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FC: City of Battle Creek wants to imprison an anti-spam activist

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 11:49:00 -0500 From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: politech@politechbot.com Subject: FC: City of Battle Creek wants to imprison an anti-spam activist Send reply to: declan@well.com

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,51218,00.html

Spam Showdown at Battle Creek By Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)

2:00 a.m. March 21, 2002 PST WASHINGTON -- The small city of Battle Creek, Michigan, wants to lock up an anti-spam activist who it believes crashed its mail server.

Never mind that the town government was using a buggy version of the Lotus Domino e-mail server, and that newer releases have fixed the problem. And never mind that anti-spammers may have been conducting a routine scan for possible sources of bulk e-mail.

Battle Creek, a town of 54,000 best known as the headquarters of the Kellogg's cereal company, is on the warpath.

Robert Drewry, a Battle Creek detective, said on Wednesday he was hoping to file felony charges of computer intrusion against the person at the Orbz anti-spam service who contacted the Domino server, and caused e-mail to crash for 24 hours. "If we can identify the person responsible, yes, we will prosecute," Drewry said.

This new Battle of Battle Creek -- the first one in 1824 pitted local Indians against surveyors -- began when an Orbz computer allegedly connected to the town's mail server to see if it might be an anti-spammer bugaboo: A relay point for bulk e-mailers.

It wasn't. But it was running an old Lotus Domino version, and what would normally have been a routine test by Orbz allegedly caused the server to mail-bomb itself into a tizzy.

Cindy Hale, a systems administrator for the town, said she was the one who had to deal with the crash.

"We had to get with our Cisco expert and get into our firewall and make some changes in there and make some changes to our (Lotus) server to not accept any mail from Orbz," Hale said.

Then Hale did what has incited a feeding frenzy this week in the online communities devoted to canning spam: She called the cops. "I just called our police department and asked if they wanted to investigate any further and there we are," Hale said.

[...]

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