Xenite.Org News

Good news for Webmasters! Osirusoft taken offline!

September 28, 2003 at 13:40:08

One of the worst and most irresponsible sites in the anti-spam community was Osirusoft, who deliberately targeted massive blocks of IP addresses in their effort to deny business relationships to ISPs they deemed to be spam friendly.

They have harmed thousands of innocent Webmasters, mostly hobbyists like Xenite.Org founder Michael Martinez who don't operate in the black (Xenite.Org does not earn enough in commissions to pay its monthly server fees), by circulating their blacklist to gullible ISPs who feel they are doing something good by blocking email from sites which don't support or relay unsolicited bulk commercial email.

The companies that Osirusoft's operator targets for economic deprivation are usually 2-3 business contracts removed from the consumer sites which are harassed into changing hosting providers. The average Web site operator has no way of knowing who really owns the IP address, as most of them cannot work their way through the complex relationships that Web hosting companies have with each other and their affiliates.

The only bad news in this article is that these unscrupulous blacklist operators are thinking about setting up a peer-to-peer network to distribute their blacklists again.

Xenite.Org currently has an official policy of BLOCKING ALL ACCESS FROM ISPs who subscribe to any blacklist that prevents our email from reaching their customers. If we cannot send requested emails to their users, their users will not be permitted to access our forums, mailing lists, or other services.

We do not like unsolicited bulk email in the least. Xenite.Org has been forced to combat it by removing email addresses from our pages and creating a special contact form which contains no information on our email addresses. We have also had to close down one well-known email account because of the SOBIG.F virus.

Nonetheless, the anti-spam community are often childish, malicious, and extremely unwilling to check their facts when people who are unnecessarily blacklisted learn about these unprofessional miscreants. Numerous innocent server operators, Webmasters, and business owners have been attacked and falsely accused of being spammers and spam-supporters when they have complained about the blacklists in anti-spam discussion forums.

"The anti-spam community has for too long overstepped the bounds of decent behavior," Martinez says. "They have become a worse problem than the spammers. It's regrettable that millions of innocent computer owners have been drawn into the technological conflict between these warring factions. It would be better for all if the anti-spam community stood down until they learn to behave like responsible members of the Internet community again.

"The harm they inflict on the rest of us is by no means justified by their goal of eradicating unsolicited bulk email."

For the full story on how one bad guy (a virus writer) took out another bad guy (Osirusoft), read this article.