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Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Okay, I think I sort of get it now.
FTFA:
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, ICANN says that they've not been ordered to act and suspend the spamhaus.org [spamhaus.org] domain, and even if they had they couldn't do it "because ICANN does not have either the ability or the authority to do so".
They also state that ICANN is not party in the lawsuit and is not involved in it.
They end their posting by stating that only spamhaus.org's registrar or the Internet Registry have the ability and authority to suspend an individual domain name.
They close their posting by stating that this comment was made in response of the community's interest (in the ICANN's position on the matter).
Parent
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
While it's technically true that they could get around it, legally, it's not a great idea.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Spamhaus:
e360: wah wah wah wah wah
Spamhaus:
Judge: OK, I guess you win, e360.
Spamhaus:
e360: Judge, please suspend their domain name until they pay us!
Spamhaus:
ICANN: Not my problem, man, go talk to the registrar.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Spamhaus is not based in the USA, and has no offices in the USA, so therefore the court has no jurisdiction to sieze anything from them. It's even dubious that the judge has the right to sieze the domain name, as it's registered with another non-US company. ICANN is just saying "Don't bother slapping us with a subpoena because we can't do it anyway."
This has much further reaching implications than it may seem at first. First Spamhaus, then online gambling sites that are perfectly legal in other countries. After that will come torrent sites, crack sites or anyone who does anything that might be illegal in the USA but legal elsewhere.
It's a slippery slope.
Parent
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
"Spamhaus may have waived personal jurisdiction as a defense early on in the case when they not only appeared, but then asked for the case to be removed from state court (where it was originally filed) and moved to federal district court (where it is today). Arguably, and this makes sense intuitively even if you don't understand the finer points of U.S. civil procedure, doing so inherently acknowledged the jurisdiction of the federal court."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
However, that said, if the subject of the order is in a different country, they can choose to ignore the order on the assumption that their home country will not prosecute or extradite them. For something this trivial, there's almost no chance that they would do so.
Firs
Summary (Score:3, Informative)
Spamhaus listed E360 as spammers
E360 sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus said that an Illinois court has no jurisdiction and didn't show up.
E360 won a default judgement because Spamhaus didn't show up.
Spamhaus still said the court had no authority and ignored the judgement.
E360 filed for an injunction, asking the court to order either ICANN or the domain registrar to block the Spamhaus domain because Spamhaus ignored the judgement.
This Stor
You missed a step... (Score:5, Interesting)
Spamhaus listed E360 as spammers
E360 sued Spamhaus in an Illinois court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus said Illinois court has no jurisdiction, take it to Federal courts.
E360 sued Spamhaus in a Federal court, saying that they weren't spammers.
Spamhaus doesn't show up to Federal court, despite having accepted their jurisdiction.
E360 won a default judgement because Spamhaus didn't show up.
Spamhaus still said the court had no authority and ignored the judgement.
E360 filed for an injunction, asking the court to order either ICANN or the domain registrar to block the Spamhaus domain because Spamhaus ignored the judgement.
Check out this Illinois lawyer's take on the matter for the full(er) explanation:
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/66
Parent
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
e360 has joined the chat
spamhaus has joined the chat
e360: omg we aren't spammers so we sue u becos u think we are!
spamhaus:
court has joined the chat
court: spamhaus won't reply, so default judgement of $12 million in litigation costs for them
court: oh, and u must remove e360 from ur spammer list now!!
court: and btw, tell u did wrong on ur website...
icann has joined the chat
icann: wtf! whats e360 claims based on anyway??
e360: omg take down every spamhaus domain until they comply with court's order! FFS
tucows has joined the chat (= Spamhaus.org domain registrar)
tucows: ??? wtf is all the ruckus about!
e360: just sign the papers to bring down the assholes u idiot
** start of these news **
icann: i dunno... but WE cant do shit.. we lack teh authority..
icann: spamhaus never wrote a contarct with us... its up to tucows i guess
icann: hell we werent even brought to court properly by 360
Will be interesting to see how it unfolds... If I understand things right, TUCOWS has not responded.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And Tucows being a canadian company, I'm not sure of the leverage an Illinois court could have over them to take down the domain of an english spamfighting organization.
Me guess none, but who knows.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They actually state that "no order has been issued in this matter requiring any action by ICANN". In a word, they were NOT ordered to take down spamhaus.org, they note that "a Proposed Order referencing ICANN has been submitted to the court" (which would mean that the proposed order hasn't been accepted by the court yet)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Which while annoying briefly, might be a Good Thing(tm). Face it, those who use services like Spamhaus probably don't realize *how much* spam there is. If your government official gets 1 spam in 20, well, they thing "just hit delete" works fine if their total spam load is 1,000 emails a day (50 spams get through). If, on the other hand, they suddenly are hit with the full brunt of it, there may be changes. Imagine Grandma who gets 5 or 6 spams a week after her ISP's filters (which probably are quite effective). And then suddenly getting 600 a day. It may open up the eyes of those who don't believe it to be a problem because they're sitting behind a wall protecting them. It's just we've all been sitting "behind the wall" to see true increases. When the amount of mail that makes it past the filters doubles, total traffic may have increased 10 times or more.
This might encourage development of a new email infrastructure that gets rapidly adopted by the Internet, suddenly faced with the realities of how much spam there really is in the world.
I for one, would love to see the end of poorly-configured MTAs who send me bounce emails that are improperly formatted. Of all things an MTA should do, is to generate proper emails! Otherwise they're contributing to the spam problem (I've got hundreds all addressed as "Mailer Daemon " and even more from antivirus/antispam systems, and nevermind whitelist systems. They all seem to contribute to the spam problem by generating even more email in response to email.)
Parent
Re:New e-mail infrastructure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, what they say is:
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
PIR are the ones who could do it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure how PIR is structured and how responsive they would be to a U.S. court order -- a lot of their board of directors seem to be European, although their mailing address is in Reston, VA, and I'm not sure where they're officially incorporated -- but Tucows is probably in a position where they have a lot to lose if they ignored it.
Still, can a registrar really "pull" a domain? It's the PIR that maintains the root DNS servers for the TLD, so if they decide to just not delete spamhaus's DNS entry, then the domain stays active. Tucows basically sends requests to the PIR to add new DNS records when someone registers a new domain, but they don't (at least, I don't think they do) actually operate the servers themselves. What is Tucows supposed to actually do?
It would be interesting if PIR just said "no" to the order, once it goes to them from Tucows, and refused to do it. There could be some very interesting precedent as a result of this: should a U.S. court have the authority to pull a domain belonging to a non-U.S. corporation or citizen? Should a German court be able to order a domain for a U.S. corporation or citizen pulled? How about a Saudi Arabian court?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just remember... (Score:5, Insightful)
A Little Background (Score:3, Informative)
TUCOWS (Score:5, Informative)
(If you haven't been following the 360 Insight vs Spamhaus [vnunet.com] thing then you'll have no idea what's going on here!)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:TUCOWS (Score:5, Insightful)
Being incorporated in Canada does not exempt them from Illinois law. That's like saying a Canadian citizen can't be prosecuted for crimes committed in Illinois.
You're oversimplifying. First, this is civil law, not criminal. Second, no crime was committed. Third, This is an Illinois court ordering a canadian company to suspend a service they contract to a UK organization. If the service is provided in the US, then the court might have the authority, but if the service is not, there is some serious question of jurisdiction here. You can't go ordering companies that do business both within and outside the US to take arbitrary actions outside the US in response to civil suits within the US.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In Illinois?
Might I suggest? (Score:3, Funny)
Now if Spamhaus registered the domain with GoDaddy, all 'e360' needs to do is say the site contains some severely questionable content and down the domain will go. GoDaddy has a good history with that...
Good for ICANN (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead they demonstrated an admirable restraint and intelligence, in a situation where both the Judge and Spamhaus have failed to do the same.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ha!
Here's a question. If you were ICANN, would you want to get involved in this particular can of worms?
I mean: they can either obey the court order, and destroy their credibility with much of people responsible for the Internet's infrastructure, or they can disobey it, and risk serious legal sanctions.
Saying "Er, you need to talk to someone else. That's someone else's job. I'm just the janitor" isn't really standing on principle, it's copping out.
Which isn't to suggest it's not the technically cor
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A "public service" that they charge for, and that makes them little different than other companies offering blocking lists. You can _no longer_ download their list of blocked IP adresses unless you pay [openbsd.org]:
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Just because DeRaadt didn't want to re-code his app to use DNS instead of a local copy he put this FUD in his commit message.
ICANN says they can't. Is that true? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this accurate? Don't the glue records get published through ICANN, and couldn't they remove them?
Of course I am in favor of Spamhaus and against SPAMers...I'm just curious if this is a legal ploy on ICANN's part to help Spamhaus (which I would applaud), or if its just ICANN telling the truth (which I would also applaud...I'm easy to please).
Also, if true, couldn't Spamhaus just move their registrar from TUCOWS (Canada?) to a registrar in a less US court friendly country where any order to remove the registration could be ignored?
ICANN.. well... Can't... but Tucows will have to (Score:3, Informative)
Will this improve ICANN's profile overseas? (Score:3, Insightful)
I realize they aren't acting in defiance of a court order (they haven't even been contacted by the court yet, if I understand the press release), but at least they're toeing the "We're independent and neutral" line.
Someone else should register name (Score:3, Interesting)
Make the "People Who Sued Us" list (Score:5, Interesting)
Create a "People Who Sued Us" list. Make this list functionally similar to the normal ROSKO list, allowing IT admins to choose to use the PWSU list for e-mail filtering purposes. Chances are that anyone on the PWSU list is a known spammer, since only a known spammer would have to resort to shady legal practices to get removed from ROSKO. However, the PWSU list is based only on the easily provable fact of someone suing Spamhaus, meaning that nobody on that list could complain that they were being treated unjustly.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If someone small creates this list, they might still be subject to costly legal harrasment. If some big news organization reports on these types of lawsuits by spammers, and just happens to maintain a history list, any legal action against them could probably be handled on the level of swatting flies by their legal department. News organizations have pretty strong precedents of First Amendment protection (and internal IT organizations which just happen to need to filte
Unlikely to change much (Score:3, Interesting)
In these situations things just keep on coming and coming.
Judges and the judicial system are set up so that court orders can be enforced. Usually against reluctant subjects, so dealing with whiners is not new to them.
Even in civil cases you can get a cop with a gun to go into a business and help you settle things up if the judge orders it. Unless anti-spam people think tucows is going to arm its US office and start shooting people, they are going to comply with this order.
Spamhaus had an easy out, make a special appearance and talk about jurisdiction. Or they could have moved it to federal and fought it on the merits, which would have likely established a positive precedent in the US for voluntary opt-in to these types of published opinion blacklists. Instead they try to game the legal system in the US. That's fine, but they are likely to lose their ability to work within the US by doing so.
spamhaus.org.uk (Score:3, Informative)
Arms race (Score:3, Informative)
There has been an arms race between spammers and admins, in many senses of the word. Spammers learned long ago that they will have an edge if they operate anonymously, either relaying through insecure relays in the old days, or more recently taking control of insecure PCs and servers and operating a fleet of zombie nodes. Their origin is masked. Or they might purchase services through dirty middlemen who then purchase services through dirty ISPs. Either way, spammers try to hide.
But the admins who fight spam often do not hide, usually because they are part of a reputable organization and are well respected by the community, and proud of their work. Also, the way blacklist technology is used (RBL, DNSBL) makes it difficult to conceal who you are. Unfortunately this makes organizations like Spamhaus vulnerable to DoS attacks, harassment, and frivolous lawsuits (remember that spammers call themselves 'internet marketers' and pretend they are legit businessmen). Other organizations like SPEWS are somewhat better at hiding their operation.
There are ideas floating around, however, on ways to harden blacklists agaist attacks of various sorts [sysdesign.ca]. The idea proposed in that 2004 paper would conceal the blacklist publisher, and use distributed resources to serve the list, kind of like how spammers use a fleet of zombies (except spammers steal those resources).
Spammers are a dirty bunch, they fight dirty. Maybe it's time we look more seriously at protecting the blacklists and their operators from various types of 'attacks'.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I just glanced over the thing, and it says that at a certain point Spamhaus' laywers stopped showing up to court, so the judgement defaulted to the plaintiff. I'm pretty sure the judge didn't have a lot of leeway to do any judging at that point.
(oh yeah, great job using "mail", "judge", and "bomb" together - enjoy being an enemy combatant... ah crap! I'll see you at Gitmo...)
Re:Please let me know the address of the judge (Score:5, Interesting)
The judge is just following the law, and, indeed, the constitution. This has nothing to do with "freedom of speech". Spamhaus asked for a civil suit to be moved to Federal Court, and then failed to defend themselves. Wham. Default judgement.
It doesn't matter whether Spamhaus is being sued for describing Ted Kaczynski or "Spamford" Wallace as a spammer. It doesn't matter if this is Spamhaus or SPEWS. It doesn't matter if spam is a nuisance or welcomed by millions of people across the world. They failed to turn up. They're subject to a default judgement and legal sanctions to prevent them from continuing the offense.
That's what the law and constitution says is the correct response, and therefore, while it might be unpopular, this is the correct thing for the judge to do. For all the criticisms of judges "legislating from the bench", it seems that the majority of people would rather they do that than follow the law. (Witness SCOTUS's response to the Connecticut eminent-domain thing. For some reason, everyone decided it was SCOTUS at fault. The real problem was a vague phrase in the constitution, an out of control local government, and state and Federal legislatures who'd failed to impose legal limits. But everyone blamed the judges.)
The judge needs to follow the law, even when it's unpopular. The legislature needs to be told to deal with this fiasco. And Spamhaus needs to be more careful and less stupid and contradictory in their ways of dealing with courts.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The judge needs to follow the law, even when it's unpopular.
Reminds me of the Dread Scott v. Sandford [wikipedia.org] case. I think it was Chief Justice Taney who was a die hard abolitionist (anti-s
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1) Spamhaus is used in Illinois court.
2) They APPEAR in court, and request that the case be moved to federal court, as IL does not have jurisdiction.
3) The case IS moved to federal court.
4) Spamhaus stops showing up.
They requested the involvment of the federal district court. In your example, the defendant was never involved. Here, they were. If they had argued that the U.S. has no jurisdiction in IL, they probably would have won. Instead, they argued that the federal court had j
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=j
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, Tucows is not an US-based registrar (it's canadian).
Also, spamhaus already has spamhaus.co.uk, but it's explicitely said that it didn't want to domain-switch, because it'd be detrimental to the users of the existing lists.