Open Relays, Free Speech, and Virus Propagation 488
sirsnork writes: "There is a story about John Gilmore running an open relay that is being used by a virus to propagate running over at Newsbytes. His defence? He wants his friends to be able to send email through his server from whereever they are. You'd think he'd know better." Gilmore has been skirmishing with Verio for some time over his open mail relay. Is it a good thing because it promotes the free flow of information? Is it bad for promoting the free flow of spam? Do the ethics change because someone writes a virus that uses the server to propagate? Interesting questions.
Jackass (Score:2, Insightful)
It's bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
He should at least know how to lock the server down to use SMTP Authorization. Even better, if he wants his friends to communicate freely, he should give them Unix shell access. Open relays being free speech? YEAH RIGHT! There's no goverment there, so the First Admendment does not apply! (If you think otherwize, REREAD your Admendments.)
Re:Why an open relay? (Score:2, Insightful)
God forbid... (Score:5, Insightful)
Invalid Justification (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, everyone knows that this isn't the reason for his running of the relay - it's simply an issue of free speech, as I understand.
I wonder how long... (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone's right! (Score:5, Insightful)
Verio has every right not to sell Internet service to people who want to use it to run open mail relays. John Gilmore has no right to demand Internet service form Verio.
MAPS, ORDB, ORBZ, and the other blackhole lists have every right to tell me that John Gilmore is running an open relay. John Gilmore has no right to gag the blackhole lists' truthful speech about him.
I have every right to refuse to accept email from John Gilmore's open relay. I may do this on my own information, or on the advice of a blackhole list. John Gilmore has no right to force me to allow him or his traffic on my property.
So everyone's right, as long as everyone stays within their rights.
It's his right to run an open relay (Score:2, Insightful)
It's also your right as an end user or mail server administrator to block traffic from his server / network.
A common carrier, however, does not have the right to block his traffic because they want to stop spam.
This is really clear-cut.
Re:SMTP Authentication!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
SMTP supports an authentication mechanism. Normally one would think you would want this hooked up to
One also can use a One Time Password (OTP) scheme. In this case, the password will be stored on the server in plaintext, and we use a challange/response system to authenticate. The server sends a challange, and then you do some cryptographic hash functions with the password and the challange to create a response, you then send the response back. The server can duplicate the steps, and if they match you are authenticated.
This way, one can setup a "smtp account" with a name like relay (not a real unix account in
I do this with qmail (with a patch for qmail-smtpd.c) and I use the same smtp server from my parents house, my apt in NYC and Columbia University (and multiple other places I have visited)
Re:What's his IP address? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've done this plenty of times. I guess that's why the last time I came home my air conditioning was set on 50, the oven was still on, and all my french bread pizzas were gone.
Jokes aside, there are sometimes that you just have to take responsibility for something. And this is one of those times. His refusal to close it is just plain a) apathy b) want for attention c) pathetic.
Ok, maybe his defense is the same of that used by file sharing programs, which unfortunately might make hypocrites out of a lot of us who complain, but anybody with common sense would know how to handle this situation. Don't be rude, Gilmore, close the damn relay!
Re:It's bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Great example (Score:4, Insightful)
It all boils down to this: While 99% of any given set of a population may be honest, ethical or safe, there is always that 1% that will take advantage of that very fact. In this case, Gilmore wants the freedom to do what he wishes with his mail server, and though most people respect that, a malious few have used that trust to damage others.
You can extend this to any argument: While most of us respect fair-use laws, there are those that take advantage of those laws and pirate music and movies. While most people with concealed gun permits have honorable intentions, there is always a small contingent that does not.
I always say, you have the right to [ speak freely, copy music, carry a gun ] until it infringes on my rights. The problem is, determining who's rights are being infringed on.
This episode is a great reminder that the issue is much more complicated that most people are willing to admit.
Freedom to shit in your neighbour's garden (Score:2, Insightful)
At least it's well known so it's easy to add to the spam blockers. Hope he didn't have anything he wanted to send me in an email.
TWW
if his issue is free expression.... (Score:3, Insightful)
additionally, i gather he has an account with verio, which has certain provisions you must agree with to have an account, one of which i imagine compells him to avoid running an open relay. If he has a problem with these provisions, he needs to find a new provider, and if he can't find a provider w/out those provisions, he needs to suck it up and realize that in the civilized world, open relays are bad.
Yelling anything during a movie is expression, but unless you're at Rocky Horror, it just isn't appropriate, and could get you kicked out of the theatre. If you take passing spam as yelling, and the internet as the theatre, it makes a decent analogy.
open relay == P2P (Score:1, Insightful)
Bandwidth conservation (Score:5, Insightful)
May I suggest instead of bitching on slashdot you take a second and send an e-mail to the John and let him know how you feel. Practice your first amendment rights. Visit his web page as well. Perhaps the "slashdot affect" can do some good. Take a second and stop being so apathetic and send John Gilmore an e-mail.
Re:Jackass (Score:4, Insightful)
It is unfortunate that Verio caved. On his page he says: Unfortunately, he doesn't seem realize that HE is the thug who is forcing Verio to change how they run their network.
Verio doesn't honor its agreements (Score:2, Insightful)
Verio has every right not to sell Internet service to people who want to use it to run open mail relays.
No, actually, Verio doesn't. It's bound by the terms under which it (indirectly) acquired The Little Garden (tlg.net), which very clearly specified [toad.com] that there was to be no blocking of service on grounds of content.
Remember this, if you're ever tempted to business with Verio: It breaks its commitments. Accordingly, you can't believe a word it says.
Re:What's his IP address? (Score:4, Insightful)
The address of the server, Toad.com, is one of 25 open mail relays hard-coded by its unidentified author into the W32.Yaha worm, according to analyses by anti-virus firms Symantec and Sophos.
Quoth my shell:
# nslookup toad.com
/etc/mail/BannedIPs /etc/rc.d/init.d/sendmail restart
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: toad.com
Address: 140.174.2.1
# echo 140.174.2.1 >>
#
Re:Everyone's right! (Score:4, Insightful)
So what? I'd say this might be a problem if he couldn't get in touch with Verio's administrators -- but he doesn't have any right to send email to Verio's other customers from his open relay. Even if he could not email Verio's administrators, I don't think that would be an issue of rights -- more an issue of Verio's competence or good sense. If he thinks they're incompetent, insensible, or malicious, he shouldn't keep sending them money.
I don't think this changes the rights involved, although it may be a valid comment on Verio's desirability as one's ISP. (Spam filtering makes an ISP more desirable to me, but may make it less desirable to John Gilmore. Neither of us have the right, though, to impose our preference on any particular ISP.)
In general, do customers of a business have the right to force that business to change the services it offers? No. I don't have the right to force McDonald's to serve me a charbroiled hamburger made from USDA Choice beef, when all they are selling is fried hamburgers made from inferior beef. In fact, I wouldn't even have that right if there were no high-quality burger joints in my town.
McDonald's thinks it can do better by selling burgers I don't like. Good thing I don't have to eat them. Verio thinks it can do better by selling Internet service John Gilmore doesn't like. Good thing he doesn't have to use it. I think I can do better by not accepting mail from John Gilmore's open relay. Good thing I can choose to do so.
Re:It's bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, to address your question: Only in a few states is it illegal to spam, and even then the spam has to violate a few basic rules. Fortunately, spammers are stupid (Rule #1) and spammers lie (Rule #3). There is no federal anti-spam statue because our (USA) goverment is that slow! (The only good thing they're doing about spam is prosecuting the fraud that results from the spams to begin with. Eh, as much as we can get, we'll take it).
BUT, the entire Internet community has said "Close your servers, they are being abused." The guy hasn't. It's being abused. Negligence? Aparently so. Conspiracy to spam? Maybe. The server's listed on blocklists. The guy hasn't fixed it yet. He's virtually required, or his ISP gets wind. His ISP is Verio. They've been sent notice. Neither he nor Verio has fixed the problem in a timely matter. The only recorse is to block all of Verio, because they're not playing nice.
Now, you say about outlawing the tools. Is Napster/Gnutella commiting copyright violations? No, they make software that shares files eazily. Any file. Every file. You configure it. It's a *general purpose tool*. It's like a car or a computer. That's ok, we shouldn't outlaw that. We should outlaw *specific purpose tools* -- programs which have only one or two functions which allow the user to break laws. Spamware falls under specific purpose tools. E-mail gatherers/spiders fall under specific purpose tools.
Re:It's bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even better yet, give them SSH access. Then they can port-forward to his mail server from the inside, where there are no open relay problems.
Either way, if he's really only leaving the relay open for his friends, and not for so-called "friends" whom he's never met before, he should make them prove their identity as his friends through some means of authentication. There is no reason that I can think of that should require him to run an un-authenticated server so that a handful of people can use it.
Missing point... (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs are out there to make a living, like the rest of us. The reality is that spammers are people who don't care about inflicting what we call a "negative externality" on everybody else. That means they are inflicting a cost on those who have to read through spam, or figure out how to block/filter it, and the ISPs who have to carry large volumes of unsolicited commercial email. While ORBZ, MAPS, etc. may be annoying, these organizations do serve a function. Gilmore is free to run his open relay on his T1, but it's akin to parking your Ferrari in the middle of Harlem, with the keys in the car, and the driver's side door open. Technically, you may not be legally responsible, but ethically, if somebody walks into that car and goes joy riding and gets into a crash killing/maiming others, well, what the hell did you expect?
Society does get to set rules about permissible behavior, and we do get to enforce them by exclusion. Hell, if 40% of ISPs (by volume, or by number, I don't know) use MAPS, ORBZ, by their own choice it's probably for a reason. And frankly, I'd rather use an ISP that does, because I don't want to be on the receiving end of any more spam than I already get.
Gilmore may be right that RBLs are not the correct long term solution. I've heard it said before, so I won't take credit for it - the correct solution is a change in Internet standards - make it more "costly" in some way (bandwidth or other) to send bulk emails. This would bring the economic cost back to the spammer and remove or reduce the negative externality. Make it so it doesn't pay to spam. And no, I don't have the solution to this problem, but I could imagine alternatives to SMTP/mail routing procedures that address the problem. Of course somebody might argue that this just reduces the utility of email. Ah well. Until then, for god sakes, close your open relays.
Re:Verio doesn't honor its agreements (Score:5, Insightful)
Refusing to provide Internet service to an open mail relay is not "blocking of service on grounds of content." The attribute of being an open mail relay is a formal property of a mail server. It is defined without reference to the content of the messages transmitted or rejected by that mail server.
If Verio were blocking every message that contained the word "spam", then they would be blocking on the basis of content. If they were refusing service to John Gilmore because of the political views he expresses using that service, they would be blocking on the basis of (intended or past) content. They aren't doing that. They aren't inspecting the content of the messages at all -- just the formal (and thus content-neutral) attributes of the transmitting host.
Let's say Verio goes into the bookselling business, and promises to sell any book regardless of its content. I publish pornographic novels, and you publish travel books. One month, we both decide to publish books of our respective genres which weigh one ton apiece and are the size of a small car. Verio chooses not to sell these particular books, on the grounds that they will not fit on its shelves and will cause damage to its facilities due to their weight.
I then complain that Verio lied, and is not selling my pornographic book because of its content. Is my complaint valid? No, it is not. The decision wasn't on the basis of the content of the book, but its form. Verio chooses not to sell books which weigh a ton, regardless of their content, be they travel books or porn.
A Sample E-mail that I sent (Score:3, Insightful)
To: gnu@toad.org
Cc: gnu@eff.org, drg@verio.net
Subject: RE: Your fight with Verio
Dear Sir,
I find myself in an unusual position, agreeing with Verio. They (Verio) isn't trying to censor your mail, it is trying to prevent your mail server from being used by people to spread SPAM, viruses and other vermin of the e-mail world. It has nothing to do with trying to censor your free speech, or your opinions.
Allow me to provide a parallel this for you. Say you maintain a building on public property with a printing press. You leave the building unlocked so that your neighbor can use it as well. You do this because making a key for your friend is "just too much trouble". The building starts being used by violent gangs and an anarchist who builds his bombs there. The public ask you nicely to lock the building so that this activity will stop. You refuse saying that they are trying to censor you because you have a printing press in the building. That is patently untrue you are in affect aiding and abetting criminals by your negligence.
As an administrator that has to defend against SPAM attacks, sometimes coming by the hundreds and thousands for small domain that has at most 10 mailboxes I have no sympathy for you. This is not about free speech, this is about theft, denial of service and common sense.
aaron@NoitalianSpam-carsPlease.com
Re:Why doesn't Gilmore? (Score:2, Insightful)
I didn't have any sympathy last year, and I have even less now. Just because one is an 'Internet pioneer' does that abdicate him of *any* responsibity for being a poor sys-admin?
What verio wanted was symple. He just wanted some publicity and attention.
Not quite.. (Score:1, Insightful)
OK, while I loathe MS, and will dis them every chance I get, I gotta say that they're not at fault here.
Spam is the only reason that open relays are bad. MS's security isn't. Worms or virii, while disturbingly common in MS-land, have no bearing on open SMTP servers at all - they use the victim's SMTP server to spread.
Gilmore & Verio (Score:4, Insightful)
As to why he's not taken steps to make his relay more responsible it's anyone's guess. Gilmore likely has the skills himself and certianly knows enough folks who could do it properly in a minute. If he's doing it as some way to support anonymity he could doubtless put in place mechanisms that would offer that but still prevent spew.
With every "right" there is a "responsibility." (Score:2, Insightful)
Frankly, I don't blame his ISP if the cut his access off completely! His negligence is costing his ISP bandwidth and hurting their reputation as well.
The virus writer is a criminal, but his refusal to close his open relay makes him a willing accomplice and just as guilty as if he wrote the virus himself. A wheelman is just as guilty as the bank-robber even though he never sets foot in the bank. Someone who helps with a crime, is a criminal themselves.
It really is too bad that people abuse services like this. The world would be a much nicer place if we just all played well together.
Re:It's bad. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's his fault that they are able to, however. He is aware of the potential for harm and does nothing (or very little) to abate the problem.
The question is really this: does Verio have the right to cut him off? I'd say they do. It's their network, they receive lots of complaints, ill-will and their other customers suffer because of this man's actions.
The difference between his situation and the file-sharing services is this: He is buying a service from Verio, they have a right to set the terms of service. They are not a government entity, they are not bound by any first amendment considerations -- even if this is a free speech issue, which I would say it is not.
OTOH, the file-sharing services have done nothing wrong by providing their service. The record companies should be going after individual users, not Kazaa or Napster or Morpheus if they're guilty of trading copyrighted material. They offer a legitimate service and there is no easy way to filter "legal" content from "illegal" content. There are easy ways to filter who can use a mail server and who can't. The fact is that this jackass doesn't want to set up authentication, which would solve the problem quite handily
Does this guy's open relay have legitimate uses? Sure, but the fact is he's not providing it on his own network -- he's providing it on someone else's service. Verio has the right -- even the responsibility -- to terminate his service. The whole thing about MAPS and so forth is a red herring -- they simply publish a list of offending servers, which many ISPs and users choose to subscribe to. If people didn't feel so strongly about getting spam, they wouldn't use these lists.
I don't believe the record companies should have the right to terminate the existence of a service that might infringe on their interest when it also has legitimate uses -- they should have to pursue the people who are actually guilty of sharing copyrighted material. Whether Morpheus or Kazaa should cancel the service of people who abuse their service or assist the RIAA in prosecuting them is the real question. They probably should, though that would make them very unpopular.
The fact here is that the RIAA is loathe to try to sue 200,000 people who are illegally copying material because that would be a PR disaster. Even if they could make their case in court, they would piss off millions of people -- and that's not good for business. Verio is already pissing off people by allowing this open relay to continue to exist.
Now that I've spent my moderation points (Score:3, Insightful)
One, John Gilmore is not some dipshit with DSL. Take a look at <a href="http://www.toad.com/gnu/">his webpage</a>. He is one of the founding members of the EFF. He knows what he's doing-- technically, morally, and legally.
Two, he's not sending spam. He's not enabling it, or allowing it. This "virus" doesn't exploit his computers, it exploits other dipshits, and then sends mail through his relay. But Spammers could send their mail through any other open mail relay (there are plenty0) -- but plenty don't. There are other ways to send spam. The virus could be written to use any open relay, why does it target his?
Maybe his definition of "friends" include people he wouldn't necessarily trust with personal accounts on his service. Maybe they include people he hasn't met personally. Would you deny strong encryption to people in countries whose government would supress their opinions, if expressed openly? No, but you would deny them the ability to send email?
This is a ridiculous scenario. No one in China or Iraq is going to use John Gilmore's mail server. But he's making a point. And the point isn't just about radicals in bad bad countries. Wouldn't it be nice if there were phones on every block and they were free to use? If everyone who could chipped in a little, the cost of sending email would drop sufficiently. Not to mention the increase in efficiency. Why should the email I send to my neighbor have to go to MAE-WEST and back? Do I really want every piece of mail I send to be routed through Verio or UUNet once they've got carnivores in place. The FBI can't put one in every geek's basement, but they can place them at strategic upstream locations and catch a huge majority the way we're currently set up.
The problem is spam, not open relays. Don't ban guns, or cars, or forks because people may do bad things. Spam will still come, in larger amounts than ever, even if all open relays are closed.
You wouldn't accept a company that has multiple expliots in their product to just advice all their customers to just disable the service that has the most frequently used exploit. Should we ban all webservers because Code Red took advantage of a vulnerability in IIS? Browsers because of bubble boy (an Active X exploit)?
This is a flawed analogy because there are other products that do not suffer from these exploits, and because these were coding flaws by one company. But other implementations could potentially be dangerous. Netscapes brown alert?
What about porn -- should we let net filters block anything that may be considered inappropriate for children?
Let's treat the problem, not one of the symptoms. Open relays enable spam. So does DSL. So does weak passwords. So does Hotmail. Is there any question where more spam comes from, toad.com or hotmail.com?
Wouldn't it be nice to live in a would where spam is not sent? You won't get there by ignoring the problem. Blackhole lists are like burying your head in the sand. They don't even save much on bandwidth. And they're getting further behind in the battle against spammers.
Re:God forbid... (Score:2, Insightful)
An open relay has similar properties, except that it's even easier to abuse since the abusers can be from all over the world.
Re:What's his IP address? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd love to see your statement if a cable company went after someone whoi did that.
In other news: Just because you leave your car unlocked doesn't mean you want it stolen, either.
Free Speech or Free Noise? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to apply the usual ethics about freedom of speech, you ought to require him to use some form of authentication for his friends, to ensure that their speech is accessable (since he won't be blacklisted) and free of excessive noise (spam, viruses). VPN tunneling, IMAP, shell accounts, webmail, authenticated POP, and POP over SSH come to mind.
Of course, I'm assuming that spam and viruses are not valuable examples of free speech in action, a view that may be difficult to justify. I consider them to not be speech for the same reason that I don't think the signals generated by a garage door opener are speech--they are signals, possibly meaningful in some context, whose intended purpose as used is to cause some event to occur. The spammer says, "I push this button, and our monthly page views go up!"; the virus distributor says, "I push this button, and 3y3 0wnz j00!"; I say, "I push this button, and my garage opens!" In none of these cases is the button pusher trying to convey any information to another person. If the signal (virus, merchandise, scam) is itself an object of conversation, I can see it being speech, but that context isn't relevant to open mail relays.
Not a jackass. A cypherpunk. (Score:5, Insightful)
In this day and age of government snooping, Carnivore, shutting down anti-globalization websites, justifying mass surveillance of all citizens under the rubric of anti-terrorism, and the other atrocities reported every damn day on
Look, let's be frank here: spammers will always find open relays in Asia. Always. China's recent baby steps forward notwithstanding, you know that this is true. This is part of the spammer's job. If spammers couldn't find open relays, they'd just purchase ISP accounts, start flooding out of their own servers, and move on when they get cut off. They sometimes do it now, even though open relays aren't hard to find.
Toad, on the other hand, is just a way for the privacy conscious to have a little conrol over how their e-mail gets routed without having to work like a spammer to keep up-to-date lists of Asian relays. It's just an added layer of obfuscation. Shutting it down won't curb spam or viruses, it'll just take away a privacy tool.
I've said this before (Score:3, Insightful)
Many others here have reiterated the things I've been saying all along, that there's no excuse for his open relay and that there are numerous solutions he could easily employ to stop spammers from using his mail server, so I won't belabor those points.
There is one point that still needs to be made, though. Despite his past record as champion of the Internet oppressed, John Gilmore is a danger to the rights of anyone who gets in his way, be they oppressed or oppressor. He is *filthy* rich from his days at Sun (and perhaps other things), and is apparently willing to throw his weight around with no regard for legal costs if he feels like making some sort of point. The problem is, he's a cantankerous, arrogant person with often strange views on right and wrong. There is a seeming randomness to the causes he takes on these days, and in cases like this, where the entity he opposes is clearly in the right, he does nothing but hurt the Internet community at large. Not only is his relay a spam engine, causing immediate but somewhat localized harm, his fight with Verio threatens to undermine an ISPs ability to enforce reasonable acceptable use policies. This latter point has broad implications for the entire Internet.
I see him as a sort of "legal terrorist". His cause is on the side of a very small faction (spammers, lazy admins, and himself - though he might also fall into one of the preceding categories), he has an undue amount of firepower (vast quantities of money to pay lawyers) and has a fanatic will to use that firepower. He is known for taking on causes, sometimes without due research, simply because it offends his often skewed viewpoint. And with the EFF behind him, with its history of legal success against the toughest of opponents, most people quail when confronted with his opposition. Spammers generally do not have the werewithal or the reputation to stand against an ISP who shuts them down. Gilmore has indirectly taken on their cause, and because of the size of his guns, might actually help them in ways they could never help themselves.
I have had dealings with Mr. Gilmore in the past, and feel obliged to say that, in my opinion, he was arrogant, uninformed and misguided. He is the quintessential kneejerk activist. He has done good things for Internet freedom, but his obtuse actions in recent history seem to say that it's time for this horse to be put out to pasture. Mr. Gilmore, I think it's time to pack your bags and move to a beach in Bermuda and enjoy your piles of money. Or perhaps feelings of guilt at being uncommonly rich are what drives you to do these things?
Shooting the messenger.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Internet used to be about openness and trust. Back before Canter & Siegel; the "Green Card Lawyers [mit.edu]", back before the Net was opened-up for the Dot Com's and commercial postings.
Back then, having an open relay was no big deal (it was even expected) because we were all friends working for the betterment of the Net, and each other. There was no "cut off their air" because the Internet was a cooperative; their air was our air. A network gains strength as a whole whenever any part of it is strengthened.
That was the Internet that Gillmore grew-up on (and helped found). Perhaps you can't remember, or perhaps you were just too young to remember what it was like back then.
That was back before the Fall of '93.
First it was spamming shutting down USENET groups, which begot CancelMoose.
Next we started seeing email SPAM, which begot procmail and it's necessary filters.
Then port 25 was blocked, and peer-to-peer email was to be nevermore.
Now we're starting to reap what we have sown.
The Internet will soon be owned by one or maybe two large network providers (AOL/Time Warner and/or MSN) and every packet you send will travel only with their permission; through paid transport or non at all. Intelligent routers will give these network providers the ability to block (or charge for) any activity they think they can make a buck off of.
And once there's a single majority player, it's all over. Internetworking always benefits the smaller organization more than the larger one (because it gains access to more resources in the bargain) but only benefits both sides until one gains a majority (at which point providing network access for your competitor cost more incrementally than providing the resource yourself).
We have lost the Internet to those who would claim it as their own and carve it up over those who come in good faith and trust to build and to share.
Think about those whom you loath the most, and what characterizes them all. We hate airline shoe bombers because they exploit the trust inherent in our air travel system to harm us where we are vulnerable. As a result, we must all remove our nail clippers when we fly.
We hate the RIAA and the MPAA because their actions to shutdown legitimate sharing of copyright materials. Their actions are a response not to the person who wants to rip the CD for their car, but to those who abuse the trust by ripping a track and making it available to all comers over the internet. And we (most of us here, anyway) hate them because of the price we must now pay as a result. We may find ourselves losing Fair Use forever because of the actions of a few individuals who's use was anything but fair.
We rant for columns on end about Microsoft's abuses of the market; and what we complain about is the abuse of trust we have placed with them. Then we complain about the latest Microsoft security vulnerability, and again it's about trust misplaced.
We complain about spyware, about online privacy, about the rights we've lost, about abuses of the GPL, and in each case it's the trust we've lost, and usually about how many Karma points we're going to grant to whichever post points this out in the funniest way.
So when Gillmore sticks his nose out and actually still trusts the community he helped to create, you shoot the messenger when you should be shooting the message.
It's not the open relay that's harming your computer; it's the virus, and the impure pond scum who wrote it!
You want the RIAA off your back? Give them a reason to trust you.
You want Microsoft to change their ways? Stop paying them for the trust they've stolen from you.
You want to keep spammers from sending UCE to you? Spread the word that spammers lie.
And if you want a free (speech) Internet where ideas are judged by their merits, rather than by the forum where they are delivered? Speak up and be heard.
Or don't. This Internet is already lost. Trust takes decades to build and seconds to destroy, and all of it which was once here is now gone for good.
You want to know what built the free software community? Trust is the operating system of the free software movement. Destroy that trust and free software will not survive. That's one reason why it's so important to assign your copyrights to the FSF (so they can defend them) and to contribute to the EFF (who understand all this stuff).
What John Gilmore is. (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunatly, you are correct. He is not doing this out of ignorance. He is doing this out of malice.
Siding with the ISP (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing that is being missed is he was once the co-founder of this ISP which over time and various mergers is now Verio. When he founded his ISP their policy was to give the subscribers the ability to do what they wanted. My ISP has changed hands several times in the last three years. With each change of hands there is a new TOS agreement. What is acceptable use today might not be acceptable use by the owners of tomorrow. As it stands my service is getting cut down one port at a time. Rather than educate its customers about viruses and exploits my ISP would rather just block the ports that are exploited. In their mind as long as they provide a portal web site to thier subscribers they are providing service.
I'm glad there are people like Gilmore who have the resources to challenge ISP's. Who else is there who stand up for the rights of the customers? Surely its not our government who passes laws like the DMCA which strips away our privacy when it comes to the internet. Today Gilmore's battle is with SMTP relays and blacklist operators. Tomorrow it might very well be the RIAA and ISP's blocking ports of known P2P clients.
Call the guy crazy if you want but I think his fight is a good one. Its about freedom, something which is slowly dying on the internet.
Open Relays, Free Speech, and Virus Propagation (Score:3, Insightful)
The classic example is to ask what you think of the ethics of throwing an old woman to the ground and beating on her. I'm sure that most people would agree that it is wrong. But add the additional data that she was on fire and you were beating out the flaims, and the whole picture changes.
Gillmore whines Any measure for stopping spam should have as its first goal "Allow and assist every non-spam message to reach its ecipients." That is bogus, as I'm sure he knows. The first goal should be to use all available ethical and legal means to impede and penalize those who spam or support spam. Gilmore's open realy is one of the legitimate targets. Gilmore can set his own goals, but for him to presume to tell us what our goals should be is chutzpah, and, IMHO, ample reason to add him to private deny lists.
Gilmore, throughout his diatribe, ignores the first principle of the anti-spam community: It's not about content. Nobody is searching his messages for naughty words or non-PC text. Rather, they are processing whatever messages he choses to send from IP blocks that they are willing to accept traffic from.
My ISP blocks traffic from certain addresses. Are they censoring my correspondents? No. Are they interfering with my personal liberty? No: in fact, they are enhancing it: I dropped my previous provider because they were not willing to impliment blocking, for technical rather than ideological reasons.