Slashdot Mirror
As the Spam Turns
Anonymous writes "The SBL has added Verio's corporate mail servers
to its blocklist which protects nearly 100 million mailboxes, because of the number of spam gangs on the Verio network.
Verio also provides connectivity to AS26212, a collection of 9 of the most notorious spammers netblocks. AS26212 - the new spambone? - is also connected to he.net and bbnplanet.net."
Blackhole operators like this are just as bad as the spammers themselves; both groups take great pride in having their head firmly shoved up their ass.
Come on. Blocking all of _Verio_? Thanks for doing your part along with the spammers to make e-mail that much less useful.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
The legal problems come from one simple thing - there is nobody that is responsible. We were blocked (wrongly) a while back by some cowboy with a list. The problem is the list is compiled by anonymous sources and the "list administrator can be *very* difficult to find.
OK, so you find the list administrator. So what? They did not actively "do" anything at all. They did not block your mail. The ISP using the list did. However, the ISP is just using a list that someone else compiled - they cannot change it and are usually extremely reluctant to override it - that might make them responsible.
So, the legal issue is pretty simple once you understand it. We would *love* to sue the people that have wrongly blocked us - we don't spam and the list people that we have just dealt with understand that. But it took four days to get unlisted.
Suing is pointless and any reasonable attorney will tell you that once they understand the situation. You might find someone to take your money for a while if they are sufficiently clueless. But there isn't anybody, anywhere to sue.
The goal of the blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet. If they can't convince you of that, they will just block enough email to make doing business via email impractical. We lost four days of being able to respond to many customers. What would you do if you bought something and didn't get confirmation for four days? I'll tell you our customers are not happy at all and most think we're cheats. Lots of credit card chargebacks coming.
We have to move away from relying on an unreliable communication media (email) just to stay in any form of business at all.
Bitter? Heck yes!
This is at least the second time I see a celebration of the in-jail sexual abuse on Slashdot. I don't know, how wide-spread such rapes really are in US prisons/jail, but I'm quite confident, they are not going to disappear entirely as long as some jerks continue to consider them a good addition to incarceration. "Cruel and unusual" your ass (pun intended) -- or is the 1st ammendment the only one you care about?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.