yourself.
At work I use RBL via BGP. When someone is RBLed, I have *NO* ip connectivity to them..
Lots of big ISPs do this too..
I consider my self a party to the action because a) I'm an internet user, and b) I use RBL.
If he's taken to court I might be too.
... Every single technical, admin, or zone contact
in the world sent a single polite solicitation to
Mr. Emery? After all, he claims to have a
relationship with us such that this is not abuse.
It is a transformational experience to realize
that one-to-many is just as abusive as many-to-one.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
You mean "will be taken away Real Soon Now, supposedly." Oddly enough, there have been serious technical problems involving making competition possible. I suppose it's not entirely implausible, but one has to wonder....
Networks Solutions? I've dealt with them in a technical support capacity: About the most clueless lusers and badly trained monkeys I've seen in quite some time. I could go into detail but that might make me traceable. Let me just say it helps if the monkey you're dealing with knows which OS he's running.
Don't want to deal with them again.
Senders pay for junk mail, so it's inherently limited to practical levels (I've never received so much it displaces legitimate mail) and they're happy to act on remove requests. Carrier route junk mail is more of a problem (the post office delivers one to every mailbox in their area for a fixed fee, and you have to get on their list of exceptions and hope they pay attention to it this time), and try to imagine what every business in your country would do if spamming were legitimized, and how much "just hit delete" that would require.
I love lawyers. All they seem to know how to do is threaten and bully, regardless of how empty their threats are.
As I understand it, RBL is a subscription service. That is, the sites that use the RBL have chosen to participate, and are voluntarily not receiving email from anyone on the list. So, if you can't send mail to me, it's because I've chosen not to listen to you. All the ISP's that I've seen that use the RBL announce this fact, so businesses that use them should be aware of this.
Secondly, email is not a legally binding (or allowable) method of conducting business. You can't send invoices only by email, and then claim in court that you gave proper notice (at least in the US). Email has no guaranty of delievery, and the courts have not reconized it as a reliable method for transmitting legal/business documents. So NSI's invoice threat is moot. If they aren't sending invoices to Amazon via methods other than email, then terminate Amazon.com for some reason that was indicated in the email, well, guess who's liable for interference of interstate commerce? NSI!
Dolts.
I don't like the RBL. I think it's a poor (both technical and political) method of attempting to control SPAM. However, I dislike NSI even more. And if the Commerce Department is now stating that the whois database is it's property (which it is), then I can't wait for them to stick it to NSI for illegal use of government property for private commercial gain.
NSI sucks hard. They just need to die. Or at least fire all their top management.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Opt-out can't scale, since there are way too many future potential senders for me to opt out of all of them. Therefore it's always wrong, and the sleazeballs at NSI hardly deserve to be a special case. Be opt-in or be LARTed.
After all, it's basically Beezelbub versus Lucifer (NSI is Lucifer). They're both equally evil, but one is a lot more powerful. If Lucifer kills Beezelbub, you cheer, even though Lucifer wins a battle, because one demon is eliminated.
Same here. NSI is rich, powerful, and going to give MAPS a good solid humbugging. Does anyone remember their history? Stealing the "A" server from Postel, actually standing up to ICANN, smiting anyone that crosses them? Do you think they're going to let a bunch of moralistic hackers get in their way?
In fact, I could imagine a world where the first domain that gets pulled is mail-abuse.org. And that would be good.
Didn't Churchill say something like "if Hitler invaded Hell, I'd invite the devil to tea?"
XOXO -Les ailes de l'amitié
Am I missing something important here? I'm not an RBL user (yet), but I've considered installing something like it. As I understand, people use RBL voluntarily and knowing that it is indeed used to block some hosts off their mail service. If I restrict connections from NSI to my sendmail or the company sendmail, am I doing something illegal or worth civil claims? If I asked a company sysadmin [ were I not the one :) ] to add NSI to restricted hosts, would one of us be doing something illegal?
Now if I have chosen to use RBL and they add NSI on it, how is it any different? I could have done the same thing locally, but instead I have trusted RBL admins.
I think they should concentrate more on keeping the domain system running and less time writing bs. Still waiting for that domain server info to be updated..
What right to they have to decide that AGIS should get blocked, just because they choose to provide services which someone else misuses. This would be the rough equivalent to ordering all Ford drivers off the roads because a couple of people did hit-and-runs with them. The difference is, IRL, nobody has the POWER to exclude Ford cars. MAPS does. Overkill by an organization that has this much power needs to be stopped by a "600 pound gorillia." Good job NSI.
XOXO -Les ailes de l'amitié
MAPS sucks. I dun like MAPS. Spam sucks, but MAPS sucks even more.
mail-abuse.org is simply a collection of poorly (crappily even) written documents (sounds more like propaganda to me actually) randomly linked in an unorganized manner. It took me forever (so I am a bit dumber than the elite hackers that run mail-abuse.org) to figure out what the RBL was about, and I find that somewhat scary considering the great impact the RBL could possibly have on me.
Imagine the confusion a poor random user goes through upon realizing his email, for some unknown reason, cannot reach the intended destination and is referred to mail-abuse.org/rbl/. He goes there, and what help does he find?
"We have not singled you out", you are only 'collateral damage' in the war against spam. Oh well, too bad. If you want to get your email through, go talk to your system administrator.
I find that very irresponsible. We all know the frustration of calling some big company and having your call juggled between two departments. This is exactly what is happening here. MAPS is simply pushing the responsibility for blacklisting an IP and taking a passive role in solving the problem.
"If we made a mistake, oh well. We'll just wait until someone notices that they've been fucked and contacts us, then we'll try and push the responsiblity on their system administrators, and wait a bit more. And since we usually fix things up within minutes, the system administrators are the ones responsible for the users wasted time".
RBL is overkill. It keeps unsolicted email away from those who haven't solicited it, but it also keeps everything else away too.
Here's an interesting situation:
What if I love recieving spam? What if I WANT to recieve 'spam'? What if what you consider unsolicted email is actually what I like to read? Are you now able to decide what emails I can recieve, and what emails I cannot?
Just my two cents, but the solution to spam is not to censor everything.
Anyway...that was a fragmented rambling and messy opinion piece. If you understand it and realize that MAPS sucks, great. If not, well..I was never a good writer anyway.
unsolicited flames sent to lgrimani@hotmail.com will get reported to MAPS!
"You cant stop us because we're already too big." ..What horseshit. The MAPS board should treat NSI the same way as any other. If you abuse, you pay. I'd bet you five bucks to a donut that NSI would shut the hell up in a *hurry* if MAPS' board came back with an order to RBL them.
I'm all for it. NSI doesnt own the net. They just want you to believe they do.
Bowie
Bowie J. Poag
As an ISP that hosts a couple of hundred domains, if we didn't get the mail from Internic, it would be very difficult to explain to customers. We are a user of RBL and if they do eventually put Internic on RBL we would have no choice but to turn RBL off. Especially since they re-established the email invoices. It's not that we don't want to but to keep the bills paid we *have* to.
What the hell is this about? Granted I've only had my domain about a week, but I haven't had any spam other than my daily "Get a free college degree - no classes required!" yet. And in my experience with XOOM and GeoCities, the spam starts the first day :) ;)
I think you can figure out how to email me
I think you can figure out how to email me
PGP Key:
That was FUNNY.
;)
:)
I wonder if they really thought anyone would give a flying fsck about some non-existant risk of Amazon suing them. If I was Amazon.com, and my ONLY billing invoice was set to be e-mail, and I lost my domain, there's three things I'd do:
1) Sue Network Solutions for removing my domain because of a lack of a response on a non legally-binding communcation medium.
2) Fire the admin who set up the domain not to have postal billing notification
3) Contact anyone I could to have said admin "disappeared"
Personally, I don't understand why someone would set up e-mail notification in the first place. I mean, come on! Sure, most clients are that stupid, but most ISP's should have the brains to point out to the clients the problems inherant in doing that.
Blacklist them. Serves them right. As has been said many times before, Network Solutions do not own the Internet, they're just unfairly utilizing an inappropriate monopoly situation created by a US Government that repeatly shows itself to be the premier organization of cluelessness and idiocity in the world.
Maybe the Government should be blacklisted to, just on general principle.
Don't be stupid. He obviously meant migrate to a system using 2 letter country codes as the TLD.
That the network 'belongs' to those that administer it (and the people they administer it for) and that any guardianship of domain names is simply that and nothing more.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Actually, if you've got a good MTA-setup you can allow users to opt-in to spam control. Like Yahoo has for their webmail service.
You miss a very distinct difference. "Us geeks" want to receive the information we request (singal). But we also must filter out information that we do not request (noise). Life is too short to live with low signal-to-noise ratio... a musician such as yourself should understand that concept.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Either ya allow the censorware morons out there censor any page with a naughty wordy-word or ya don't censor anyone that spams
Most of the people upset about censorware is that they miss many naughty words, and censor other sites that have none.
Then there's the fact that RBL really is reviewed by human beings, and tries to work with the site that is about to be black holed (censored) to give them a chance to avoid the action.
They are both opt-in agreements. No one has to be apart of that arrangement if they do not wish to be.
RBL is opt in. Most censorware providers are actively involved in efforts to require censorware for schools and libraries. In that case, there is no 'opt' at all. Part of their involvement is to 'assure' legislators that every site is checked and re-checked by human beings (patently false).
That's the difference you're looking for. That and that RBL actually works.
Before accusing others of being too stupid to operate mail filters, you should consider how ridiculous you look as you accuse voluntary RBL participants of being "unsuspecting." Yes, in case you didn't realize it, participation in the RBL requires active effort and is necessarily voluntary.
In short, no one who loves receiving spam will ever have anything blocked by RBL, simply because they would not be subscribed to RBL.
As for mails we send to your personal address, I doubt that such a mail would be a bulk mail. As such, it would not fall under the definition of spam, "Unsolicited Bulk Email."
Censorship, by definition, operates on the content of the message. Spam, on the other hand, is defined by its volume, not by its content. If you send unsolicited bulk email, your email is spam, no matter what its content. Contrariwise, if your email is solicited, or not bulk, then it's not spam, no matter what its content.
The fact that spam is characterised by volume, and not content, is the single most important difference between spam filters and content-based censorship.
the letter says you can ask them to not send their spammy stuff - do they ignore the unsubscribe request?
anyway, just reading NSI say they have 5,000,000 customers pisses me off, since they deserve about 3% of that.
Juln
Clearly this is a no-brainer. This is what MAPS exists for. NSI not only refuses to change their policy on spam, they are threatening MAPS with what will happen if it does its job for its subscribers.
Black hole them, MAPS. I'm sure if you are worried about legal fees, plenty of us will be glad to chip in for your defense. Set up a web page for that now if you haven't already.
.. is that MAPS has gone up against bigger companies and won...
Anyone remember when Microsoft was RBL'ed?
They poised, and they threatened, and then they backed down... MS is bigger than NSI could ever hope to be, and they have WAY more money to throw at lawyers.
AOL, also was blackholed as well; with the same results; denials, threats, submission.
If MS couldn't win, then what makes NSI think they will? This letter just shows exactly how clueless they are. Someone should send them a wake-up call. Paul Vixie doesn't back down.
clifyt wrote: You're absolutely right. There's nothing illegitimate about my using censorware to filter out some piece of the Internet. Though most people I know wouldn't use the stuff, since the particular sort of filtering it does seems unnecessary and amusingly inept. It's different for those people who have not opted in. If I am an ISP user and my ISP is performing some sort of filtering with which I disagree, why, I can change ISP's. If I am a 13-year-old trying to get information at a library and I have no other access to the Internet, I have not opted into whatever inept filtering scheme is used, and yet I am stuck with its effects.
This is more of a problem with censorware, because it often blocks useful information people are actively trying to get, and rarely a problem with spam email, since it is unsolicited.
This is clearly untrue in the cases cited. There's no need to pass laws to prevent either spam or censorship. To prevent spam, clearly the RBL works nicely. One good way to prevent censorship is to keep the government from passing laws requiring it in the first place. Cryptography is another case where there would be no problem if government hadn't gotten involved in the first place.1) NSI's definition of "customer" is bogus. Yes, a company has certain rights to communicate with its customers (see below). But the status of "customer" implies the meeting of a willing buyer and willing seller. Because NSI has had a monopoly these past few years, we can't assume "willing buyer". Who knows how many people would have gone to a different source for TLDs had one been available? I know I would have. Therefore, we as buyers are in an *enforced* customer relationship, and NSI shouldn't assume that the usual privileges apply.
2) Even if we were truly NSI's "customers", opt-out bulk e-mail is still not part of the "usual privileges" package vendors earn from such a relationship. I've seen the e-mail in question -- it's a pure sales pitch, *not* administrative. It's not central (or even related) to the functioning of the relationship, and one has no opportunity to opt-out at the time the relationship is started. In short: appallingly bad marketing. But what moves NSI from the world of Bad Marketing and into the sphere of Theft is the cost-transference nature of e-mail.
--Tom
Tom Geller
>
>
Opens with ad hominem arguments and ends with moot threats. I think I can see why it got flamebaited.
That said, the AC who wrote the article did have some good points, which probably bear repeating:
and consequently,
One problem, though - most of these concerns are valid only for situations in which an ISP is RBLed, and customers of the ISP wonder why their mail is blocked. For a blocking of NSI (or RealNetworks' mail servers), only those machines would be blackholed - and thus, only users on those spamming machines (in this case, presumably just a mailing 'bot) are likely to suffer collateral damage.
An RBL for an ISP is different - it passes the support load from the newbie customers of the ISP on to the support department of the ISP. On the other hand - when all else, including the efforts of the RBL team to resolve the situation peacefully, has failed, maybe that's the only option left. If an ISP chooses to harbor spammers, its customers will suffer, and leave.
Maybe that's fair, maybe it's not (and it's certainly a valid subject for debate), but that's not what we're talking about here.
An RBL for a spam-spewing mail server in a single domain inconveniences only the ability of that server to spew spam. If the server exists solely as a spam hydrant, then the collateral damage is essentially zero.
Finally, in MAPS' defence, it's hard to get a site on the RBL. Writing Nick (Nick Nicholas, former pacbell.net abuse god :) and saying "I mailed abuse@isp.com and they ignored me" isn't enough. A history of abuse must be established and documented, as well as attempts by phone as well as e-mail to resolve the situation. The MAPS team then goes out and attempts to resolve the situation themselves. Their decision to place a site on the RBL isn't an everyday occurrence; it's a last resort reserved for the most brazen of offenders.
Forstering an illegal tax. Censoring the net. Protecting their monopoly. Allowing other companies to steal your name. Now they are the spammers that will make your domin vanish if you don't accept their shit. Lay the slap down on this BE-OTCH! Crack the root servers! Wipe them the fuck out, and then jump in with a collective OPEN solution and take over! Domain holders of the world unite! SIC SEMPER SPAMMER!!!
Bite me. I choose what methods I use to control incoming mail, and MAPS is an important part of that. NOT because it blocks much spam (because it doesn't), but because it's the best stick that exists to deal with companies like NSI who think the rules don't apply to them.
NSI is spamming non-registry info. Specifically, 2 weeks ago they spammed out an ad for discounted Verisign certificates to all tech contacts.
Anyone remember the previous email from Paul Vixie? Had a line something like "this could well be the big lawsuit we've been waiting for".
They want to be sued, preferrably by a large well-known company, so that they can establish a precedent.
> We are a user of RBL and if they do eventually
> put Internic on RBL we would have no choice
> but to turn RBL off.
No, just add them to ACCESSDB (/etc/mail/access)
as OK.
Any time the RBL blocks someone, you get an
easily parsed log message. If you're worried
about losing mail, make RBL return a 45x rather
than 55x; the sender's server will retry.
In a year of using the RBL I don't believe we've
inconvenienced more than a handful of
non-spammers. The only case that comes to mind is
an open relay at UPenn -- 99% of what the RBL
delayed from that relay was spam, but there might
have been some legit users too. And then they
fixed the problem.
MAPS doesn't go off half-cocked like ORBS. They
only add to the list after the site has had ample
opportunity to respond. It's not really
"realtime."
I wouldn't be surprised if NSI themselves subscribe to RBL to prevent being from spammed. You think?
Well.. won't it? NSI will no longer be THE company to do domain registrations. If NSI becomes known as a spammer, no one will use them. They will realize. Even though, hasn't anyone been smart enough to figure out to have to email accounts, one for buisness that you randomly give out and one for real use?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Since it looks like the Inbreds are going to get UCITA passed in some form or fashion, it might be interesting to take a look at this scenario. Would NSI have an arguable case in a court (that place where the moon is made of cheese and pigs fly by fart power) if UCITA is already in effect?
/. story, and it's looks like masturbatory verbage to me, which is probably just where those inbred lawyers want it.)
Does UCITA legitimize spam in general, if a customer "agrees" to it?
NSI would have grounds, under UCITA, to disable a domain if a domain owner signed up with spam-blocker, if it is specified in the service agreement (or equivalent) that the customer must go through NSI to end the spammage. Actually, that's a scary damn thought, because it could apply to any electronic service (incl. telcos).
(I read a draft after the
The problem here is what people can get used to- and the potential of that to cause damage.
Maybe you personally don't object to deleting spam. I, myself, don't especially mind sorting known-good email into special mailboxes and then having the inbox be the spamtrap, sometimes meaning that cmd-A delete is all I need to do. I've discarded good messages because I thought they were spam, a couple times, and it didn't cause me too much trouble, just a bit of ribbing from my boss who'd got his message deleted by mistake.
However, I fully support these draconian measures against spammers, because the problem is the 'I could do that' factor. There are a certain number of new spammers every day, and many of them noisily advocate spamming to others, and some of the spams are themselves for spam tools. It's a recipe for 'meltdown'.
Even a fairly humble linux box can saturate a T1. If any concessions are made to spamming, and it gains any sort of acceptability, it's a 'tragedy of the commons' situation but will happen so fast it'll make your head spin- and suddenly, the networks will be saturated, ISPs and backbones collapsing under the weight of one person in a hundred, or one in ten, deciding that 'it doesn't cost anything' to send their advertising note to, well, heck, how about sending it to everybody? There's this neat program a spam pointed them to, and it can run 24/7...
I get spams authored in Frontpage using some non-English language that might be Japanese or some 2-byte language. I've been getting quite a few of those, more and more. Why be restricted to 'customers' who can read your language? Why not just send email to everybody on the internet and then those who can't understand it should just throw it away- or 'opt out'? Let's _everybody_ do that. Then each of us will only have to throw away 1 email/day from everybody in the world. No, that's silly, call it one in a thousand. So each of us will only have to throw away or opt out of several million spams a day...
Hell with that. RBL 'em. The net is not necessarily a safe place. In particular, spammers don't have rights to network access, and have no reason to expect fairness.
Nobody makes the decision for paying customers but the paying customers. Each ISP has their own suite of blocking tools. Some of these are the null set, some are the RBL, some are custom.
The customers decide what mail they do or don't want blocked via their choice of ISP. It's called the free market. Home Depot doesn't carry Nelson's sprinkler products, so if I want to buy them, I go to a competing chain.
The "Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California"
http://www.isi.edu/us-domain/
-- Darin Dugan dddugan@iastate.edu
Actually, let's just spam NSI back. Send out masses of email to NSI offering yourself as a free target for commercial email from NSI. I'm sure NSI's servers are capable of handling the /. effect in terms of http, but how about blowing out their SMTP servers? :-)
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
NSI is way too arrogant.
People subscribe to the MAPS RBL to help them
identify networks and companies that have
good UCE practices.
If NSI doesn't have good UCE practices, they
should be in the RBL.
With competition, if I find that I can't
do business with NSI because they are in the
RBL (which I subscribe to), I'll find another
registrar that has UCE practices I find
acceptable.
Cheers,
- Jim
I don't know that it would be effective since:
(1) NSI would be in breach of contract (IANAL tho)
(2) There would be huge publicity advertising MAPS
and RBL to all kinds of people that have never
heard of them before
(3) Even if they do delete the vix.com domain, you'll
note that this still wouldn't stop the use of RBL
by any domain which slaves the rbl.maps domain,
since you configure bind with the IP's of the
master's for the zone.
Um, reality check. Let me get this scenario straight:
- Amazon.com joins the realtime black hole list.
- Amazon's technical contact doesn't realize that NSI got put on the RBL (despite the fact that just the news of the possibility is making its way into every technical contact's internet news feed).
- Amazon's domain is suddenly revoked by NSI -OR- Amazon's business, technical, and administrative contacts all forgot about that small part of the contract that says it has to be renewed.
- Amazon loses their domain name and doesn't realize it in time.
- Poor little Amazon and 40% of other e-commerce sites go out of business. (accordingly, NSI loses 40% of its business)
- To recover losses, Amazon and the other 40% of e-commerce sites who go out of business are going to sue the pants off MAPS (not NSI).
Now that would be funny!"...do not hesitate to contact me if you wish to discuss this matter further. "
From what I've heard, Slashdot never hesitates. For those of us that are technical contacts, how can we contact you directly?
Scenario:
- MAPS blackholes NSI
- NSI starts deregistering domains - perhaps starting with MAPS' own.
- Network connectivity starts to go to hell.
- One or more alternate registries set up root servers and publish the old domains' data, along with new registrants. They have essentially all the domains while NSI, having deregistered many, has fewer. (Use of their services, of course, is strictly voluntary.)
- Sysadmins reconfig their named.root to pick up the new registries in preference to NSI's, in order to retain maximum connectivity.
- The net is now migrated to competitive registries.
NSI's misbehavior and the (entirely appropriate) blackholing of NSI thus create a Shelling Point for the migration of the net away from the NSI monopoly.
(For those not aware of them, Shelling Points are those moments in history where a large bulk of people, without explicit advanced agreement, realize that "This is the moment for action X, and everybody else knows it too." The British attempt to sieze the colonists' arms was a Shelling Point for the American Revolution. The acquittal of the policemen accused of beating Rodney King was the Shelling Point for the L.A. Riots, and so on. With a Shelling Point a mass of people can act in concert to great effect - for good or bad. Without one people must forge an agreement on timing, "go off" according to individual thresholds which don't match, or be boiled like a frog in a slowly heated pot.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
NSI is behaving in the manner of any long-standing institution, who's demise is eminent.
Like all other long-standing institutions which are facing eminent demise/change. It's sad, because we all remember nsi.. we've know them since our youth. We now have to watch, red-faced, as they cry like babies who are made to eat instead of bottle-feed. Can't they just accept the change gracefully?
Especially with the spamming, good-riddance.. The last use I had for them was to register domains I knew I wanted but didn't have the $$ for at the time, that's gone so I might as well go with a service that doesn't stand for beauracracy, but for a newer company.. that is seperate, not independent of a central organization (wasn't the arpanet originally designed for the sole purpose of a non-central based network that can't be taken out by nuclear attack? to stay true to those goals, you just can't have any sole entity on-line for such an important service)
"And how can this be? For he is the
By any chance are you someone who makes money from spam tools?
I have seen the "What if I love spam?" argument before, repeatedly. But I have only seen it from anonymous posters or identifiable spammers.
As for MAPS, the only time I looked at their web site I had no trouble finding instructions on how to get off the list - even using Mosaic for a browser. The first link on the index page is "MAPS Realtime Blackhole List". Hit that and you get a page with a list of resource links:
End User information on the RBL
Our rationalle for the MAPS RBL
Reporting spammers to the MAPS RBL team
How to get into the MAPS RBL
How to get out of the MAPS RBL
How to use the MAPS RBL to protect your network
Some of the sites that use the MAPS RBL
Look up an entry on the MAPS RBL
Trace the route from the RBL server to someplace else.
An explanation of "greeting-card spam."
RBL in the news
How hard is it to figure out that "How to get out of the MAPS RBL" is the one you want?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Unfortunately, although at first, I was very much on the side of MAPS, many people raised some good objections. However, I still -====>>====- NSI with a flaming passion and vengeance that many people may not be able to imagine. I hope NSI burns in hell. And what the heck, I still support RBL and MAPS.
Let's sic Briana the Voluptuous X10 Price Slasher on NSI!
:)
Oh, yeah, if amazon.com lost their domain, I bet they'd actually become profitable
You said:
"What if I love recieving spam? What if I WANT to recieve 'spam'? What if what you consider unsolicted email is actually what I like to read? Are you now able to decide what emails I can recieve, and what emails I cannot?"
I work for an ISP. We block sites like popsite.net because the ONLY E-MAILS we EVER get from them are SPAM. Spam costs us lots of $$$, for these reasons:
1. We have to have a netabuse team (several people) who do NOTHING ALL DAY except watch the mail and news servers for crackers and spammers. Believe me, they are seldom idle!
2. Our sysadmins have to keep an eye on the mail, news, and other servers as well.
3. Our network operations center has to spend time contacting the various networks when Abuse is either saturated with tracking all the jerks and assholes, or out for the evening. You may have noticed that it's kind of expensive to call the office of another network provider (or anybody else for that matter) 2,500 miles away...
4. We have to add huge amounts of extra disk space to handle news and e-mail. Much of this is occupied by spam. This costs us MONEY that SHOULD be spent on building/leasing POPs, hardware/memory upgrades, etc. Instead, we have to spend our member's money defending them from crackers and spammers. It's not fair to us, and it's REALLY not fair to them!
5. This is kind of off on a tangent, but it bears saying. When someone unloads a ton of spam onto our servers, WE SEE IT. We have an algorithm that checks the mail servers' syslogs for repetitive instances of text in the headers, etc. When it sees this, it notifies us. Think you can get away with it? We'll call your provider, have them knock you offline, and then forward them the logs so that you get CANCELLED. Same if you try to crack our systems or initiate a DOS attack against anything we own. We'll get you kicked off and we'll also do everything we can to get you cancelled from whatever ISP you're coming from. And since most dialup gear keeps a record of your phone number, we might even call you and demand to speak to your mommy at 3AM. B3W4RE, SKR1P7 K1DD135!!! Whenever you try to spam or crack us, WE SEE IT. Don't think that a dynamic IP makes you anonymous, because every ISP in the world logs what IP was used and at what time. They have to for legal reasons.
It looks like an honest opinion
The best trolls look like honest opinions. The litmus test is if the opinion is uninformed or not.
This poster was either a troll or was running his fingers without the aid of any logic or knowledge. This sort of thing does not deserve to be moderated up.
To any NSI grunt that may read this: you jack-asses are sore loosers. You take a government contract and expect to be able to claim that the information you obtained during that contract actually _belongs_ to you? Kiss my ass you f**king morons! That's my tax dollars you're talking about. That data belongs to me and every other American that uses the internet. A lot of people, including myself starting back when there was no public access to the 'net, have busted their asses to make the 'net what it is. For you to pull the kind of stunts that you have lately is a disgrace to us all, but more so to yourself. I really do hate socialism, but fair is fair. Cooperate or get off the bus!!!
Dumb asses....
Don't be stupid. He obviously meant migrate to a system using ISO 2 letter country codes as the TLD.
A recent version of these can be found here.
(just improving the previous AC)
So, if I were to create the technically perfect Web censorship software, Jon Katz would not be annoyed at its use? "Most of the people" who usually complain would not? No.
I and others who are bothered by censorship are usually bothered because censorship implies a power of control. Control of ideas, in fact, which is one of the most powerful forms of control.
The RBL presents the same danger, but the original poster was incorrect in assuming that that danger can be acted upon. Because the RBL is voluntary (and in fact is only the most popular of several such efforts, some of which are more technically sound, but have a higher barrier to entry) it can never have the same impact as, say, the V-chip which is required in every television set in the US.
I have a problem with some of the applications of the RBL, however. For example, WebTV applies the RBL to your mail whether you like it or not, and that's exactly the problem with things like the V-chip (granted, this is WebTV's problem, not MAPS').
NSI is not being censored, they are being refused access to the pockets of millions of consumers because of bad business practices. The consumers do not have to deny access (except as noted above), but they WILL because they don't WANT unsolicited EMail. If NSI wants to put those messages on their Web site, and slam out ad banners to every major Web portal on the planet, there's nothing wrong with that. BUT, it would cost them money, and NSI doesn't want to have to spend any actuall money! Therein lies the rub. Spam costs money, but not to the sender. Thus it is refered to as theft. NSI is commiting theft, and what's worse, they are doing so because of their relationship with the US government that gives them a monopoly over one of the most important communications technologies in history.
Let me repeat, this is not a censorship issue, this is a simple case of abuse. NSI is abusing their customers, and their customers are not pleased (that includes me).
Dude if i were you i wouldnt be so fast to support ICANN, the group seems a little shady and non-transparent if you ask me.
"It's bad for me, therefore it should be banned" is a corrupt argument: it's the same one that Janet Reno is using to get governments to ban cryptography.
There are good arguments why spam is bad: mainly because the burden of cost is not on the sender and therefore there is no negative feedback mechanism to control it. Arguments that try to dictate what a person can or cannot receive are superfluous, and always unfair to someone or other.
If you want to control spam, find a way of passing the cost on to the originator. In this hugely dynamic free-ISP scene, blocking the output is a fool's game that doesn't cure the disease at all.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Your response to this forgets one important thing. Your customers PAY you to provide them with email, and if that means the ability to receive advertisements, that is what is includes. If you need more hard drive space to provide the email service your customers have contracted you with, and this doesn't fit your budget, then you have poor planning with regard to your pricing structures.
First let me say, there was SUPPOSE to be a SMILEY attached to my last comment, meant as a light ending -- but without the smiley I came off looking like a self-righteous asshole -- SORRY! :o) :o) :o) Ok, repeat after me... RBL is not a government, nor is it a law, nor is it implimented by either of the above. The Black-holing of NSI will be a public action taken by the public.
This is exactly what I'm talking about - doesn't this seem precisely like mob lynching?
--
I would actually like to pose a question to clarify a point here:
Suppose my ISP was an RBL "member." I go to NSI to try to register a new domain, and those of you who are familiar with the registration process know that you have to send an email based on their template.
Normally, the NSI automails a response indicating the success/failure of your registration request.
But if NSI was blocked, I would not receive this confirmation. Is that correct?
SlicedBread 2.0 -- the greatest thing since SlicedBread!
I would imagine that several thousand of us own our own domains.
How about all of the domain holders amongst us send an email as follows:
To: hostmaster@internic.net
Subject: NOT INTERESTED IN BUSINESS
As a resgistered domain contact for , I would like to notify you, and Mr Jonathan Emery, that I have no desire to conduct a business relationship with NSI. At the first opportunity I will be seeking to conduct my business with an alternative vendor. I have not CHOSEN to be an NSI customer, I simply wish to have a domain.
As a result of this notification, any future emails or postal mails sent to me by NSI, not relating to the function, administration, status or billing of my domain, are demonstrably unsollicited.
Spread the word (and the email) to anyone else you know to be a domain name owner.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
I've never heard such a clueless person working for an ISP. I hope dso's cusomters become aware of their ISP's spam-friendly staff and either get rid of that staff or switch ISP's, putting dso out of business. I don't even think AOL has such a clueless stance on spam.
Illiad has NSI pegged with this one...
Sunday's User Friendly
Jon Katz would not be annoyed at its use? "Most of the people" who usually complain would not? No.
Most of them would not complain if it was opt-in as well. I was perhaps not explicit enough that censorware would have to be both accurate and opt-in to be acceptable to most'geeks'
Let me see, they require an email address, but the contract terms do not require that you actually receive email at that address. Seems to me that if NSI cuts off a domain solely because attempts to contact it by email have failed, NSI is in breach of contract.
And yes, I've gotten the NSI spam, and no, they have no right.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I am surprised that they didn't try the more effective "if you blackhole us, we will delete your domain". It would be more effective, and its legal footing would be just as shaky
The sooner on the blacklist, the better. What right does NSI and every joe business have to spam me? Did I pay NSI $70 for their service of providing my information so they can own it and spam me some abuse with it? If vigilante justice through the RBL is not allowed, then its time for baseball bats. One way or another, I'm going to get relief!
According to the lawyer's letter, there are instructions in NSI's emails for being removed from the mailing list. Is this true?
As long as the ISP makes it clear.. they can CHANGE ISP if they want!
I'm sorry im not high up enuf on the teirs to have registered a domain yet. Whats this about a CD with everyones email on it? could someone elaborate, thank you.
Actually, it's not the internic.net domains that have been spamming. It's from the NSI-only domains. (netsol.com, etc).
I don't know all of what the MAPS RBL is proposing blocking, but I have seen some procmail scripts for stripping out from NSI that's not from internic.net.
(check the mailing list archive at abuse.net)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I would like to add that they'll be only blocking one server, which is the source of the spams themselves, and not any other server. Your unsolicitated notices of renewal et al over e-mail should be comming in fine if they don't use the same server that the spams are comming from.
---
Spammed? Click here for free slack on how to fight it!
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Who is the registrar for the .us toplevel?
About three monthes after i registerd my domain i got a spam advertising a set of CDs that had the Email address of "web profesionals like yourself" who would be "interested" in high tech bargains.
.sig)
Ive gotten about three of them, along with others selling similar stuff. The agravating thing is that i know it had to come from NSI, there the only ones with the address i used. When i originally bought the domain it was for research so everyhting had to be anonymouse and untraceable.(sp) IT really kinda pisses me off that im getting this stuff. I could care less about "great values for web profesionals" and i dont have any need to spam.
(I need to change my
Lissell (where have all the cowboys gone?)
I really don't sympathize with MAPS. MAPS and blackholing is a bad way of controlling spam.
Recipients should be able to set their filters to filter out people who don't address them specifically. Only specifically authorised Bccs allowed - e.g. fav mailing lists, ISP announcements, friends and so on.
That's what I do and it works well enough. I can even do it with Yahoomail. But not Hotmail - they have not put in that feature even though I've been going around their stupid Commentquest for many times, sending that suggestion (that's why I switched to Yahoomail, after 1 or 2 years of waiting).
Now if only my ISP can allow me to set up such filters on their mail servers.
Cheerio,
Link.
NSI should, as they say, blow me.
I am an admin & tech contact. I have NO choice about who administers the root servers that contain my domain registrations. It is a US Govt. enforced monopoly.
Sure would be a shame if the root servers got taken off-line, though.
Hell,I'd probably have to start my own, using stolen copies of the NSI "propriatary" database.
Hack uber alles!
Pass the Lord and praise the ammunition.
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
MAPS RBL is painful for those who have ISPs that use it. They have no way to opt out of the "service" their ISP is providing. Sure, they are "voluntarily" using that ISP, but when you have to switch ISPs to avoid spam protection software you are inconvenienced to a much greater degree than a few spams a day.
So NSI say that emailing their customers is an important business channel?
So why are they mailing the technical contacts? Surely technical contacts have no purchasing power and are simply operating the domain.
I hassled NSI for years to get them to do something about other idiots using the whois database to spam, now they are doing it!
I don't see that I should have to remove myself from any mailing list. My time costs money and I have better things to do than reply to junk email.
I think NSI should be blackholed, it would send a message to them that they don't own the internet, it is owned by the collective of people who agree to connect their networks together.
Their namespace is almost exhausted, roll on the next generation of TLDs.
Ding dong, the witch is dead....
Just migrate to the .US domain, like the rest of the world is doing anyways.
-- ----------------------------------------------
Vive le logiciel... Libre!!!
This, moderators, is the another side of the argument. Kudos to the moderator who moderated it up, flames to the moderator who tagged it flamebait. It looks like an honest opinion. Honest opinions -- even if unpopular or misinformed -- do not deserve to be moderated down as flamebait. Please reconsider.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
The only way for Amazon.com, or anyone else, to have their domain registration-related E-mail traffic disrupted would be if amazon.com willingly subscribed to the MAPS RBL feed.
NSI is whistling through their ass here. MAPS RBL is a purely voluntarily blacklist. If someone does not wish to have their mail to/from NSI blocked as a result of the RBL, it will take approximately five seconds for them to disable RBL filtering on their mail server/routers, or provide an exception for NSI's IP address space. Someone should ask the Looney Tune who wrote that letter whether or not he would have any objections if someone were to have him sign up to a few thousand mailing lists, on a condition that every one of them will have a working remove address. According to this Looney Tune, as long as there's a functioning remove address, there's no problem, so he will have no reason to object.
--
I subscribe to RBL. I've monitored the logs (the rejects get logged!) for the last year, and I have yet to see any non-spam mail get rejected. I would never go back to the pre-RBL situation.
TA
As a fairly long time subscriber to the RBL service I find that it does the job nicely. I look at my log files and find several spam messages blocked and the quantity of that crap that appears in my mailbox has been reduced noticeably.
There are some key words that have to be recognized. One, I am a subscriber. They created their own list. I, as an administrative decision, chose to use their list. Two, they make it abundantly clear that, or at least they did when I signed up for the service, that RBL is not perfect, that you have to be willing to occasionally throw out the baby with the bathwater. For me, spam had gotten so bad that I finally relented and enabled RBL. I've been happy ever since.
As for the NSI debacle. It comes down to one key point. I haven't seen their spam message (well, not the most recent one). If I use the whois database to mine for email addresses and send SPAM, NSI will try to (1) sue me?, (2) block my access to the database, (3) who knows what else. Yet, they are doing the exact same thing.
Bottom line. I used them as a registry service. I created a business relationship with them as a registry service. As such I suppose I would get some spam from them as a registry service. However, if they started spamming me with messages about hosting, or non-registry issues -- that that most definitely is SPAM. Look at it this way. Let's say magazine publisher XYZ Corporation publishes magazines on 50 different topics ranging from Apples to Zebras, and you subscribed for a magazine on wireless data. Your now on their mailing list. You've created a business relationship with them. Would you be upset if you got junk mail from XYZ Corporation encouraging you to subscribe to adult mags?
The line between spam and acceptable commercial email is getting slimmer and slimmer. In a way, depending on what information is being sent out, NSI does have a valid business relationship with people in their database and can send email to them. They've learned from all those that mined the whois database for email addresses just how valuable such a targeted list of names can be.
NSI could have avoided all of this by 'announcing' in their first SPAM message "You are receiving this from NSI because you have at least one registered domain name in our database. You have been included on a list which will send you periodic updates on new services and features available from NSI. If you do not wish to receive these messages, here is how to remove yourself from this list. If you take no action, you will automatically receive news on any new and important services and features available from NSI."
That first message would not have advertised anything, yet it would have alerted everyone on the list of what was to come and could have avoided this entire problem!
I hope that NSI get blacklisted. They are attempting to justify that their sending of unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail to all their customers is legitimate because they have done business with their customers before.
Sorry, NSI. This is called "acquaintance spam" and is viewed as spam. If NSI had serious competition, then NSI would lose customers in droves. Few people like being spammed.
---
Here is a method that I've just thought up to make spamming less effective: fill up the spammers' e-mail address lists with as much chaff as possible, thus reducing or destroying their usefulness as a resource for the spammer. We already do this in a passive way by "spam-proofing" our e-mail addresses in various ways, so that spambots find these instead of our real address. We should take a more active role to destroy spam lists as a resource.
* If you like spam-proofing your e-mail address to avoid being spammed, make the address look almost right. For example, spambots might have filters to filter out addresses that lack "." and "@" characters.
* Change the spam-proofed address regularly. This introduces more "chaff" addresses for spambots to find.
* Some spammers use "remove" addresses in their spams to verify that a particular address is a real address that can be spammed again. Naive spammers may trust the addresses that they receive at these addresses and add them to spam lists, on the assumption that most people have nothing to hide and don't conceal their e-mail address. We could reply to these addresses with an assortment of fake addresses, thus filling spam lists with chaff. This tactic is perhaps highly questionable and is probably illegal in some jurisdictions, but is a spammer really going to sue you?
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Yeah, that's the problem - NSI won't separate their spam from the messages I want and pay for.
When I registered my domains, it was through NSI. When I read the agreements and what not, it was specifically stated in the agreement that if you are an established customer of NSI, you agree to receiving mail (such as this).
Last I checked, if you register a domain and you pay NSI (or you indirectly pay for the registration), you are an established customer of NSI. Thus, you have agreed to accept email from NSI such as this one.
Perhaps people should take the time to read the legal crap before making accusations!
Frankly, I've hated NSI from the very first time I registered a domain name. Now, they think they own the database? I think not! Blacklist 'em!!!!
---> Your mouse has moved. Windows 98 must now be rebooted for the changes to take effect. L. Wimble mnemoni
NSI: We're a 600 pound gorilla, and we intend to behave as badly as we want to. Get in our way, and we'll squash you.
If RBL is to mean anything, they really have no choice but to blacklist NSI at this point. MANY people have complained about SPAM from NSI.
NSI, because of their special monopoly position, has a higher obligation than most companies to not spam. It's not as if most of the people on their list could have chosen another registrar that doesn't spam (at least not when they gave NSI their email address).
For those who will have problems if NSI is blacklisted, there are several options. Tell NSI to send invoices by snail mail, de-configure RBL, or go to another registrar. I suggest the latter if at all possible.
Somthing just occured to me, If we all sent NSI letters saying "Dont give people my address you stupid fink" Then maybe they will actually stop. Of course this only is able to stop NSI itself. What about all the people who baught there CD's with all our Email address on them?
;-)
.sig)
So, does anyone know the adress we should send such things to? It would be fun to slashdot NSI snail mail style
Course Email would work just as well.
(I need to change my
Lissell (where have all the cowboys gone?)
The MAPS RBL has blocked whole backbones before (AGIS, for the Cyberpromotions fiasco they had). Real Networks got thrown in, even after they sent a legal threat to MAPS. MAPS has not received any orders against the listing.
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Spammed? Click here for free slack on how to fight it!
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
What the fuck is this different than the subject that showed up two days ago (RE:Censorware...)??? Ya'll complain when someone censors your account for no apparent reason, threating to take action and use the law, but when you want to do this, its perfectly legitimate.
This is no different than any other self-regulation. Either ya allow the censorware morons out there censor any page with a naughty wordy-word or ya don't censor anyone that spams you. They are both opt-in agreements. No one has to be apart of that arrangement if they do not wish to be.
I am opposed to both spam and censorship, but unless we pass laws, then there is no way to deal with both...oh yeah, I forgot, geeks don't get involved with politics unless cryptography is involved.
Nevermind...
clif
> If you do not wish to receive these messages, here is how to remove yourself...
Make that "If you wish to receive these messages, here is how to add yourself" and I could concede the point - provided they put a checkbox in their signup form for new registrations and/or gave the instructions in their signup confirmation mail, and only sent the above, ONCE to OLD accounts.
We consider it spam if somebody repeatedly sends mail to everybody on a list he buys unless they opt out. Why should it be different for a "somebody" who just happens to have had a government mandate to monopolize the internet registry?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way