Slashback: Sand, Maps, Antiquities

Slashback has for you tonight the usual tasteful spread of updates, corrections, and things to think about as you settle in to sleep. (And a Merry Christmas for those who celebrate it.)

The world will beat a path to their doors. parvati writes: "This is the follow-up to an unusual contest mentioned on Slashdot a few months ago. A Princeton neuroscientist, John Hopfield, created a neural network modeling how the brain interprets sensory input, posted it on a website, and invited others to deduce the basis behind the way the network "thought". There is now a winner--David MacKay's group at Cambridge University--and the results will be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in a bit. Preprints are available from the website that contains the information about the network."

Cuchulainn also passed on word of this NYTimes story on the two winners of the contest.

Who's spamming who, on the freeway of love? jamie passed on this email from Bennett Haselton, who runs Peacefire.org, as a followup to the recent story of his about the traffic-blocking capabilities (and implementation) of Above.Net.

I've found out why I haven't been getting any email from the gilc-plan or ifea-plan mailing lists for several weeks now.

The hosts where these mailing lists are run is connected to the Internet via HIS.com, which is connected to the AboveNet backbone. Peacefire's ISP is on AboveNet's "boycott list", which means all their downstream customers are blocked from accessing our Web site or sending email to peacefire.org addresses. (To them, it just looks like the site is down -- "the server is not responding...", or "Returned mail: host not responding...")

AboveNet does not publicize that they do this, and in fact I called AboveNet pretending to be a naive customer and asked them whether they blocked their users from accessing anything on the Web. All five employees that I talked to in sales and tech support, said "No". Although when I talked with a high-level technician and showed him the evidence, he did admit that AboveNet blocked sites on the boycott list.

I talked to several AboveNet users affected by the block, and they had no idea that AboveNet was filtering their Web access; most were pretty pissed off about it.

When Slashdot published a story about this, AboveNet immediately re-opened their customers' to our ISP's web sites: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/12/13/1853237 but I don't know if the un-ban is temporary or permanent. Currently we are detecting when customers connect to our site from an AboveNet-controlled IP address, and opening a separate window to warn them that AboveNet has been blocking their Internet connection for the last several months, and that they may be entitled to sue AboveNet for censoring their connection without their knowledge.

AboveNet is participating in a boycott of our ISP, organized by the Mail Abuse Prevention System, because of sites like http://209.211.253.69/ which sell mass email software (but does not spam or use spam for advertising). I think this distinction is important (there are many sites that host software programs with far less ethical uses, however, the hosting ISP's aren't the ones responsible), but never mind -- there's nothing wrong with a boycott as long as it's voluntary. AboveNet, however, is co-opting their users into the boycott involuntarily, knowing that 90% of their customers would never agree to have their Web access censored if they knew what was going on. AboveNet admitted it has nothing to do with protecting customers from spam (obviously, since they're blocking Web sites, and the targeted servers aren't spamming anyway); it's just a way of putting pressure on the ISP by threatening to cut off their customers' access to their sites.

We also contacted the boycott organizers to ask why they didn't just remove Peacefire's IP address from the list and block the others in the same range, and they said it was technically possible, but they wouldn't do it -- unless we joined the boycott by going to another ISP.

For the time being, I can get mails from the gilc-plan and ifea-plan lists. If AboveNet re-instates the ban after the controversy dies down, I'll re-subscribe to the lists under a different email address.

-Bennett
bennett@peacefire.org http://www.peacefire.org

Anyone care to ante up 1/6 for an MP3? minard writes: "I have on my shelf an example of a wax drum (forerunner of the vinyl record) that had been sold in Britain circa 1905. I just noticed a label on the side I hadn't really paid attention to before. It says:

"This record is sold by the National Phonograh Co Ltd upon the condition that it may not be sold or offered for use by the original or any subsequent purchaser (except by an authorized factor to an authorized retail dealer) for less than 1/6 each. Upon any breach of said condition the license to use and vend this record implied from such sale immediately terminates."

1/6, by the way, would be about 10c. Not sure how much that would be today. Basically this is a license restriction that enforces pricing controls (completely legal at the time). I'd always assumed these were a new thing. Guess not."

You look a little down in the Mouth ... The seventh in our continuing reprint of Jon Katz's "Voices From the Hellmouth" series is now online.

Comments

Re:It is a "Big deal"

[dubl-u]

Some of them had nothing to do with spam,

MAPS started by listing the spammer sites. After six months of trying to get the ISP to clean up their act and being given the runaround, they gave up, and have concluded the ISP is spam-friendly. Since they have been the top listing at spamhaus.org for months, this seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion.

I'm sure that the people at MAPS think that peacefire is a swell thing. But they have concluded that the ISP is spam-friendly, and so they have listed it as such. It's a shame that Peacefire is using a spam-friendly ISP, but they have the right to decide for themselves, eh?

And since when does AboveNet have the right to blacklist entire domains and IP blocks anyway?

AboveNet is only blocking the stuff on their own networks. ISPs who have other routes to Media3 are not affected. An

Re:cyber patrol vs. peacefire

[laborit]

Well done! The people who saw it no doubt immediately understood your commentary on the futility of blocking software. I'm sure not a one of them didn't fail to apprehend that this site shouldn't have been viewable, or that it was in place of more worthy ones. Moreover, I'm certain that not a single person walked out of that store thinking, oh, say, "the internet has some horrible smut on it! There ought to be a law!"

- Michael

-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!

British money in 1905

[RasTafarii]

minard writes about seeing a warning label on a wax cylinder sold in Britain in 1905 and states '1/6' is about 10 cents us. [one shilling, 6 pence]

prior to 1971 and decimalisation the pound sterling contained 20 shillings or 240 old pence thereby making a shilling = 12 pence.

before 1914 one pound sterling was worth us$5.00, doing the math: 18 pence*2.08333 = us$0.375 cents.

an inflation calculator [http://www.westegg.com/inflation/] gives the value of us$0.375 cents in 1905 as us$6.75 in 1999, not bad considering us$5 per week was considered a decent wage in 1905...

Media3 and spam.

[strredwolf]

Aparently, neither jamie nor Peacefire haven't done their research yet. Lets see now...

• Media3's one of the top spam producers (were it not for UU.NET) -- see Spamhaus and news.admin.net-abuse.sightings.
• Media3 hosts spammers. They may use throwaway dialups to open mail servers, but they host the pages that are the main cause. Once again, news.admin.net-abuse.sightings
• Efforts to get this to the attention of *anybody* without a clueless responce has been a waste of a few good phone calls by voice. news.admin.net-abuse.email

So, yes, the RBL listing is nessisary -- just as publishing the identities of child molesters is now nessisary (and quite legal in many court decisions over the years). But it is only a publication -- what you do with the information is up to you. Most ISP's who use it block mail that is comming from them. Above.net (who Vixie left about a year ago if not more, get it straight) chooses to block any connection.

And while I'll prase Peacefire for doing *some* homework (unlike jamie, who fell for alot of the hype and FUD) for contacting MAPS and Above.net, their next step is to contact their upstream to find out why they're not getting a clean, spam-free feed to the Internet. If they don't get an answer, a good solid answer, not just another clueless reply, then walk to another provider.

I'll be glad when there's a national law in which we can sue them for unauthorized commercial usage of mail servers. I betcha CmdrTaco can run Slashdot and AnimeFu on what's left from the lawyers cut...

--
WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

cyber patrol vs. peacefire

[Phexro]

i was in a radioshack the other day. they had computers set up with some sort of broadband net access. and cyber patrol to filter out all the smut.

i try to load the peacefire webpage. it's blocked. no surprise there. so i try to load www.goatse.cx. it's not blocked.

i left it open, so the customers have something to think about, then left.
--

Spam, censorship, emotional ranting

[The Famous Brett Wat]

This whole Peacefire/Media3/RBL thing seems to trigger so many emotional responses that it's impossible to have a rational debate about it. It doesn't help that spammers usually yelp about freedom of speech and anti-censorship sentiments to back their supposed right to spam.

Let's be clear on this. Media3 is what's in the RBL, not Peacefire specifically. Media3 is a spam-friendly provider, and given the spam problem that I face on a daily basis, I'm very pleased that they're on the list. If they weren't, I'd add them to my own blacklist. Of course, I'd just be blacklisting them at the SMTP level, not the IP level, which is what certain other organisations (like above.net, at least for some of the time) have done.

Why blacklist Media3 at the IP level? It's not because they have people selling spam-tools, believe it or not. Nowhere in the mail-abuse guidelines does it talk about blacklisting people for selling spamming tools. Personally I detest spamming tools and the people that sell them, but I'm aware that one can't easily pick and choose about blocking sites on this basis. That is a form of censorship, and I think censoring the Internet is futile, even if it would serve my particular desires.

So if it's not about the tools, then what's it about? It's about the spam, stupid! The people who sell the spamming tools use the spamming tools to advertise their wares. The spam isn't necessarily originating from Media3's network: I expect that their terms and conditions prohibit it. So what does a spammer do? They host their permanent web page at Media3, then spam-advertise that web page via some other service entirely. Create a throw-away account, spam until it gets terminated, rinse, repeat. Under these circumstances, the only real way to hurt the spammer is to target their web page. It's getting close to borderline, but I believe that the RBL is still quite justified in their actions here.

My advice to Peacefire (all 2 cents worth, discounted and donated to the public domain) is to stop dealing with a spam-friendly service provider. It's one thing to support freedom of speech, but spam is nonconsensual speech. It's noise thrust upon you by a sociopathic git who's playing the numbers game. I do my level best to avoid spam, and I've had to deal with several items in the last day. I'm all for freedom of speech, so long as I maintain the freedom to not have everyone else's junk arbitrarily delivered to my inbox when I don't want it. Freedom of speech is only a valid concept when there exists an audience who will willingly listen to that speech. When it comes to imposing speech on an unwilling audience, that's a violation of the rights of the audience, not an affirmation of the rights of the speaker.

Peacefire, from all that I've seen, is doing a valuable job. Don't spoil it by confusing anti-spam measures with censorship. Both issues are too important to conflict like this.