Spamwars...

[Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>]

Finde ja, dass man einen Unterschied machen sollte zwischen kommerziellem
und anderem Spam, die privaten kriegt ORBS eh nicht. Anyway, hier ist
Lessig, ich weiss, dass er an seinem Standpunkt festhaelt, und ein
2. piece. Conclusio ist ein Klagrecht fuer Einzelne...w/ Kommerzspam:


   http://www.thestandard.net/article/display/0,1151,3006,00.html
   
   December 31, 1998 
   The Spam Wars
   By Lawrence Lessig
   
   A war of sorts was avoided last month - an Internet war. It was
   avoided by accident, and in time, the crisis is certain to recur.
   
   The looming conflict is a spam war. A spam war is not the battle to
   clear our inboxes of uninvited junk. A spam w ar is the battle that
   will be fought as spam vigilantes flex their muscles and ISPs resist.
   The result won't be pretty, and the terms of a possible peace aren't
   obvious.
   
   This skirmish began at MIT. In November, Jeff Schiller, MIT's network
   administra tor, began receiving e-mail from people complaining that
   mail sent outside the MIT domain had been blocked. It took little
   effort to discover the mail was being blocked because an antispam
   vigilante, Open Relay Blocking System, had decided MIT had "bad e-
   mail practices." Without notice, MIT was placed on the ORBS list, and
   subscribers to ORBS began excluding MIT mail automatically.
   
   No one likes to be accused of "bad e-mail practices," especially not
   an MIT type. It was salt in the wound when Hewlett-Packard confirmed
   its policy of blocking according to the ORBS list. MIT was told that
   mail from MIT to HP would not go through until MIT ch anged its
   network policy.
   
   But MIT was not to be bullied. In Schiller's view, the institute's
   decision not to block all "third-party relay" e-mail (e-mail sent
   through the MIT server without authentication that the sender is
   associated with MIT) made sense. MIT is not prospam. Its network has
   measures to limit spam, in particular by policing the use of its
   third-party relay facility. But MIT's methods are not the methods of
   ORBS, which made MIT an ORBS enemy.
   
   Rather than cave to the pressure of O RBS, Schiller decided to fight
   it out with HP. The plan was to bounce all e-mail from HP until HP
   stopped bouncing e-mail from MIT.
   
   So it would have gone, had not a network god of sorts intervened.
   Responding to complaints from other ISPs, ORBS' netw ork services
   provider, BC Tel, decided that ORBS' "unauthorized relay testing" was
   a violation of its own network policy agreement. BC Tel bumped ORBS
   off its network, and mail from MIT flowed again to HP. (ORBS will soon
   be relaunched as Internet Mail Re lay Services Survey - IMRSS.)
   
   I know it's bad taste to talk of war so soon after the holidays, but
   these battles will not go away. The power of the vigilantes will no
   doubt increase, as they hold out the ever-more-appealing promise of a
   world wi thout spam. But the conflicts with these vigilantes will
   increase as well. Network service providers will struggle with
   antispam activists even as activists struggle with spam.
   
   There's something wrong with this picture. This policy question will
   fund amentally affect the architecture of e-mail. The ideal solution
   would involve a mix of rules about spam and code to implement the
   rules. But there's little agreement about what the spam rules should
   be, and even less agreement about how they might be enfo rced. Somehow
   we need to resolve these differences in a way that puts the burden on
   those creating the problem.
   
   I don't think MIT is the problem, but I must confess some bias in
   MIT's favor. (My own institution, Harvard, has been the target of the
   ot her major spam vigilante, the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List.)
   
   Certainly, spam is an issue. But the real problem is that vigilantes
   and network service providers are deciding fundamental policy
   questions about how the Net will work - each group fr om its own
   perspective.
   
   This is policy-making by the "invisible hand." It's not that policy is
   not being made, but that those making the policy are unaccountable.
   The self-righteous spam police may or may not be right about the
   solution to spam; that 's not the point. The problem is that policy is
   being made by people who threaten that if you complain or challenge
   their boycotts through the legal system, then you will suffer their
   boycott all the more forcibly.
   
   We are entering the age of Protocol Correctness, in which the mere
   suggestion of dissent is enough to condemn dissenting packets to
   oblivion. Is this how network policy should be made?
   
   The answer is obvious, even if the solution is not. This is not how
   policy should be made. We know t his, but we don't know what could
   replace it. We imagine policy decisions made in a context where
   dissent can be expressed without punishment, where collective
   decisions can be made. But no such context exists in cyberspace, nor
   in our imagination about w hat cyberspace might become.
   
   The Net has thrived because decisions have been made from the bottom
   up, but wars also thrive under those circumstances. What's needed is
   an institution that can mesh the best of the bottom-up culture with a
   top-down pers pective.
   
   If necessity is the mother of invention, then one might hope, that
   these struggles will bring some sensible sort of Internet governance.
   But I've yet to see such a creature around these parts.
   
Und:


   "http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/237/business/Choosing_spam_over_cen
   sorship+.shtml"
   
                         Choosing spam over censorship
                                       
   By Hiawatha Bray,
   Globe Columnist,
   8/24/2000
   I have pretty much made my peace with spam - those annoying unwanted
   e-mails from folks trying to sell you something. The stuff just
   doesn't bother me as much as it used to, even though I get more of it
   than ever.
   I've learned to chuckle at messages that offer me the chance to retire
   rich at age 35 - eight years too late, guys. FedEx me a time machine
   and try again. Meanwhile, I'll just delete this crapola with the flick
   of a finger ... there! That wasn't too bad. And maybe the next batch
   will be even sillier.
   Not everybody's as even-tempered as I am, though. One Californian's
   outrage over spam has launched him on a crusade that's being waged in
   a federal court.
   There's a good chance you've never heard of Mail Abuse Prevention
   System LLC (MAPS) of Redwood City, Calif., even if you're affected by
   its actions. MAPS was founded in 1997 by Paul Vixie, a man who hates
   unsolicited e-mail. He set up a list of Internet addresses that
   originated the offending messages. Then he automatically blocked all
   mail from these sources.
   The nation's Internet service providers liked the idea, and asked to
   use Vixie's system, which he called the Realtime Blackhole List (RBL).
   This led to the foundation of MAPS, a nonprofit organization that has
   sworn eternal enmity to spam in all its forms.
   Today, MAPS estimates that about 20,000 Internet users and service
   providers rely on the Blackhole List to block spam. This includes some
   of the biggest outfits in the business, such as Microsoft Corp.'s free
   e-mail service Hotmail. And yet, MAPS is still run by a handful of
   people, who decide for themselves what counts as spam. If you offend
   their sensibilities, you go on the list.
   And what does it take to offend them? A handful of complaints. Three
   will do. That's how many people griped to MAPS about getting e-mail
   from Harris Interactive Inc., known for its Harris Poll public opinion
   surveys. Harris polls over the Internet, sending questions to people
   randomly selected from a list of 6.6 million e-mail addresses.
   A number of sites provide their membership lists to Harris. Users are
   warned about this during the sign-up process, and can choose to opt
   out of the Harris list. But it'd be easy not to notice the warning.
   Next thing you know, you're getting unexpected questions about how you
   plan to vote in November.
   That must have happened to the unlucky trio who complained to MAPS,
   which responded by black-holing Harris. Now millions of e-mail
   recipients, including those who really do want to be polled, no longer
   can receive the questionnaires. That's because these people use
   service providers that subscribe to the RBL, which deletes mail from
   Harris.
   My ISP doesn't subscribe to the list; I know because I get Harris Poll
   e-mails. I've never responded to them, but I don't mind getting them.
   And I'm not sure I want some guy in California denying them to me, or
   to millions of others who don't even realize their mail's being
   blocked.
   For its part, Harris has filed a federal lawsuit against MAPS and a
   number of Internet providers who use it. ''They have too much power,
   and they apply it arbitrarily,'' says Harris spokesman Dan Hucko.
   ''They're basically acting as censors, and that's just wrong.''
   The MAPS people say there's no First Amendment right to send unwanted
   e-mail. MAPS and the ISPs own their e-mail servers, and can choose
   which messages to accept or reject. ''Being on the RBL just means I
   think you're friendly or neutral to spam, and I don't choose to
   exchange packets with you,'' says the list's manager, Kelly Thompson.
   To get back into Thompson's good graces, Harris must send a
   confirmation e-mail to every new person it signs up, and must send
   such mail to the 6.6 million members it already has. These are good
   ideas, and Hucko says that Harris is considering them.
   It may have no choice. The judge recently refused to issue a
   restraining order against MAPS, and there's much merit to the
   organization's case. Surely ISPs are entitled to reject some kinds of
   incoming mail. On the other hand, should the final say reside in the
   hands of a few self-appointed Web cops?
   Though I've grown used to spam, I wouldn't miss it if it went away.
   That could happen under a proposed federal law that recently passed
   the US House by an almost unanimous vote. Rather than ban spam, the
   law would make it easy for consumers to sue the spammers. A few fat
   financial judgments against these clowns would be more effective than
   MAPS's vigilante tactics, and not nearly as creepy.
   Hiawatha Bray can be reached by e-mail at bray@globe.com.
   This story ran on page C01 of the Boston
   Globe on 8/24/2000.
   (c) Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.