ORBS sucked into a black hole!

[Riad S. Wahby]

George at Orwellian.Org wrote:
> #    One popular theory mooted on the Net is that Brown closed down 
> #    the site rather than comply with a New Zealand court order 
> #    demanding that he remove two specific ISPs from the blacklist. 

I know I sound naive asking this, but has something like this ever
happened in the US?  

The way I read this, the NZ court ordered a private publisher of an
enumeration of IP addresses to modify his publication despite the fact
that the IP addresses in question met the criteria for inclusion on
the list.  (ORBS claimed to be a list of open relays, but it was well
known that it included any network that blocked ORBS probes, which
apparently included the two companies in question.)  In addition, even
if it did include networks that didn't fit the stated criteria for
inclusion on the list, it seems to me that the circumstances under
which a particular entry is added to the list are completely
immaterial---for any particular entry on the list, its inclusion only
indicates that the ORBS administrators are not adequately assured that
spam will not originate from the IP address in quesiton.  Doesn't seem
like that could possibly be considered libel.

One might be able to make the case that being listed in ORBS was
damaging in that outgoing email from a listed system would be blocked
by lots of people, but that doesn't seem compelling---people are
_choosing_ to block traffic from your server based on the fact that
they trust the recommendations of ORBS and, according to ORBS, it
cannot be ascertained that spam will not originate from the system.

Like I said, I'm probably just naive.

--
Riad Wahby
rsw at mit.edu
MIT VI-2/A 2002

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