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Could you elaborate on what happened in your case that you'd be so vehemently opposed to spamhaus(to the point of being willing to commit crime(s) to hurt them)

Could you elaborate on what happened in your case that you'd be so vehemently opposed to spamhaus(to the point of being willing to commit crime(s) to hurt them)? I'm truly curious on why the reaction to spamhaus being DDoS is so polarised.

eli 14y ago
I can't speak for np422, but a few years ago Spamhaus blocked one of my IPs and insisted I had sent messages to one of their "spam trap" addresses. I think they were wrong or (less likely) someone was maliciously messing with us. But since the spam trap addresses are secret, it was an impossible charge to defend against or investigate. Not fun.
np422 14y ago
A long time ago in a galaxy far away I was a sysadmin at a local university. Trying to keep mail-servers running and keeping up with the different spam clearing houses different policies that kept changing without notice was a lot of work back then. Once you got black-listed getting removed wasn't always an easy process no matter how quickly you tried fix whatever caused it. Methods of communicating were not always available and when it were, responses were not always helpful or even very polite. I haven't managed mail servers for over ten years, and really hope that the conditions for being included on a blacklist and process for getting removed is more transparent by now. Given the amount of trust that most people running mail servers are putting into the different blacklists organizations like spamhaus get a lot of power over the internet. Judging from my experience with spam clearing houses it looks like that power have once more corrupted when I read the news stories about cyberbunker. We need places like cyberbunker to keep the internet free and open. When all the pr0n, w4r3z and 1337 stuff have been cleaned out from the internet the infrastructure to stop anything at will on the internet will be in place and functional. I wonder what would be the next thing to be removed from the internet?
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I'd wager that there's more pr0n and w4r3z on the internet right now than at any point in history. And I don't see that changing soon/
- tquai 14y ago
  Once you got black-listed getting removed wasn't always an easy process no matter how quickly you tried fix whatever caused it. I took a job in the year 2000, at a company with 3000 email users, listed by Spamhaus. First thing I did was close the open relay they were running. The listing was promptly removed, and the mail queue was back to normal within only a few days. I'm skeptical of your claim. I've never seen a confirmed case of Spamhaus aggression, but I've seen a lot that were disproven, and even more that sound like they were written by miscreants. Like the kind who would advocate DDoS attacks cough.
  - np422 14y ago
    (English is not my native language) Open relays were at the time manageable, even the ones that suddenly appeared when someone installed an old OS-version, as were the process for getting removed from the blacklists due to open relays. Once you had one a computer lab workstation hacked and used for spamming - not so easy to get whiteliested anymore. The university had a class B-network, trying to get the staffs subnet whitelisted while keeping the computer-labs blacklisted was apparently not possible according to the spam clearing houses. Blocking port 25 for outgoing traffic not possible to check from the outside and didn't help. I can understand that organizations like spamhaus are overworked don't have the resources to handle every non-standard case on the internet as quickly as the blocked ip-range would like, but the replies we got were truly unhelpful. The fact that someone bothered to register the domain stophaus.com seems to indicate that my experiences isn't uniqueue.
wiredfool 14y ago
Every so often, spamhaus drops my mailserver/forwarder onto their policy blacklist. My mailserver forwards my mail on to where I actually pick it up, which unfortunately, uses the PBL. When that happens, I first have to notice (normally due to a lack of spam in my inbox), I have to jump through their hoops again. Yeah, I could fix that, either by hosting my full stack of email, or not doing it at all. Either way, it's a pain.

eli 14y ago

I can't speak for np422, but a few years ago Spamhaus blocked one of my IPs and insisted I had sent messages to one of their "spam trap" addresses. I think they were wrong or (less likely) someone was maliciously messing with us. But since the spam trap addresses are secret, it was an impossible charge to defend against or investigate. Not fun.

np422 14y ago

A long time ago in a galaxy far away I was a sysadmin at a local university. Trying to keep mail-servers running and keeping up with the different spam clearing houses different policies that kept changing without notice was a lot of work back then. Once you got black-listed getting removed wasn't always an easy process no matter how quickly you tried fix whatever caused it. Methods of communicating were not always available and when it were, responses were not always helpful or even very polite. I haven't managed mail servers for over ten years, and really hope that the conditions for being included on a blacklist and process for getting removed is more transparent by now. Given the amount of trust that most people running mail servers are putting into the different blacklists organizations like spamhaus get a lot of power over the internet. Judging from my experience with spam clearing houses it looks like that power have once more corrupted when I read the news stories about cyberbunker. We need places like cyberbunker to keep the internet free and open. When all the pr0n, w4r3z and 1337 stuff have been cleaned out from the internet the infrastructure to stop anything at will on the internet will be in place and functional. I wonder what would be the next thing to be removed from the internet?

jiggy2011 14y ago
I'd wager that there's more pr0n and w4r3z on the internet right now than at any point in history. And I don't see that changing soon/
tquai 14y ago
Once you got black-listed getting removed wasn't always an easy process no matter how quickly you tried fix whatever caused it. I took a job in the year 2000, at a company with 3000 email users, listed by Spamhaus. First thing I did was close the open relay they were running. The listing was promptly removed, and the mail queue was back to normal within only a few days. I'm skeptical of your claim. I've never seen a confirmed case of Spamhaus aggression, but I've seen a lot that were disproven, and even more that sound like they were written by miscreants. Like the kind who would advocate DDoS attacks cough.
- np422 14y ago
  (English is not my native language) Open relays were at the time manageable, even the ones that suddenly appeared when someone installed an old OS-version, as were the process for getting removed from the blacklists due to open relays. Once you had one a computer lab workstation hacked and used for spamming - not so easy to get whiteliested anymore. The university had a class B-network, trying to get the staffs subnet whitelisted while keeping the computer-labs blacklisted was apparently not possible according to the spam clearing houses. Blocking port 25 for outgoing traffic not possible to check from the outside and didn't help. I can understand that organizations like spamhaus are overworked don't have the resources to handle every non-standard case on the internet as quickly as the blocked ip-range would like, but the replies we got were truly unhelpful. The fact that someone bothered to register the domain stophaus.com seems to indicate that my experiences isn't uniqueue.

wiredfool 14y ago

Every so often, spamhaus drops my mailserver/forwarder onto their policy blacklist. My mailserver forwards my mail on to where I actually pick it up, which unfortunately, uses the PBL. When that happens, I first have to notice (normally due to a lack of spam in my inbox), I have to jump through their hoops again. Yeah, I could fix that, either by hosting my full stack of email, or not doing it at all. Either way, it's a pain.