On 2008-01-18 at 21:24 -0000, Phil (Medway Hosting) wrote:
> Please excuse my posting of this here, but I felt it was justified. I
> hope I don't offend anyone. Please find below a couple of posts from
> today's mail on the Spam-L forum. Please at least visit the first link
> and inwardly digest the implications !!
The implications for SMTP diagnosis are bad, so it is on-topic somewhat.
However, it's not a clean-cut case.
Please also read the PDF, as I did after this first reading about this
incident; see also
<URL:
http://www.circleid.com/posts/811611_david_ritz_court_spam>.
Learn the facts and don't let this become a hyped-up over-reaction.
Some parts of the technical information the judge relied upon were sheer
lunacy or technically wrong (since when do you invoke "host -l" to do
lookups within an existing TCP session? Either you use host -l which
creates its own, or you have a command which establishes a connection
and then lets you type other built-in sub-commands; host is not one
of those rare programs that actually uses file-descriptor passing).
However, you'll also read that the defendant lied to the court
repeatedly, claiming that Supernews (a company I respect) didn't offer
to help with legal costs, amongst other cited instances. Given that he
destroyed his credibility with perjury and ignoring restraining orders,
it's unsurprising that a judge would side with the group not obviously
lying. It's unfortunate that this was a group who were incompetent and
lying but just not in ways that are obvious to a lay-person.
So typing HELO and VRFY into an SMTP session are now fraudulent,
impersonating a computer. Never mind that the older RFC-series
protocols such as SMTP were deliberately designed to be something a
human could type in. Every mail-admin on this mailing-list is probably
in trouble on that score, now.
I'm hoping that an appeal will reverse many of the findings and restore
sanity whilst still leaving the defendant liable for his perjury. This
guy is not the shining example to hold up as a victim of spammers; more,
an example of how some of the anti-spammers do more harm than the
spammers.
-Phil
