Slashdot Mirror
Spam Catchers Block Latest Crypto-Gram
An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier sent out a note about SpamAssassin and possibly other spam filters blocking his excellent Crypto-Gram newsletter. Fortunately you can get it here (early no less!)." Schneier's email reads, in part "Tomorrow I will be sending out the February CRYPTO-GRAM, as I do on the 15th of every month. In the process of creating this month's Crypto-Gram, I discovered that SpamAssassin thinks that this issue is spam, probably because of certain links and descriptions of scams in the text. I have anecdotal evidence that other spam filters block Crypto-Gram as well. ... I'd apologize for the inconvenience, but I'm not sure what I could do to make it less so -- I don't intend to alter my content to accommodate spam filters."
biased misinterpretations of politically charged tracts caused YOU to be "filtered out"!!!
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered CowboyNeal community when FDA confirmed that CowboyNeal's waist line has jumped yet again, now up to over 12 parsecs. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that CowboyNeal has disgusted 1.2 million women, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Cowboyneal is collapsing as a black hole, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a doctor to predict CowboyNeal's future. The hand writing is on the wall: CowboyNeal faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for CowboyNeal because CowboyNeal is dying. Things are looking very bad for CowboyNeal. As many of us are already aware, CowboyNeal continues to have heart attacks every day. His urine flows like a river of blood.
CowboyNeal is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of his organs. The sudden and unpleasant anal probe of CowboyNeal can only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: CowboyNeal is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
CowboyNeal doctor Theo states that there are 7000 pounds of CowboyNeal. How many pounds of CowboyNeal would it take to feed an army? Let's see. The number of CowboyNeal versus Army Reserve posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 pounds of CowboyNeal per soldier. A recent article put CowboyNeal's artery blockage at about 80%. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 seconds left for CowboyNeal to live. This is consistent with the number of CowboyNeal Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Slashdot, abysmal business plan, and so on, CowboyNeal went bankrupt and was taken over by Kuro5hin who have another shitty website. Now Kuro5hin is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that CowboyNeal has steadily declined in life expectancy. Cowboyneal is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If CowboyNeal is to survive at all it will be starving in bally's total fitness health club. CowboyNeal continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save him at this point in time. For all practical purposes, CowboyNeal is dead.
Fact: CowboyNeal is dying
Repeal the DMCA!
Who thinks this is an utter waste of a FPP? I mean, why the hell would anybody even submit this to /.? And if they did, why the hell would it be posted fer crissake?
Wow. Some spam filters may have a false positive. How groundbreaking. News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
ehintz
Come on - is it really your fault if you accidently find yourself "a customer of an ISP harboring a spammer?" Do you deserve to be punished too? Do you really think that blocking the entire netblock of people who may be using the service because they have no other choice is really a good method to stop spammers?
I doubt many people blocked due to a single spammer are going to think "oh, well, I may not be able to send e-mail to my most important client - but at least while I'm losing thousands of dollars, I know I'm helping to fight spam!" Most, I'd bet, would just call up the offending receiver and complain that they're getting bounce messages when they try and send e-mail and that the receivers should fix their mail servers as soon as possible.
So, I guess if costing a few hundred people a hundred bucks to move to another service is "helping to reduce spam," it's a cost that they should be glad to pay...
If you want to use SPEWS for your own personal webserver, then go ahead. If you expect anyone doing any buisness with e-mail to use it regardless of the risks of blocking important e-mail, then you're out of your mind. If you think that blocking entire netblocks is going to encourage companies to use SPEWS, then you're insane. If you think harming many to bring justice to a few in the group is morally just, then I must question your morals.
(I suppose a better analogy would be "Yeah, the gas may have put hundreds of innocent civilians into the hospital for a month, but it also put the three-man scam out of operation!" in that people that are blocked by SPEWS can become unblocked, and hence are only "wounded." It's still harming many to eliminate a few.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
What is needed is a foolproof way of saying "I want this, please send it to me" and then being able to reject it safly without needing the other party to do it for you. For example:
It's called Usenet. You post something to a newsgroup, and anybody who is interested may read it without their mailbox getting stuffed with crap. Electronic mailing lists are for people who are too dumb to figure out how to configure a newsgroup reader.
Bush Lies Watch