Howdy all,
Check out:
http://www.directmag.com/content/newsline/main.html#81
In short, Yesmail.com has received a restraining order from an Illinois
judge to keep MAPS from adding them to the RPL spam database. The order
is good through 8/2/00. A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.
While I'm not a huge MAPS fan (prefer ORBS myself), I find the prospect
of the above a bit more than scary. To start, yesmail.com *are*
spammers. We're not talking about some poor admin who has not been able
to upgrade his version of Sendmail yet and is being used as a relay, we
are talking about an organization that makes a lot of $$$ ($8.2 million
last year according to their Web site) by spamming. I've personally
received spam from Yesmail.com, have tried to opt out, and have been
responded to with a larger amount of spam. So now the bad guys have
legal backing, oh joy.
My other concern is that this strikes at the very heart of firewalling.
The whole concept of firewalling is that we (the Internet community)
have the right to pick and choose which traffic we will allow into our
environment. Firewalls are simply a method of implementing that right.
If Yesmail.com wins their suit, that right becomes threaten as now there
is legal precedence for having to allow certain traffic into your
environment.
IMHO this has the potential to grow much bigger and get really nasty.
For example take the recent report of NASA blocking all of @Home when
they could not get a response to intrusion attempts. Should @Home be
able to sue NASA sighting the Yesmail.com case (if they win) as a
precedence? Scary stuff.
So I would advise everyone to keep a close eye on this case. Its a
slippery slope with far reaching implications.
Cheers,
Chris
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