Previous message: "City of Battle Creek wants to imprison an anti-spam activist" http://www.politechbot.com/p-03282.html --- From: Tom_Giovanetti/IPIat_private Subject: Re: FC: City of Battle Creek wants to imprison an anti-spam activist To: declanat_private Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 10:31:07 -0600 Bravo to the town of Battle Creek! These anti-spammers purposely sabotage other people's property under the guise of performing a public service. But they are attacking someone else's property. No question in my mind it's a form of vandalism. -------------------------- Tom Giovanetti President Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) www.ipi.org tomgat_private --- From: "Richard M. Smith" <rmsat_private> To: <declanat_private>, <rmsat_private> Subject: RE: City of Battle Creek wants to imprison an anti-spam activist Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 11:07:46 -0500 Hi Declan, >From everything I read about this case, I think it is appropriate for law enforcement to get involved. It appears that Ian Gulliver sent specially crafted email messages to SMTP servers that he knew would crash a certain percentage of them. Looking for open relays is certainly a legit. service. Going around crashing people's computers is quite another matter. The ends do not justify the means. Here is how Laura Atkins of SpamCon put it: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article/0,,10_995251,00.html "Laura Atkins, newly installed president of the non-profit anti-spam outfit SpamCon Foundation, said the code changes needed to correct the bug was "trivial" but one Gulliver, for one reason or another, was unwilling to correct. "When you run a blacklist, you need to be responsible and you need to be considerate of the other servers," she said. "The overall impression I'm getting is he knew the bug was there and he just decided he wasn't going to do anything. If his test happened to crash a Lotus server, then it wasn't his fault." Richard M. Smith http://www.ComputerBytesMan.com --- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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