One Last Spamhaus Warning Before The End 632
kog777 writes to mention that Spamhaus has released a final warning about an increase in junk email, as they prepare to lose their domain to an Illinois court ruling. From the article: "According to Spamhaus, more than 650 million Internet users - including those at the White House, the U.S. Army and the European Parliament - benefit from Spamhaus' 'blacklist' of spammers that helps identify which messages to block, send to a 'junk' folder or accept. Losing the domain name would make it more difficult for service providers and others to obtain the lists. 'If the domain got suspended, it would be an enormous hit for the Net,' said Steve Linford, Spamhaus' chief executive officer. 'It would create an enormous amount of damage on the Internet.'"
I'm still a little fuzzy on e360 (Score:4, Insightful)
How can they be legit? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How can they be legit? (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is you can definitely end up on Spamhaus with being a Spammer. You can usually get off the list but other times they are total dicks. They blocked an entire C class belonging to XO with the response that if you were "Stupid enough to use XO" it was your "own fault." Disregarding the fact that XO lights buildings and companies don't always have a choice in the matter. They later cleared that up but it took 3 weeks.
So while I am pro Spamhaus I wonder what e360's deal really is.
Minor nit-pick. (Score:5, Insightful)
Spamhaus does not "block" anything. All they do is list the addresses that meet their criteria for listing (yeah, I know that's redundant).
Mail admins can choose to reference that list (or not) and block / flag / delay / whatever based upon it.
I use Spamhaus with SpamAssassin, but I don't block or deny. It just adds to the spam score.
Spamhaus does not block. Spamhaus just lists.
Mail admins block.
Re:Minor nit-pick. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blacklists suck. Whitelists suck. Spam sucks. We do the best with what we've got. But for Spamhaus to pretend that they don't know that adding an IP to their list will result in it being blocked from delivering mail to a vast portion of the net is disingenuous. That's exactly why they list large blocks of IPs: because it prevents mail from being delivered, applying pressure to the ISP because their customers are angry. If a listing truly had no effect, they wouldn't do it. (Never mind the ethics of harming uninvolved parties in order to attack the party you dislike; it's the same tactic as another group whose label begins with "t" uses.)
Do I use Spamhaus? Yes. Is a Spamhaus listing alone enough to get mail blocked on my server? Nope. It's just another vote of no-confidence for a particular message. Do I loathe spammers? You betcha. But Spamhaus shouldn't pretend they're not a blocking list. And these spammers should be laughed out of court, the rat bastards.
Re:Minor nit-pick. (Score:5, Funny)
Murders don't kill people. Guns kill people. Murderers just point and twitch thier index finger.
Re:Minor nit-pick. (Score:4, Insightful)
A very large number of mailservers automatically block mail based solely on this service
And how is this the fault of spamhaus? They're clear about what their listing criteria are, it's up to mail admins to decide how to use it.
Re:Minor nit-pick. (Score:5, Insightful)
I say that unless your mail server meets a minimal set of criteria, including proper delegation and RDNS, then I don't know you from Adam, and I should reject your mail by default. Your dynamic IP is persona non grata, and I make no apologies. This is easily fixable by you, and if you refuse to do so, it's not really my problem.
Yep, it's Balkanization. I don't see any ethnic cleansing going on though, so tell me what else about Balkanization is bad?
Re:Minor nit-pick. (Score:4, Interesting)
But when their data is false? I have a static IP. For whatever reason, it is listed as a Dynamic IP. For again whatever reason, LOADS of people seem to block dynamic IP's even ones not implicated in Spam.
Oh, believe me, I understand the issue. I used to run a mail server on a static IP that was listed as part of a dynamic IP block. Now I run a mail server that is on a dynamic IP (well, semi-dynamic -- it doesn't seem to change more then once every couple of years). I ran my server with direct delivery for a long time, without any trouble, but I eventually had to configure my mail server to deliver via my ISP's SMTP server because too much of my mail was blocked.
I say we should treat all IP's as innocent until proven guilty.
In principle, I agree. In practice, it's those dynamic IPs that generate nearly all of the spam, and it's not that difficult for non-spammers to route their email through their ISP's mail server.
In any case, I still have to say that the problem is with mail admins that misuse the Spamhaus list, not with the list itself. The list doesn't claim to be a list of spamming IPs, just a list of IPs that are likely spammers. Your IP is a likely spammer, even if it isn't a spammer. Personally, I use Spamhaus, but I only use it to add an "X-Listed-By-Spamhaus: yes" header to the messages, so that bogofilter can use that information. I find it increases the accuracy of bayesian filtering considerably.
Re:Minor nit-pick. (Score:4, Informative)
Whoever your ISP is, gets their IP addresses in blocks, which they designate as Dynamic. Certain subnets get marked as static - and are generally reserved for loops - T1 etc. When you get a 'static' IP address from your ISP, they create a DHCP block for you with only 1 IP address in it. So your 'static' IP address is really a 'dynamic' IP address drawn from a pool of 1 possibility.
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I'm well aware that *you* or *someone you knows* is smart enough to not immediately block e-mail from someone on the Spamhaus list. Great. Glad you know someone like that. Fact of the matter is that I'd estimate that people like that compri
Now,now (Score:5, Funny)
Their web site has lots of useful information.
And I think you should get it all with
wget -r http://www.e360insight.com/ [e360insight.com]
Repeatedly, if necessary.
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they are spammers, see here (Score:5, Informative)
(from http://www.spamhaus.org/legal/answer.lasso?ref=3 [spamhaus.org])
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But when they e-mail out their notification to everyone that the spam is going to increase, that message will be treated as spam.
Re:I'm still a little fuzzy on e360 (Score:4, Interesting)
I've just sent the following email to the lawyers for e360:
to: amertes@synergylawgroup.com
from: j@ww.com
Hello there,
It seems you are the people responsible for leading the charge on 'spamhaus' on behalf
of your customer, 'e360'.
if you cause spamhause.org to no longer function then you can rest assured I'll do my best to forward each and every spam message received on my servers to yours.
fair warning
It's one thing to play clever lawyerly games, it's quite another to
piss off just about everybody on the net on behalf of some lowlife.
Jacques Mattheij
CEO ww.com
Re:I'm still a little fuzzy on e360 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, RBLs are used voluntarily. That doesn't mean every user of them makes a critical judgement about their purpose and intentions. If many people blindly use a certain RBL, it sooner or later will turn corrupt and the power to intimidate ISPs and legitimate mail senders automatically arises. You can't change human nature.
Spam is bad. Corrupt RBLs are bad, too. I'm not implying Spamhaus is bad. I'm just saying look carefully who you trust and for which purpose. For me, this means never blocking a certain sender based on any RBL alone. Let the RBL modify some score, but never strictly block based on what it says.
Spamhaus is popular *because* they're good (Score:5, Informative)
They can and presumably do make mistakes, but they're about the best out there.
Most ISPs need more protection that just burning CPU on Spamassassin - diverting obviously untrustable email at the SMTP handshake instead of accepting the message is pretty critical, and the way the SMTP protocols work, if you refuse the message then, any correctly-configured legitimate email sender will get feedback, as opposed to if you accept the message and then dump it. (You can do milter-things to process the message body before accepting the message, but there are enough known-bad sources that you can kill before they get that far that it saves you a lot of CPU and transmission.)
Simply greylisting mail kills off a surprising fraction of spam, including mail from most zombies and most of the unused-address-space-BGP-hacking senders. You could certainly use Spamhaus, and for that matter just about any RBL, to drive a greylist harder (e.g. 1 hour delay for listed sites, 5 minutes for unknowns.)
The IP Address (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, if we can get the word out to 650 million Internet users to use IP address 216.168.30.71, what damage is done? It will just take a while for people to tell ICANN how stupid they are. Maybe this is a good thing? Maybe this will cause the community to complain about ICANN and the American control of the internet?
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Re: The IP Address (Score:5, Informative)
Why would they want to do that? From the article;
Executives at the U.K.-based Spamhaus Project...
Re: The IP Address (Score:5, Funny)
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Proxy? (Score:2)
That's possible, but there is a proxy design scheme [wikipedia.org] they could implement for a single IP address that would allow them to stay in business. Is this uncommon or hard to do? I don't think dishing requests to other boxes is that hard of a thing to do.
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Re: The IP Address (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, this is a good case for control of registration and domain names not being US-based. A court in Illinois should not be able to affect a legitimate
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- Gilmore
What's wrong with a little anarchy? I'm sure if the suggestion were sent around, spamhaus.org would remain in DNS and e360.com and any associated businesses could be made to disappear.
Re: The IP Address (Score:4, Interesting)
Is the US the only country that can compell ICANN to modify the DNS record list? Can't a judge in the UK overturn the US judge's ruling and compell ICANN to reinstate the address? If not, that's insane that US law is the end all of Internet law.
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On the other hand, you can just use spamhaus.org.uk and you'll never notice.
I will explain this because I'm tired of this arg (Score:5, Interesting)
when my email server receive some mail from 1.2.3.4, it looks up 4.3.2.1.sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org and, if the address exists, it closes the connection (so that the mail won't even clog our intertubes). Now, I already changed it to look up 4.3.2.1.sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org.uk, but other 650 MILLION servers still have to do the same. Because if they don't, and this judge thinks it should call, their email load will get up by 20x or so. Got it now?
Re:I will explain this because I'm tired of this a (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I will explain this because I'm tired of this a (Score:4, Informative)
I think you should wait before changing anything. I don't think spamhaus.org.uk, or any other name besides spamhaus.org, will ever resolve the Spamhaus RBLs.
From Spamhaus' response [spamhaus.org] to the proposed order (proposed, people, by the spammer's counsel, no judge has ordered ICANN anything), it seems they'll intend to contest this. They mention they don't think that ICANN suspending them can actually happen, for reasons I in fact agree with (go read them at their site). They also mention that "one U.S. government agency has begun working on a response."
However, if worse comes to worst, they probably won't switch to any other domain name. They state: "... if Spamhaus gets around the court order by switching domain to maintain the blocking, the judge would very likely then rule us in criminal contempt. We don't want a criminal record for the sake of fighting spam. We normally help fit the spammers with criminal records, not the other way round."
Which I read as, if this order is enforced, and ICANN caves in and all that, there will be no more Spamhaus, period.
Which would really piss me off. The whole episode already already seems like a bad dream to me. To see Spamhaus destroyed by some spammer scum would be just depressing. One thing's for certain, though: it'll be a cold day in hell before any site I manage will exchange traffic with this spammer.
Do they have to defy the court? (Score:3, Insightful)
Or is my understanding about a mile off?
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So...get a new domain? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how a US court ruling could shut down a domain name in another country's TLD; so why don't they just go and get a name in the UK, or Switzerland, or Sealand.
Somehow I think enough people find Spamhaus useful, that if they asked they could probably take up collection and get enough money to afford a new domain, and right now they have enough press coverage to ensure that it would be publicized. Sure, it would be a PITA for a lot of mailserver admins who would need to change the address, but that's still a lot less work than filtering their spam by hand.
It sounds like Spamhaus is getting ready to 'cut off their nose to spite their face,' or in this case, destroy themselves in order to try and prove some point to a Federal Court in the US that couldn't give a damn one way or the other. If they're trying to make a point, this isn't the way to do it.
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I've been trying to make a similar service in my spare time.
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It doesn't know what site is going to be ultimately asked for.
They'd need to block
Re:So...get a new domain? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see how a US court ruling could shut down a domain name in another country's TLD; so why don't they just go and get a name in the UK, or Switzerland, or Sealand.
You're not the only person to make this mistake. The judge's order to pull the SOA for SpamHaus's domain has NOTHING TO DO with whether the TLD is
How can this be? Well, SpamHaus is subject to the jurisdiction of a U.S. court. Once a court (any court, not just American) decides that you're subject to its jurisdiction, it can issue an order compelling you to do whatever it wants. It can also issue a court order compelling a 3rd party (in this case, the domain registrar) to take some action in regards to you. It doesn't matter whether one party in the lawsuit, or the 3rd party who isn't involved in the suit, is actually resident in the U.S.
Enforcement of a court order is a slightly different issue. It may be very, very difficult to enforce the order of a U.S. court in a foreign country. It's easy enough in the U.S. because the court can hold the non-compliant party in contempt (and enact fines, jail time, etc.), but these mechanisms don't automatically work overseas. Some countries, under some circumstances, will honor civil court orders from other nations, but usually you would have to sue in the foreign country's courts to effect any action on the part of a foreign body.
An important exception to the above is that many entities have assets or physical presence in multiple countries. If (hypotheticallly) the German arm of Register.com operated the
In short, the Illinois court made a STUPID FUCKING BONEHEADED decision, and the judge or jury should probably be removed and caned, but it is certainly procedurally possible for them to hassle SpamHaus regardless of where you register the domain name.
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Have YOU opted into e360? (Score:2)
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Failure to Legislate (Score:4, Insightful)
Look at how long and how much money it took for the Crackberry developer to get the federal gov't to do things like the "emergency review" and subsequent invalidation of the submarine patent owner that went after them while they were clearly set to lose in court to the submarine patent holder.
I would be very interested to see/hear if there isn't K Street pressure to kill spamhaus off so other companies that DO legislate can make consumers pay more for the "luxury" of good spam filtering.
Re:Failure to Legislate (Score:5, Insightful)
Acknowledging this reality is not defeatism or cowardice, nor "encouraging" corruption, it's simply realism. If you disagree with this, then if you aren't actively taking up arms and planning a violent revolution, then you are a hypocrite.
Let them have it... (Score:2)
As for the list, switching to spamhaus.org.uk will be trivial in most cases, i really doubt the rbl domains are hardcoded anywere. Perhaps spamhaus should see if they can make the list inaccesible to US users as well, since they seem to think everybody (even foreigners) is required to accept their commercial email.
Just
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Bullshit US Judgement (Score:2)
Not such a bad thing (Score:4, Interesting)
are you s@#%ing me .. (Score:2)
I've never had a problem not receiving legitimate e-mail. But spending 20 minutes a day clearing out my inbox of some tosser trying to sell me VltAGRA is a right pain. Right now in my unusable real e-mail box 238 unwanted adverts for s@#% I don't need.
re Re:Not such a bad thing
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Uhm... No. For me, they are a godsend. So go fuck yourself. You don't like them, don't use them.
Unfortunately many sources that ended up on these block lists are the common mail servers of other major ISPs, resulting in large volumes of false-positive emails being blocked.
Do you REAALLLYYY think the users of such lists do not understand this? They do, they don't care about your problem. It's YOUR proble
Spamcop (Score:2)
suspend US control of ICANN (Score:2)
The Letter That Won US Internet Control [slashdot.org]
Spamhaus should sue ICANN (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a power play by Spamhaus, but it's a totally justified power play. And I applaud them for not giving in to the demands of a stupid court that has no jurisdiction over them or any reason in the first place to pass an injunction against them. If their domain name is removed, then the fallout from all of the additional SPAM will be cause a great deal of trouble.
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a little clue (Score:3, Insightful)
I really think the idea of white lists or per email fees is starting to come due. Yep its a hassle and the idea of paying for email kind of sucks but if done right it would have little effect on the average user but really make spammers accountable. I'd like to see a monthly or weekly cap over that and you pay. I also would like to see the Icann or someone rule that non working or non existant opt out's result in an immediate revocation of ALL domains owned by the offender.
ICANN suspending domain != no DNS (Score:3, Interesting)
However, just because ICANN suspends a domain doesn't mean that its out of DNS. Anyone with a DNS server can still serve the records. Not all root servers are under ICANN control.
Many email servers have their own DNS server (if only for caching). I say, manually add the records in defiance of the SPAMers and their abuse of our legal system!
One lesson is that judges do matter (Score:2)
Are you in a place that elects judges? It's hard to get good information about them, but the Bar Association ratings are better than nothing. Are you in a place that appoints judges? Maybe there are retention elections later.
Are you in a place that's completely appointed? Ask candidates how they would go about nominating judges. Watch their platform and their colleagues for signs that they might appoint sleazy hacks
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Big deal (Score:3, Insightful)
I've heard this somewhere before... (Score:5, Funny)
It's okay, guys. Spamhaus will lose their domain for a night, then get it back along with a huge government grant to go find a way to stop th emess that was made when they were shut down, and it'll all be cleaned up in time for a sequel.
Spamhaus shutting down may be a good thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Think about it - let's say Spamhaus is effective enough that they're stemming the tide of spam (which I've noticed has increased 50% in the past month or two).
So they shut down, and everyone using them suddenly gets lots more spam. Those who only use Spamhaus as a suggestion won't notice too much, but now everyone else realizes how big the problem really is. Which may call for action, like revamping the email infrastructure. It only takes one important congresscritter to suddenly have his blackberry reject emails from other congresscritters because it was full of spam. Or heck, imagine government paralyzed because they're spending more time deleting than responding.
Sometimes you have to realize that spam filters may be part of the problem - those who rely on them start to get a distorted idea of how much spam is out there. So turning off the filters for a few weeks may be a better solution to get people moving.
Or rapidly degenerate email to the point where the only use of it is spam, so no one bothers using it anymore. Which would be a good solution too as it can lead to fast implementation of next-generation email solutions. (Forums have replaced mailing lists, IM has replaced quick "how are you doing?" emails, and so on). If people's phones ring multiple times a minute... or if a junk fax started using up all your paper and toner/ink in the course of an hour...
Like I for once would like to kill bounce emails - you'd be surprised at the number of MTAs and spamfilters that contribute to the spam problem - their bounce replies are spam basically (no viable From address, etc). And those that whitelist, well, depending on the mood, I intentionally whitelist them. If they spam me because they don't want spam and don't bother believing that From addresses can be forged, too bad.
Sometimes letting the broken thing (SMTP) break down is a good thing rather than continuously patching something to do what it really can't do.
Ignorance is bliss... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe we should disable _all_ spam filters for one day.
Let's call it "Spam awareness day" and show the journalists just what Spamhaus etc. really do.
This ruling is a total farse IMHO, but with ignorant journalists, judges and so called "experts"
wakeup call (Score:4, Insightful)
So far, the war has been fought by amateurs vs. increasingly aggressive and organized criminals. But the amateurs have been fairly successful, so nobody really noticed. Open the floodgates and let everyone realize that spam really is a problem that needs to be dealt with, once and for all.
One last time... (Score:5, Insightful)
If they had done nothing, the court probably would have dismissed the charges for lack of jurisdiction.
If they had asked the court to drop the charges because they were a UK entity and a US court doesn't have jurisdiction, the court probably would have agreed.
But no, they explicitly asked for the case to be transferred to federal court, implicitly acknowledging the jurisdiction of the court and then they never came back.
The judge is saying, "You asked for this. We went to a lot of trouble to accommodate you. Where are you? If you don't show up, I'll have to find for the plantiff."
They shot themselves in their own foot.
Matthew Prince has a good summary [securiteam.com].
Missing the underlying problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Think differently...
From what I've heard, spam constitutes something over half the traffic on the Internet. Think of blocking half of a water main, or half of a sewer, or half the lanes on the highway. No doubt at all that this would be considered more than just "an annoyance," but that's pretty much what spam is doing each and every day. Look at the legislative "encouragement" to build more bandwidth and the end-to-end compromises being threatened, but in reality we're wasting over half of what we've got, already. Spam is much more serious than just an annoyance.
How's this for an idea - link it to terrorism!
Imagine for a moment that you want to transmit secret, untracable terror plans all around the world. Simply put "V1agra" on the subject line, send it to EVERYBODY, and you're pretty much guaranteed that NOBODY will read it. You could probably send your plans in clear-text safely, but steganography would be advisable.
So here it is... Spam is really a secret terrorist communications channel! It needs to be stopped!
Re:Missing the underlying problem (Score:5, Informative)
Extra cheese and sausage for spammers (Score:5, Funny)
From: david linhardt
Subject: mail fraud and identity theft
Be advised, I am aware that members of the spamhaus organization are using my personally identifiable information to fraudelently order products and services on my behalf. I know this is true because I mistakenly provided you with my home address...
Link to the spammers website (Score:3, Informative)
Too bad so sad (Score:3, Interesting)
What else can we do (Score:3, Interesting)
"They are thumbing their nose at an order of the court," Loethen said. "What else can we do?"
How about trying to sue them in the UK, unless they are just interested in taking advantage of the way the US legal system works - which seems more like the case.
This was a good court decision. (Score:5, Insightful)
A. First, Spamhaus argued that this case belongs in U.S. Federal Court. That's mistake number one; you don't tell a judge that your case belongs in a certain court, and then refuse to show up. Even odder, they say this, "But, to ensure this doesn't happen we are working with lawyers to find a way to both appeal/contest the ruling and stop further nonsense by this spammer." The question is, why didn't you guys work with lawyers before hand?
Take a look at http://www.spamhaus.org/legal/answer.lasso?ref=3 [spamhaus.org] . Spamhaus makes a compelling case there as to why the court should not have jurisidction over them. So why would you _not_ present this evidence in court; especially after you've already told a court that they DO have jurisidiction over you.
B. Look at Spamhaus.org (or a mirror, if you can now). What logos does Spamhaus display on their "About Spamhaus" page. I'll cut and paste the organization names, about whom Spamhaus says, "Spamhaus works with many Law Enforcement agencies and cyber-crimes teams worldwide, assisting investigations and compiling evidence on illegal spam operations. Our main working partners are:"
1. Federal Bureau of Investigation
2. National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance
3. United States Postal Inspection Service
4. National White Collar Crime Center
5. Internet Crime Complaint Center
6. Department of the Treasury
7. Internal Revenue Service
When you work with this group of U.S. government services, and claim that they are your first line of working partners, it's difficult to argue that U.S. courts should have no standing over you.
C. Spamhaus does business in the U.S.!
Spamhaus makes this claim, which I do think is one that would require discussion in court:
"
Claim: An Illinois court has jurisdiction over Spamhaus in the United Kingdom because Spamhaus does business in the State of Illinois.
This statement is false. Spamhaus does no business in the State of Illinois. Spamhaus has no office or agent in the State of Illinois nor any affiliation with any Illinois resident or entity. Spamhaus is a British organization and is not subject to Illinois County Court jurisdiction. Spamhaus advises Mr. Linhardt to re-file his case in the proper venue, a law court in the United Kingdom.
"
Consider that Spamhaus has a public mirror (perhaps several) in the U.S., over which Spamhaus has tight control. Furthermore, consider that Spamhaus sells a Datafeed service to U.S. residents. On http://www.spamhaus.org/datafeed/pricecalculator.l asso [spamhaus.org] , prices are listed in Dollars, not Euros.
Given that they sell this service, and given that they manage servers in the U.S., it is difficult to argue that they don't do business in the U.S., and certainly is an issue for substantive debate. Not something you can win by default, and certainly something that a non-technical Judge would (fairly) decide without a defense.
Summary: The Judge, in this case, made a good decision. A company brought forth a fairly legitimate looking claim, one which may be somewhat feeble but had some legal grounding. The defense argured that it was not within Illinois's jurisidction, which *is* true, and then argued that it belonged in Federal court. The illinois judge said, "fine". Spamhaus then proceeded to ignore the federal court.
What did they expect?
They should have argued from the begining that this did not belong in U.S. courts at all, and the proper jurisidiction would be Britain. That *might* have been a lengthy discussion, because Spamhaus does, indeed, offer services within the U.S. for pay, as well as free listing services; and being listed on a spam list may or may not interact with libel laws.
Either way, I think Spamhau
There seems to be a lot of failure to 'get it' (Score:5, Insightful)
There are two kinds of jurisdiction ('jxn'): subject matter jxn and personal jxn. Both must be proper in order for a court to hear a case.
Subject matter jxn deals with matters like standing, the subject of the case (e.g. is it a patent case), diversity, etc. It's really not an issue in this case, and will only crop up once, and be briefly noted later on.
Personal jxn deals with whether the parties in the case are within the court's jxn. American law generally has very broad personal jxn. The limits on this are basically those put in place by state and federal law, including the Constitution. This is because jxn is basically the extent to which the court is permitted to reach by law, and those are the relevant laws. Whether the court can effectively exercise power over people is an entirely different matter -- fleeing to a faraway country or holing up in a bunker with a lot of guns are the sorts of tactics used to escape the law, and don't have anything to do with jurisdictional matters.
In any case, jxn is how far the law allows the court to reach, regardless of practical matters of enforcement. The law generally put it to be as far as possible, ultimately limited by the Constitution. It could arbitrarily be shorter, but this is not common.
There are several ways in which a court may find that it has personal jxn. The easiest is when someone is physically present. But physical presence is not actually required. For example, if you are a resident of a state, but are not currently in the state, there is still personal jxn. Or if you are not a resident of a state, but drive a vehicle in the state, you are deemed by law to have consented to the matter of personal jxn by driving there. (Again: personal jxn is what the law says it is, not what you think it ought to be, and totally apart from the matter of whether enforcement is practical)
Still, when the applicable law is simply that personal jxn extends as far as the Constitution permits, the question becomes one of Constitutional law: does the guarantee of due process in the Constitution permit jxn to be exercised here? The traditional test to find out is the minimum contacts test.
Roughly, there must be at least a minimum number of contacts of sufficient quantity and quality that it would be fair and just to exercise personal jxn.
For example: did the defendant engage in business dealings in the jxn? Did they avail themselves of the benefits of the jxn's law (e.g. by entering into contracts which the jxn's law could be called upon to enforce in some manner). Do they solicit business within the jxn? Do they sell goods or services, directly or indirectly, to people in the jxn?
The more contacts there are, the more likely that jxn will stand. If there are few contacts, then it is less likely. However, where a suit is closely connected to a particular contact, personal jxn may be found with less of a contact than if there is no such connection. (E.g. if you only do business with one person in California, then probably only that person would be able to sue you there based on that contact)
Some contacts are too attenuated or minor to support personal jxn, but they're the exception, particularly where we're dealing with business matters.
The other important thing to note about personal jxn is that it is waivable. The law permits someone to consent to personal jxn. You often see this sort of thing in contracts. But going to court to defend yourself will count too. If you want to argue that a court lacks personal jxn over you, then you have to do so in a very precise fashion, lest you inadvertantly waive it, irrevocably. This might seem odd to you, but let me reiterate: jxn is what the law says it is, and the law says that personal jxn is waivable, and has to be brought up in a very specific way, at a very specific time (immediately, basically), or else it is waived. It has nothing to do with what country you're in (unless that matt
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Re:Shoulda seen this coming... (Score:4, Funny)
Much as I'd love to see that happen, since it would demolish ICANN once and for all, I seriously doubt it.
In other news: Spamhaus LLC (http://www.spamhaus.org.uk) experienced a temporary decrease in reachability today as one of its redundant domains became unreachable. Unnamed officials at Spamhaus have warned that the situation is expected to deteriorate somewhat when the US-based servers in its worldwide fault-tolerant network are shut down, and to expect slight increases in lookups due to this. One official was quoted as saying, "Backhoes, DDOS attacks, daft overreaching judges, it's all damage we're set up to route around."
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Yeah, because they just decided to let an $11.7 million default judgment fall into place so they could say "naner naner boo boo" to a US Court. Not even close.
They were trying to prevent themselves from becoming a target for a flurry of lawsuits from spammers everywhere who would ostensibly seek to clear their good name when in reality they'd just be trying to freely push t
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ummmm yea...
You do know that Spamhaus appeared in the original Illinois state court only to request a change of venue to a federal court, right? In other words, they showed up, said "You state guys have no jurisdiction in this case, it needs to go to a federal court.", thus admitting that the feds *do have* jurisdiction over this case. After hav
Re:Shoulda seen this coming... (Score:4, Funny)
Thank your.
Re:Shoulda seen this coming... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Shoulda seen this coming... (Score:5, Interesting)
Works the other way too dude.
Let's say that you're posting WWII revisionism on an american website. You're protected by the 1st amendment.
Now the website is browsable from... say... France. France has laws against revisionism, so your post is a crime as far as the french law is concerned. Since your post arrived to france, it falls under french juridiction, your crime -- in your own opinion -- was comitted in France even though there was no crime comitted in the USA (interresting isn't it?), and you could be extraded to France to be judged and put in prison.
Fun isn't it?
Becomes much funnier when you put "interresting" countries into play, like, say, China.
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And it's very wrong of you to claim that the judge is incompetent. Because Spamhaus refuses to go to court and present its side of the story, the judge is only hearing one side of the case. He really has no option but to side with e360; the law says that they will win by d
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A Canadian business can do business in the US, or in Cuba, but if you do business in Cuba and in the US, US laws let you sue Canadian businesses also o
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No i do not understand this. In fact someone else mentioned it but it seems silly. If John decides to sue Bobby for X reason....if Bobby defends against X reason or not does prevent Dave from sueing Bobby for X reason. Remember, this is civil, not criminal, and that means the person can be sued a billion times over. So why not defend yourself? Spamhaus
From what I understand (Score:3, Informative)
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Just go and read the statement on the matter on the spamhouse.org website. It is absolute and utter bullshit.
One of my CS teachers before the days of politicall correctness used to say "You cannot have your penis in both hands and your soul in paradise" (to boys) and "There is no such thing as a little bit pregnant" (to the girls).
If they want to comply with US law they go and fight the court case.
If they claim that US law does not apply they tell the USA court to go and shaft themselves wi
Re:Shoulda seen this coming... (Score:5, Interesting)
Spamhaus is in the UK. The court in the US. End of story.
I hope ICANN pulls the DNS records; that will be the final sign for the EU and other parties to take control over their own domains.
If Spamhaus is not liked here, have the US build a huge firewall around the country to "protect" itself.
BULLSHIT (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BULLSHIT (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't that they persued the wrong legal strategy, it's that they persued both of them. Either strategy would have worked. But by changing mid-stride, they screwed themselved.
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Erm, nope...
Most 'other civilized countries' whould have applied, at the very very least, common sense to a judgment. Yes, even when the accused thus not defend himself.
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Of course you wouldn't. It's obviously so stupid as to not bear considering.
So why should a business in the UK worry about complaints from a company in the US that is ITSELF committing acts that are against the law. (In both countries.)
And what portion of the spammer's argument holds up in court? 'We are trying to send millions of emails to people that don't
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not being able to send mail to people because your IP is included in a range of blacklisted IPs is fun too!