Marc Perkel wrote:
>
> Phil Pennock wrote:
>> 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
>>
>>
>
> For what it's worth I alerted the Electronic Frontier Foundation
> (eff.org) about it and there are definitely looking into it. EFF tends
> to win these kind of cases and it will be interesting to see what they
> find out in the next few days.
>
It is also linked on groklaw.
As Phil points out, it is a sorry affair all around.
Just about everything that could be wrong about the 'technology' cited
IS wrong. But little of it is actually germane to the issue in any
case. That's why the 'sideswipe' is so worrisome.
Tortious behaviour and defiance of court orders doesn't rely on whether
information or tools used in the commission were public, private, or
part of human DNA.
One hopes the technical errors are corrected within the process of the
ongoing and separate *criminal* proceedings. That is where expert input
- EFF or other - matters most.
Bill
