FC: Giovanetti and Smith: Battle Creek should jail anti-spam activist

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Previous message:

"City of Battle Creek wants to imprison an anti-spam activist"
http://www.politechbot.com/p-03282.html

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From: Tom_Giovanetti/IPI () ipi org
Subject: Re: FC: City of Battle Creek wants to imprison an anti-spam activist
To: declan () well com
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 10:31:07 -0600

Bravo to the town of Battle Creek!

These anti-spammers purposely sabotage other people's property under the
guise of performing a public service. But they are attacking someone else's
property. No question in my mind it's a form of vandalism.

--------------------------
Tom Giovanetti
President
Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI)
www.ipi.org
tomg () ipi org

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From: "Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>
To: <declan () well com>, <rms () computerbytesman com>
Subject: RE: City of Battle Creek wants to imprison an anti-spam activist
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 11:07:46 -0500

Hi Declan,

>From everything I read about this case, I think it is appropriate for
law enforcement to get involved.  It appears that Ian Gulliver sent
specially crafted email messages to SMTP servers that he knew would
crash a certain percentage of them.  Looking for open relays is
certainly a legit. service.  Going around crashing people's computers is
quite another matter.  The ends do not justify the means.

Here is how Laura Atkins of SpamCon put it:

   http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article/0,,10_995251,00.html

   "Laura Atkins, newly installed president of the
   non-profit anti-spam outfit SpamCon Foundation,
   said the code changes needed to correct the bug
   was "trivial" but one Gulliver, for one reason or
   another, was unwilling to correct.

   "When you run a blacklist, you need to be responsible
   and you need to be considerate of the other servers,"
   she said. "The overall impression I'm getting is he
   knew the bug was there and he just decided he wasn't
   going to do anything. If his test happened to crash
   a Lotus server, then it wasn't his fault."

Richard M. Smith
http://www.ComputerBytesMan.com

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