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What does ethics have anything to do with professional reporting and journalism?
-- Fuat Kircaali, CEO of Sys-Con Media, publisher of several computer magazines

Yet another one of Sys-Con's online publications people should avoid for various reasons.

There is a great body of moral philosphy that tends to support libertarianism; Start with most (though of course not all) Enlightenment era philosphers.

Like the salesman who phone me when I'm eating dinner telling me I should subscribe to The Gazette. I should subcribe to The Gazette. I should subscribe to libertarianism. These statments don't seem different in essence to me.

The difference is that the Gazette salesman does not have a coherent moral philosphy to back up why you should subscribe. Economic arguments work extremely well, too, if you're more of a utilitarianist.

I'm going to decline to offer a philosphy course here; if you're really interested in learning about it, check out some of the references here, under the libertarian sections.

People knew sex, and its intricacies, but were discrete about it. It wasn't something they depicted on television, or explicitly in leisure books.

By your logic, if 99.999% of the electorate did not vote, then the leader you end up with is all the fault of the 0.001% who did. Cast a protest vote if you don't like any of the candidates, or spoil your ballot paper. But doing nothing at all will change nothing. No one will ever know why you didn't vote. Or care, except psephologists ...

Feel free to be a self-admitted feminist, but realise that the likes of that group are responsible for banned books in Canada.

Through its decision in the Butler vs. Her Majesty case, the Supreme Court of Canada adopted Catherine MacKinnon's definition of obscenity nearly word for word into Canadian law. This 1992 court decision -- which was vigorously championed by most feminists in Canada and the US -- allows Canadian customs to seize what it judges to be pornography at the border as the material is being imported. In reaching the Butler decision, the Supreme Court acknowledged that it was violating freedom of speech, but it deemed the possible harm that pornography could inflict on women to be of greater legal significance.

Unlike others I generally prefer to keep my opinions of a woman's body to myself. However, I definately can't support any set of ideals that requires mass censorship. I believe that makes me anti-feminist, but moderate.

You, on the other hand, may not be a feminist at all, at least according to that article, although you choose to identify with them.

Pardon me if I came on a bit strong there, but when a select minority-by-choice of people can, at a whim, introduce sweeping censorship laws I get really pissed off.

If you are asking for a change from society's old views of yourself, you might want to avoid clothing yourself in a devil's cloak. In short: Choose a better term than "feminist". I don't believe you are one, and the term carries far too much misandrist baggage for you to be taken seriously.

You mis-understand my point. My point is that *any* "investment" made by the government is wasteful, and relies on THEFT FROM THE TAXPAYER via taxes or inflation. Thus, it is immoral no matter what. See Who Should Pay for Science? by Michael Levin and State Science, State Truth by Wendy McElroy (also author of XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography).

You have the right to act on radio waves passing through your body as you have jurisdiction over your own body. This page applies here, too.

I found this page, which I bookmarked for people like you who just don't get it. If there's still something you need clearing up, post a response to this with your difficulty and I'll see if I can help.

They were called the day complaints came in and terminated at the end of the next day.

Okay, to give you fair credit, that does sound like you responded pretty quickly.

Our entire class C was simply seen as part of their growing network.

Well, you're listed as one of the ISPs that provided support (hosting and email and DNS, in your case). You can see from the listing that Cobra Networks first bounced the spammer through five different IP addresses. Then for some reason hotticker.com moved to Netsville (strange, as the other sites like stockrumors.com and streamingquotes.tv are still up at Cobra) after the SPEWS blocklist was increased to cover part of Cobra's parent ISP, 9NetAve.

Now this is the tricky bit - you see, once a domain name (eg. hotticker.com) is known to be associated with a spammer, it generally becomes list-on-sight. You actually did get rid of them fairly quickly once you realised what they were, but - and I know this may sound cold and uncaring *wry grin* - you should have realised what they were before you signed them up. I suspect you didn't do any research on them before signing them up - I gather from your comments below that you now realise this might be a good idea in future. :-)

If it'd been a case where you signed up a client that was not a known spammer and then that client started spamming, you'd have the situation shown in the earlier part of S716 - complaints sent to your abuse contact and possibly single IPs listed. And with a relatively quick response as you demonstrated in the case of hotticker.com, you probably wouldn't get listed at all.

But the "rules" (such as I understand them) are different for known spammers.

The issue comes down to more than "Is SPEWS bad?". It is a matter of legitimate emails being blocked by uninformed sysadmins who don't realize they are NOT solving their spam problem,

It's interesting that you feel compelled to characterise all sysadmins using the SPEWS list as "uninformed".

I certainly think that every network admin that uses the SPEWS list as a basis for rejecting mail should understand what they're dealing with, and the policy behind SPEWS. There are other blocklists with different policies that may have lower legit-mail lossage.

I think one of the major misunderstandings behind SPEWS is the belief that it's primarily intended to "block" spam email. That's certainly a major goal, but I believe the primary goal is to apply pressure to spam-supporting ISPs. When ISPs stop hosting spammers, everybody benefits (including those that don't use blocklists or filters to defend themselves from spam). Conversely, if an ISP continues to host spammers and all of their non-spammer clients leave, then everyone can happily reject email from them and everybody benefits.

Read up a bit about shunning as a social technique for dealing with troublemakers in a community.... in fact, this article is pretty good.

Having your servers on as level 1 for months and your class C as a level 2 for 6 months is absolutely absurd for ONE case of ONE mailing of spam.

*raised eyebrow* How many millions of messages were sent out in that "one" spam run? How many days in total were you hosting hotticker.com? Note that even if they hadn't made a spam run from your mailserver, you're still considered responsible for hosting the website.

How long have you been listed on SPEWS as level 1? How long ago did you pull the metaphorical plug on hotticker.com and kick them off your netspace? Seriously, if you really have been listed on level 1 for "months" despite booting the spammer within two days of the first abuse report, I think you've got a pretty damn good case to ask SPEWS to at least downgrade and possibly unlist you completely. Post to news.admin.net-abuse.email and ask. Politely, remember - you may disapprove of SPEWS, but being belligerent and rude will get you absolutely nowhere fast. :)

Anyway, SPEWS does not recommend blocking on level 2. If you get mail rejected from a server that's blocking on your level 2 record, contact them and ask them to either change their policy or whitelist you. With regard to your mailserver being in the level1 list, the obvious solution would be to move it to one of your spare level2-listed IP addresses. Or just wait until SPEWS downgrades them to level 2, which shouldn't take all that long (theoretically). A polite message to nanae explaining the situation might speed up the downgrading.

Yes we should have looked into their history, and we now do with new clients.

From the perspective of someone who uses email, I'm glad. You're now part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Mistakes are made, you learn from them, and SPEWS is there to rape you in the ass and [...]

Sigh. I just wish that if you're going to badmouth SPEWS and/or similar blocklists, try not to grossly misrepresent reality. If you think SPEWS is a poor solution to the "problem", you're certainly free to not use it. But I'd suggest you (along with far too many others) may have subtly misunderstood what problem they're actually trying to solve (see above re: shunning).

Pete.

Craig