invisibill.net

The Syclone is on the road again!

More on the Spamhaus legal saga…

There’s a Slashdot article regarding Spamhaus’ warning that the spamhaus.org domain might get suspended due to all the lawsuit stuff. It looks like a bit of inconsistency may be their biggest weak spot - rather than completely ignoring all these legal threats (as they have no jurisdiction over UK companies), they originally had the lawsuit moved up from a local court to a US federal court. That implies that the US does indeed have jurisdiction in the matter - why should you care about the details of a lawsuit that doesn’t apply to you?

Anyway, if you want to visit Spamhaus or are having problems with the SBL/XBL, use spamhaus.org.uk instead of spamhaus.org. You may be interested in Legal Threats and Lawsuit Answers and copies of spam sent by e360insight. This spam was sent to an address that has never belonged to any person. It was created by a typo when it was entered into the Internic database years ago during a domain registration. Thus, everything sent to it is 100% guaranteed spam. <sarcasm>Hmmmm, I wonder how they opted in to receive those valid, valuable marketing emails…</sarcasm>

PhishTank is a new service by the OpenDNS guys. It’s a public clearinghouse of phishing data. Users submit phishing sites/emails, and other users verify whether or not it’s actually a phish. The data is all available via API, which means people can make cool apps that access this growing wealth of data. A web browser could check URLs you visit, or Spamassassin or your mail client could check emails for phishing links. The FAQ has more info, but this looks to be a very good idea. PhishTank is also tied into the OpenDNS free DNS service, so it will help block phishing sites before OpenDNS users even see them, and in the future OpenDNS’ other sources of phishing data will feed into PhishTank as well.