[KLUG Members] Fwd: FC: City of Battle Creek wants to imprison an anti-spam activist
Jamie McCarthy
members@kalamazoolinux.org
Thu, 21 Mar 2002 11:20:54 -0500
This isn't really Linux-related, but the town just down the road
from us has hit the international spotlight. The Battle Creek
city government was running a buggy, closed-source mail server which
has the unfortunate habit of crashing when fed perfectly normal data
(not a good habit for a server designed to accept connections from
anywhere).
When an anti-spammer connected to their servers to test them, a
crash resulted, and the Battle Creek city government decided it
would be good to file charges against the anti-spammer, who then
promptly ceased operations.
Wow.
====== Forwarded Message ======
Date: 3/21/02 11:49 AM
Received: 3/21/02 10:58 AM
From: declan@well.com (Declan McCullagh)
To: politech@politechbot.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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Jamie McCarthy
jamie@mccarthy.vg