Interesting People mailing list archives
more on more on ICANN ordered by Illinois court to suspend spamhaus.org
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 13:11:53 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker () bbiw net> Date: October 11, 2006 11:56:43 AM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net>, ip () v2 listbox com Cc: "Prof. Jonathan I. Ezor" <jezor () tourolaw edu>Subject: Re: [IP] more on ICANN ordered by Illinois court to suspend spamhaus.org
David Farber wrote:
From: "Prof. Jonathan I. Ezor" <jezor () tourolaw edu>I'm writing an article on this very subject which I will presenting in Denmark in December (http://www.iblt.eu), so I've been following this case with some interest. I'm not surprised by the ruling, nor by Spamhaus' recalcitrance--I have seen first hand how Spamhaus will threaten to block list an entire hosting company in order to get the host to shut down a Web site Spamhaus has decided is a spammer, and also received caustic e-mail from Spamhaus when I wrote on behalf of a wrongly blocklisted client. Improper inclusion in filters and block lists is becoming a huge problem for legitimate communicators...
Dave, What is most unfortunate about Prof. Ezor's note is that he correctly identifies a significant concern but incorrectly asserts that Spamhaus is guilty of it. Those of us signing this response are active in anti-spam efforts. None of us has direct or indirect involvement with any aspect of Spamhaus operation, although some of us use one or more of the Spamhaus published lists and are quite familiar with its operation. We feel that Prof. Ezor's note warrants a community response, rather than merely getting one from Spamhaus. The world of spam and anti-spam engenders confusion and emotion, exactly as one might expect from something involving open communication and abuses of it. That is why it is so important to distinguish between participants who operate responsibly and those who do not. It is certainly true that some anti-spam lists are operated in a cavalier manner, even serving as outlets for personal vendettas. Spamhaus is not one of these. Spamhaus has a well-earned reputation in the industry for acting responsibly, effectively and fairly. Its criteria for being listed are clear and reasonable. Its mechanisms for remedying being listed also are reasonable. (See <http://www.spamhaus.org/>.) Not perfect, but reasonable. Indeed there is a very strong consensus among the anti-spam community that Spamhaus provides an essential infrastructure capability, needed for sustaining a viable Internet mail service. It is estimated that use of Spamhaus lists provides an extremely efficient and inexpensive pre-filter of incoming mail, that detects perhaps 75% of received spam. The remainder must be subjected to computationally-costly and error-prone heuristic analysis. Remove the benefits of having Spamhaus lists, and hosts receiving mail will quadruple their processing overhead, along with significantly increasing the number of false positives -- legitimatemail that is incorrectly refused delivery. It is worth considering Prof. Ezor's complaint in light of this background. He characterizes Spamhaus as acting with threats and caustic language, and of wholesale blockage of neighboring IP addresses that have committed no offense. We did some research on Prof. Ezor's case. Spamhaus blocked exactly one host IP Address. Not a set, as he claims. The host in question had been the source of spam for some weeks, prior to being added to a Spamhaus list. Here is the entire text of the response that Spamhaus sent, after receiving Prof. Ezor's claim that his client was improperly listed:
------------------------------------------------------------ From: linford () spamhaus org Subject: Re: Urgent Letter Regarding Improper SBL Listing Date: 2 June 2004 09:37:27 GMT+02:00 To: jonathan () lustigmanfirm com Hello, When your client ceases employing spamming as a marketing method, your client will be removed from our database, until then your client will remain listed, it really is that simple. Legal threats serve only to inform us that rather than stop the spamming, the entity hopes to attempt to scare us into allowing him to continue with the spamming. National Collector's Mint engaged the services of not just one, but two extremely well known professional spammers listed in our Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database: Magnum Enterprises and John Grandinetti ("britmilla.com") to market their products. Spamhaus lists not only sources of spam, but also resources of those who directly profit by it. If National Collector's Mint doesn't like the reputation it is making for itself of being a purveyor of spam, and the consequences of spamming (being listed in the SBL), may I suggest you direct your legal effort at those responsible for your clients situation: the professional spammers your client is hiring and whomever in your client's organization hired them to spam for your client. Regards, Steve Linford The Spamhaus Project http://www.spamhaus.org ------------------------------------------------------------
Even from the perspective of someone attempting to improve their negotiating leverage, we do not see any reasonable way to characterize Spamhaus' note as containing threats or caustic language. What we do see is that Prof. Ezor's note makes it that much more difficult to conduct reasoned public discussion of this very difficult topic. At the least, we hope that his upcoming presentation in Denmark iswritten with more care, accuracy and balance than his note to the IP list.
Sincerely, Dave Crocker Principal Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net Neil Schwartzman Chair on behalf of the Board of Directors CAUCE Canada: The Canadian Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email http://cauce.ca/node/1 James Lick Chair, on behalf of APCAUCE APCAUCE wiki.apcauce.org Scott Hazen Mueller Chairman and Founder, on behalf of the Board CAUCE (US) www.cauce.org Director and Founder International Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (iCAUCE) www.international.cauce.org Rick Wesson CEO Support Intelligence, LLC support-intelligence.com CEO Alice's Registry, Inc. ar.com Justin Mason PMC Member Apache SpamAssassin project spamassassin.apache.org Justin Greene President/CEO The Spamex Disposable Email Address Service www.spamex.com Larry E. Smith Owner/Partner Electronic Communication Systems www.ecsis.net J. William Campbell, Jr. Manager Celestial Software, LLC www.celestial.com Huey Callison Software designer and anti-spam activist huey.callison () gmail com Bob O'Brien Software Craftsman whitelist.com Matt Sergeant Co-Author Draft DNSBL Best Practices (IETF ASRG) Member of the Board CAUCE Canada Chris Lewis Anti-spam infrastructure architect Nortel Senior Technical Advisor MAAWG Michael "der Mouse" Parker Vice-Chair and Secretary to the Board The Canadian Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email http://www.cauce.ca/ Peter Seebach President Plethora Internet http://www.plethora.net/ Mickey Chandler President/CEO Whizardries, Inc. www.whizardries.com Paul Myers Publisher TalkBiz News www.talkbiznews.com John Glube Owner Glube's - Business Services www.trusted-email-sender.com Victor Duchovni Postfix developer http://www.postfix.org Suresh Ramasubramanian Coordinator APCAUCE wiki.apcauce.org Manager, Antispam Operations, Outblaze Ltd http://www.hserus.net Gadi Evron Security Evangelist Beyond Security Daniel Senie President/Founder Amaranth Networks Inc. amaranth.net Michael A. Atkinson Email Security Consultant mike.atkinson () gmail com John Levine Member (North America) ICANN At Large Advisory Committee Edward Falk The Spam Diaries thespamdiaries.blogspot.com Don M. Blumenthal Former Internet Lab Director US Federal Trade Commission Gerard Alan Latham walcots () gmail com Steven Champeon CTO hesketh.com/inc. Founder enemieslist.com Clifton Royston Antispam software developer President I and I Computing www.iandicomputing.com John Fitch Professor of Software Engineering University of Bath, UK people.bath.ac.uk/masjpf Director Codemist Ltd www.codemist.co.uk Peter Salanki Network Architect Bahnhof AB www.bahnhof.net Jonas Birgersson CEO Labs2 Group www.labs2.com Amar Andersson Senior Network Engineer TeliaSonera AB www.teliasonera.com Joe Greco sol.net Network Services http://www.sol.net Kelsey Cummings System Architect Sonic.net, Inc. corp.sonic.net Mark Mallett President MV Communications, Inc. www.mv.com Russell Nelson President Crynwr Software webmaster () qmail org Gerard Alan Latham Moderator sci.archaeology.moderated Patrick W. Gilmore Network Architect patrick () ianai net Sean Eric Fagan Former MAPS employee sef () Kithrup COM Robert H. Braver Owner oklahoma-isp.net www.oklahoma-isp.net Rik van Riel Linux kernel developer http://surriel.com/ Mike Paulsen Concerned end-user mike.paulsen () ownrecognizance com Ray Everett-Church, Esq. Principal PrivacyClue LLC www.privacyclue.com Co-Author Fighting Spam for Dummies Nick Nicholas In the Nick of Time IT Consulting nicknicholas.net Tony Finch Email systems specialist University of Cambridge dotat.at David Wright ISP Development Services, UK www.dww.org.uk Richard Welty Owner, Averill Park Networking www.averillpark.net Webmaster Spamvertized www.spamvertized.org/ Jake Richter Managing Director NetTech, N.V. nettech.an Matthew Vernhout Concerned end-user www.vernhout.net -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more on more on ICANN ordered by Illinois court to suspend spamhaus.org David Farber (Oct 07)
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- more on more on ICANN ordered by Illinois court to suspend spamhaus.org David Farber (Oct 11)