Perspectives on Spamhaus's Dilemma

The Illinois court that told Spamhaus to stop blocking the spammer filing suit against them — an order which Spamhaus ignored — is now considering ordering ICANN to pull Spamhaus's domain records. While Gadi Evron, whose blog posting is linked above, urges everyone to beat the judge with a clue stick, a guest writer on his blog counsels much greater restraint. Anti-spam lawyer Matthew Prince explains how Spamhaus got into its current pickle — apparently by following conflicting legal advice at two points in the process — and what they might have to do to get out. One spamfighter of my acquaintance says that Spamhaus's SBL and XBL blocklists knock out 75% of the spam at his servers before it hits and requires more CPU-intensive filtering. If ICANN is ordered to unplug Spamhaus from the DNS, and does so, is the Net prepared to deal with a 4-fold increase in spam hitting MTAs overnight?

The odour of bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't going to happen, neither ICANN or the current DNS would ever recover from a scandal like this. Let's just forward all our spam to Governor Blagojevich [illinois.gov].

Re:Its a stupid arguement.

[El Torico]

Wait, we should see both sides of this argument. All of us can read what e360insight has to say at http://www.e360insight.com/case_history.html [e360insight.com], and yes, I mean all of us. Of course, since we are polite, all of us won't do it at the same time, will we?

Also, we can express our concerns directly to them at http://www.e360insight.com/contact.php [e360insight.com]. They were nice enough to have a comment submission form. I hope they have a lot of disk space for submitted comments.

Re:Would you like spam with that?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the judge's email address? I'm sure spammers wouldn't harvest it from Slashdot...

Re:Go ahead - there's ALWAYS a workaround

[Anonymous Coward]

Mind posting instructions for those of us using djbdns? Sorry, I can't afford to get pwned thanks to another BIND bug.

Down with Illinois

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they should just sever all internet connectivity to Illinois.

Re:The Q-Tip Solution...

[MrSquishy]

seems at least as effective as holding your ears and screaming "LA-LA-LA-LA" everytime the court tries to tell you what to do

I can't hold my ears and scream "LA-LA-LA-LA" because of a Q-Tip accident you insensitive clod!

Re:Ghostbusters

[ArsenneLupin]

Not to mention that .uk is member of the "coalition of the willing". Disconnecting it would probably result in the US very rapidly losing its control over Iraq... oh wait!

Re:Ghostbusters

[Eunuchswear]

Get real, Tony is George's bitch, if .UK was disconnected Tony would just say "oh, harder, harder my love" - after all, if .UK isn't disconnected then "Terrorists Win!"

Re:Ghostbusters

[TekPolitik]

In a nutshell: I agree, the Illinois has no dick.

Obviously this is wrong - it has a huge dick who wears a black robe.