Abusive blacklist

[Dean Anderson]

Terry, you are using an abusive "blacklist". SORBS, like ORBS, has no
qualms about lying about those they don't like.

In our case, they don't like the fact that I revealed their secret spam
support operations. (They scan for open relays and then give that
information to abusers.)

Anyway, one can easilly see that 130.105/16 is not hijacked, nor is
198.3.136/21 hijacked. Neither registrant is out of business. The false
claims of hijacking came from Alan Brown (of ORBS infamy) who was found in
court to be a liar, engaging in defamation and false statements against
ISPs he didn't like, for he personal financial benefit. Alan Brown and
Matthew Sullivan are not authoritative for the registrations and have no
authority to make any kind of statement about their registration.

People who are genuinely interested in anti-spam should shun those who use
such tools for personal attacks. (The Judge in one of the ORBS cases noted
also that Brown was using false ORBS listings as a personal attack, not
based on any genuinely held belief.)

--Dean
--
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 14:44:29 -0500
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-***@cirrus.av8.net>
To: ***@av8.com
Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details

The original message was received at Mon, 10 Jan 2005 14:44:18 -0500
from dakota.av8.net [130.105.19.131]

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<***@ashtonwoodshomes.com>
(reason: 553 5.3.0 <***@ashtonwoodshomes.com>... Message from 130.105.36.66 rejected - see http://www.dnsbl.us.sorbs.net/cgi-bin/lookup?IP= 130.105.36.66)

----- Transcript of session follows -----

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550 5.1.1 <***@ashtonwoodshomes.com>... User unknown
<<< 503 5.0.0 Need RCPT (recipient)

[Arnt Gulbrandsen]

Terry, you are using an abusive "blacklist". SORBS, like ORBS, has no
qualms about lying about those they don't like.
In our case, they don't like the fact that I revealed their secret
spam support operations. (They scan for open relays and then give
that information to abusers.)

Do you mean that they give the information to the general public,
abusers included, or do you mean something else?

Arnt

[william(at)elan.net]

Post by Arnt Gulbrandsen

Terry, you are using an abusive "blacklist". SORBS, like ORBS, has no
qualms about lying about those they don't like.
In our case, they don't like the fact that I revealed their secret
spam support operations. (They scan for open relays and then give
that information to abusers.)

Do you mean that they give the information to the general public,
abusers included, or do you mean something else?

I think Dean meant that they scanned for open relays and compiled blacklist
and made that blacklist available for general public including by zone
transfer (i.e. abuser could easily get entire list). That is not an issue
any more as almost nobody runs open relay any more and abusers have moved
to other ways to distribute spam (which are even worth - now instead of
simply using somebody elses resources without authorization to relay through
they are hacking and taking over somebody elses machine with specialized
viruses to do that).

[Dean Anderson]

Post by william(at)elan.net

Post by Arnt Gulbrandsen

Terry, you are using an abusive "blacklist". SORBS, like ORBS, has no
qualms about lying about those they don't like.
In our case, they don't like the fact that I revealed their secret
spam support operations. (They scan for open relays and then give
that information to abusers.)

Do you mean that they give the information to the general public,
abusers included, or do you mean something else?

I think Dean meant that they scanned for open relays and compiled blacklist
and made that blacklist available for general public including by zone
transfer (i.e. abuser could easily get entire list).

I thought it might have been unintentional leakage back in 1999. But I
don't think it was unintentional anymore, for a number of reasons. On
several occassions, open relay abusers were tracked back to open relay
"anti-spammers". In one case, a particularly persistent abuser was fired
from his job as an abuse desk person at a large ISP. He posted his
diatribe to spam-l, blaming me for his termination. Even after pointing
out their contibution to open relay abuse, Open relay blacklists made no
attempt to limit access to information Also, no genuine commercial
spammers were ever found abusing open relays. Open relay abuse was always
nonsense: it wasn't genuinely commercial.

And the final clincher is that open relay abuse dropped off to almost
nothing after the open relay blacklists closed. If people not associated
with the blacklists were doing to the abuse, they would have found other
sources. The abusers quit the same time the blacklists quit.

Post by william(at)elan.net
That is not an issue any more as almost nobody runs open relay any more
and abusers have moved to other ways to distribute spam

Actually, there are just as many or more open relays as there has ever
been. The change was that the open relay blacklists have shutdown. The
decline of open relay abuse correlates with the shutdown of those
blacklists.

[Dean Anderson]

Well, I see Terry is _still_ using SORBS, despite knowledge that it is a
revenge list. I guess that's his choice. But it raises the question of
whether his interest in anti-spam is genuine. You can't associate with
Court-proven liars using anti-spam for vendettas and remain credible.

So, I'm just going to point out a few things. These are mostly things that
I've been thinking about recently, relative to abusive blacklists and
such.

As the Judge said about Alan Brown and ORBS:
http://www.iadl.org/ab/AB-Defamation-Domainz.html

Indeed, the very same Alan Brown originated the claims that our IP
addresses were hijacked on spam-l. This was picked up by Matthew Sullivan
of SORBS. Paul Vixie is also discreditably associated with SORBS: he
offered them "bulletproof" hosting after SORBS was booted from XO for AUP
violations for the defamation of Av8 Internet and for threatening "mail
bombing" (IE spamming). In another irony, Vixie doesn't have an AUP. (its
ironic because Vixie demands that everyone have AUPs and enforce them.
Except Vixie. And he has no problem associating with "mail bombers". Hmm.)

Once you really dig into the spam problem, or rather the anti-spam
community (certain parts anyway), its very frequently about vendetta's and
privateering. One wonders who the spammers really are**. There are
precious few people who are actually genuinely interested in spam problems
and those people don't associate with the fakes and abusers.

Anyway, most people don't want anything to do with SORBS after they find
out about SORBS, and look up our listing. And few people use SORBS:
Rarely a message blocked despite their attempt at blocking all of a /16
and all of a /21. That's a lot of mail to try to interfere with. Only the
(temporarily) misled and the Brown/Sullivan/Vixie crowd use it. Well,
Terry clearly has his eyes open about SORBS, and chooses to associate with
the disingenuous, the liars*** (Court-proven even), and the dishonest,
people who aren't really interested in spam problems. The people who are
genuinely interested, don't associate with fakes.

--Dean


**The real spammers seem to mostly comply with CAN-SPAM. So who are the
ones who don't comply with CAN-SPAM? Recall that CAN-SPAM doesn't ban
spam, in fact, it explicitly legalizes spam, so long as spammers comply
with certain practices. The DMA pushed it through, and its essentially the
same as the IEMCC proposal. The spammers love it. The anti-spam community
mostly hates it. But a lot of junk in my emailbox doesn't even comply at
all. "Could it be ", (said in my best
'Michael-Moore-in-George-Bush-school-scene' voice), "that anti-spammers
are sending this non-commercial, non-compliant spam, just like they abused
open relays? Damn. It was them." One wonders who the criminally
CAN-SPAM non-compliant really are.

*** Nick Nicholas (former executive director of MAPS) wrote a manifesto
about "The Truth through Lies"
http://home.pacbell.net/nicnic/johnson.html
Nicholas writes "Johnson's fictional treatment of this historical event
suggests that, paradoxically, the road to truth is paved with lies." Uh
huh. Right. But it explains a lot about that crowd.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 22:19:42 -0500
From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-***@cirrus.av8.net>
To: ***@av8.com
Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details

The original message was received at Thu, 27 Jan 2005 22:19:37 -0500
from sr22.av8.net [198.3.136.5]

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<***@ashtonwoodshomes.com>
(reason: 553 5.3.0 <***@ashtonwoodshomes.com>... Message from 130.105.36.66 rejected - see http://www.dnsbl.us.sorbs.net/cgi-bin/lookup?IP= 130.105.36.66)

----- Transcript of session follows -----

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550 5.1.1 <***@ashtonwoodshomes.com>... User unknown
<<< 503 5.0.0 Need RCPT (recipient)