Now if Gilmore would provide an open phone relay...
George at Orwellian.Org
George at Orwellian.Org
Fri Mar 16 02:28:33 PST 2001
UniBlab ran up a $500 LD bill using my calling card.
The little darling.
----
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/172
#
# Spam war gags Gilmore
#
# Verio cuts off EFF co-founder John Gilmore over open mail server.
# By Kevin Poulsen March 15, 2001 5:19 PM PT
#
# Aggressive anti-spam measures by Dallas-based ISP Verio have
# stripped some of the Internet's digerati of the ability to send
# email, and EFF co-founder John Gilmore is calling it censorship.
#
# Gilmore's home network includes what anti-spam crusaders call
# an "open relay" -- a mail server that accepts and forwards email
# from anyone. For decades, the practice was considered central
# to good network citizenship. But in recent years, spammers have
# begun hijacking open relays to multiply, sometimes a thousand
# fold, the number of junk messages they can send at once.
#
# That abuse sparked a campaign by anti-spam activists to close
# the open relays, a campaign that Gilmore, an entrepreneur,
# electronic civil libertarian, and co-founder of the Electronic
# Frontier Foundation (EFF), has little use for.
#
# "It reminds me of the X-ray machines they have in airports and
# the security checks they put people through," says Gilmore. "It
# doesn't actually solve the problem, it just infringes on the
# rights of the innocent."
#
# Even as commercial ISPs began tightening down their mail servers
# -- rejecting outgoing mail from non-subscribers, and forcing
# subscribers to electronically prove their identity before sending
# mail -- Gilmore kept his own mail server open to the world, a
# service he says his friends have come to rely on.
#
# "Part of the reason my friends are using my machine is their
# own ISPs' anti-spam measures prevent them from sending email
# as they move around in the world," says Gilmore. "If one user
# connects to my machine from an unknown address and sends a
# message, my machine forwards it on. It's happy to. That could
# be John Perry Barlow sending email from Africa to his girlfriend."
#
# Gilmore says he shuts down spammers when he detects them, but
# acknowledges that some junk mail gets through his system. Late
# last month, one such spam message -- from a would-be entrepreneur
# offering professional spamming services to the public -- resulted
# in a complaint to Gilmore's ISP, Verio, from an anti-spam group.
#
# Verio's sweeping acceptable-use policy prohibits open relays.
# When Gilmore refused to put fetters on his mail server, the
# company's security department slapped a filter on Gilmore's T1
# net connection Wednesday, blocking outgoing email from his
# network.
#
# A Verio spokesperson did not return a telephone call Thursday.
# Verio security team leader Darren Grabowski declined to comment.
# "What we do is between us and our customer," said Grabowski.
#
# Anti-spam pressure Gilmore believes anti-spam efforts have gone
# too far, and impact the rights of innocent people. "Verio is
# filtering me because they were pressured by a pressure group,
# and they don't have enough intelligence to stand up against that
# pressure."
#
# But the head of the anti-spam business that forwarded the
# complaint to Verio last month says the ISP did the right thing.
#
# "It's been a very long time since open relays were considered
# acceptable on the net," says Julian Haight, owner of SpamCop.net.
# "On today's Internet, things have changed considerably."
#
# SpamCop.net lets netizens easily and automatically track and
# report spammers and open relays, and maintains a blacklist of
# network addresses the company considers spam-friendly. Haight
# acknowledges the influence his organization, and other anti-spam
# efforts, can exert on an ISP, but he says no one has a right
# to operate a service that lends a hand to spammers.
#
# "Freedom of speech is not 100 percent," says Haight. "You're
# not allowed to come into my home to preach to me... Open servers
# are responsible for making copies of unsolicited commercial emails
# and sending it to people who don't want it."
#
# Gilmore argues that by making decisions about what to allow or
# disallow over their network, ISPs risk losing the common carrier
# status that protects them from legal liability for their
# customer's actions.
#
# "Ultimately, they should be a pipe. They shouldn't care what
# content goes through. For them to say, well, we'll send your
# IP packets... except when you send this particular type of IP
# packet, it takes them out of the realm of a common carrier,"
# says Gilmore. "That puts the entire Internet in jeopardy."
6/13/2000 Hannity & Colmbes, Representive Dan Burton, giving his
URL to where he put a report critical of Clinton on the WWW:
"It's at indiana.com"
[confers with someone off-screen]
"It's at indiana.gov.com"
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