Re: Abusive blacklist

On Tue, 11 Jan 2005, william(at)elan.net wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Jan 2005, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
> 
> > Dean Anderson schrieb:
> > > Terry, you are using an abusive "blacklist". SORBS, like ORBS, has no 
> > > qualms about lying about those they don't like.
> > >
> > > In our case, they don't like the fact that I revealed their secret 
> > > spam support operations. (They scan for open relays and then give 
> > > that information to abusers.)
> > 
> > Do you mean that they give the information to the general public, 
> > abusers included, or do you mean something else?
> 
> I think Dean meant that they scanned for open relays and compiled blacklist
> and made that blacklist available for general public including by zone 
> transfer (i.e. abuser could easily get entire list). 

I thought it might have been unintentional leakage back in 1999. But I
don't think it was unintentional anymore, for a number of reasons.  On
several occassions, open relay abusers were tracked back to open relay
"anti-spammers". In one case, a particularly persistent abuser was fired
from his job as an abuse desk person at a large ISP. He posted his
diatribe to spam-l, blaming me for his termination.  Even after pointing
out their contibution to open relay abuse, Open relay blacklists made no
attempt to limit access to information Also, no genuine commercial
spammers were ever found abusing open relays. Open relay abuse was always 
nonsense: it wasn't genuinely commercial.

And the final clincher is that open relay abuse dropped off to almost
nothing after the open relay blacklists closed.  If people not associated 
with the blacklists were doing to the abuse, they would have found other 
sources. The abusers quit the same time the blacklists quit.  

> That is not an issue any more as almost nobody runs open relay any more
> and abusers have moved to other ways to distribute spam 

Actually, there are just as many or more open relays as there has ever
been. The change was that the open relay blacklists have shutdown.  The
decline of open relay abuse correlates with the shutdown of those
blacklists.