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How Pervasive is ISP Outbound Email Filtering?
Erris writes "A member of the Baton Rouge LUG noticed that Cox checks the text of outgoing email and rejects mail containing key phrases. I was aware of forced inbox filtering that has caused problems and been abused by other ISPs in China and in the US. I've also read about forced use of ISP SMTP and outbound throttling, but did not know they outbound filtered as well. How prevalent and justified is this practice? Wouldn't it be better to cut off people with infected computers than to censor the internet?"
If they did that, it would lower their income and cut into their profits. Filtering outbound email costs less, at least in the short run and that's all the typical MBA is interested in. Their idea is to move to a new company before the long-term damage they've caused becomes evident. (I'm not just wanking, here; I asked an MBA about it once and that's what he told me.)
Good, inexpensive web hosting
They could do inline virus filtering easier, cheaper, and still not be intrusive. IMHO they are being rude when they could be helpful.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
ISPs should ask you what services you really need when you sign up for a new account:
"I'm a normal user, let me have what normal users get"
"I'm a power user, please turn on ___, ____, and ___"
"I'm a power user and I really really really know what I'm asking for, please turn on everything."
Then let them change it at any time, either permanently or, if they only need it for awhile, for an hour, a day, or a week.
Once you do that you can hold customers responsible for things like letting bots run loose spamming the planet over an available outgoing port 25.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'd say that every ISP should do that, that is, if you could get it unblocked if you requested it or via some online account management.
99% of all people wouldn't need it anyway(except the bots on their machines) and the ones who do, would know how to open it. Of course it is a not the ideal way to solve the problem, but it's all we got for now.
Yes, I'm guessing they set the filter up so you can't email somebody a link to http://my_homebox_ip_number:8081/ and have it be a spoofed Paypal signin page or something like that.
That's got nothing to do with it though.
Whether or not you're running a home server, sending an email containing a URL certainly shouldn't breach the ToS. They're not going to filter emails referring to a breaching server, they'd contact you about the server or terminate your service.
Advanced users are users too!
It's a mixed metaphor:
I couldn't care less = I don't care
merged with
I could give a damn = I could care but I don't
and became
I could care less.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
In the Boston area, comcast fuckers are blocking port 25. So, even though people have legitimate uses for the internet connection they pay for, these companies are taking it on themselves to block standard connection protocols.
/. crowd already knows.
First its port 25, because of spam. Then it will be P2P because of copyright. Then it will be ssh because of terrorism. Then it will be, inspired from the new york story yesterday, filtering web content to prevent false alarms.
Fuckers. Bury your head america.
When people talk about fascist Germany, they focus on the extermination of jews and the holocaust, and while those were horrific acts, they are not what the Nazi party was about. They were the result of the acts of fanatical and arguably insane men who had gained power in the Nazi party, not the Nazi party, per se'
The Nazi party was about power and the exercise of it. It was about bringing pressure on the citizens from all aspects of society to conform to it. It used social structures and industries and laws to bring people under control. It is EXACTLY what is happening in america today. Its all the little things slowly picking away at the big things, until the big things crumble. Freedom of speech? Nope, now we have "free speech zones," where no one will hear you. I could go on, but the
Just like the Reichstag fire in 1933, the world trade center in 2001 gave the neocons the ability to enact limits on freedom. After that, industries which were once regulated in order to protect the citizens are now deregulated and destroying citizens who do not conform, RIAA, MPIAA, walmart, etc.
ISP censorship is just one more piece of it. The internet is becoming the primary conduit of communication and fascist america must have its citizens controlled, just lake Nazi Germany needed its citizens controlled.
All this isn't a conspiracy theory either. No conspiracy theory need exist. Our government (of the people, by the people, bla bla) is supposed to protect us. If it stops protecting us from big companies, those companies will naturally do the work for their own gain.
Now everyone in the USA is afraid. Some of terrorists, some of losing heath care, some of losing their job, their house, what ever. Fear, as the nazi's will tell you is a powerful tool to harness.
Welcome to neocon amaerica where companies sue their customers because they can. Companies dictate what you can do with your property, because they can, and if you do anything about it or protest, you can lose your job which means your house and health care.
Sorry for the rant, but I can't be the only one who sees this whole thing in this way
The problem is that the TOS are bogus, and there's absolutely nothing the customer can do about it. It's not as though we have a half dozen other cable subscribers to choose from and to keep each other honest; aside from the phone company, Cox is the only game in town for many folks. The theoretical benefits and corrective effects of free-market competition do not operate in such an environment.
Seriously, "servers of any type [...] server like functionality"? Congratulations, you've just described anything that accepts an incoming TCP or UDP connection. If I cannot at least SSH and VPN into my home network from abroad, my so-called Internet connection loses 50% of its utility.
I'd love to see somebody with the resources to do so stand up to these guys and sue them for false advertising. If you perform unwanted filtering on the incoming and outgoing access of your users, you're no longer selling a full Internet connection. The most troubling part is that Cox isn't even the worst offender in this regard, not by a long shot.
Or server-like functionality?
So, what exactly, defines a server? When you think about it, there's just traffic between two points. From a semantic perspective, posting to /. could be seen as "serving" text to a remote computer...
But, I think this kind of highlights the apparent Cox conceptual model of the internet:
The optimist in me hopes I'm wrong on some of the above points, but the pessimist knows to suspect the worst.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Blocking every port under 1024 and having a touch tone phone interface to unblock them would be ideal.
That way there is no way for a bot to automate it (ok maybe if they still have a analog modem but unlikely) and its pretty easy to unblock yourself while keeping the ISP's workload low.
That would cut out a lot of the net's problems overnight and make it extremely difficult to bypass.
No. Kill the connection of those computers. Don't block and filter my computer because Joe Idiot has malware. Cut him off and make it his responsiblity to clean his property. If I had a spiking phone that was causing disruption to the telephone network they'd disconnect my phone not start filtering your phone conversations. If my car was a defect I wouldn't be allowed to drive.
Come on, are you telling me sending an email is an add on to the basic funtionality of the internet, and optional extra? "Oh, you want "clean" water? Well I suggest you upgrade to our business service. Our residential water pipes only deliver untreated effluent."
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
The answer I have to that is "9/11 Changed Everything".
Seriously -- when the US government asked the telcos to commit surveillance crimes against the US citizens, only Qwest refused. Usually, breaking the law is a bad thing, but the US government was offering lots of money to the telcos, and presumably the promise not to prosecute. So the only company that got in trouble was the one following the law. And somehow the Qwest CEO that refused the deal ended up in jail. Meanwhile Dick Cheney is desperately trying to get immunity for the cooperating telcos for their crimes. See how that works?
So on the surface of things scanning and filtering our email might seem to be a bad busines move. But if the same US Government that got illegal telephone surveillance of US Citizens is also going for illegal surveillance of our emails, email filtering starts to make much more business sense.
It used to be that the idea of the US government secretly finding out what was in your emails was in the tin-foil hat realm. But the illegal surveillance of telephone calls would have been as well, along with secretly torturing people in secret overseas prisons. As well as "constitution-free" zones such as Gitmo that are paid for by US taxpayer dollars.
So if you have a government that scans your telephone calls, email, and web-surfing habits, you get very close to a goal of "total information awareness", which was one of the government's programs that was renamed and shuffled around after the public got very upset.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
In this day and age, with most busy mailservers fending off about 60% of their load as Mass Spam storms, it is almost negligent to allow all of your customers unlimited access to smtp to any destination. Yes, there will always be outcry about 'censorship' and 'big brother'. It's a shame it's not the same crowd that shouts about the torrent of Spam and viruses that comes from high bandwidth, unaware mom & dad users (and us techies too - I can't remember the last Open Relay I saw configured by a mom & dad!) incidentally, scanning for and removing http://ip.ip.ip.ip/ links from Email is a pretty good way of detecting and blocking the outbound phishing attempts that each year result in millions of dollars being drained from the bank accounts of the uninitiated. Censorship is designed to prevent a particular content, subject or message from being propgated. I'm pretty sure you can re-write an Email in such a way as it does not get blocked. I'm pretty sure that if you want to run an SMTP server, you can get permission. if however, you happen to be a virus, you're hopefully s**t out of luck.
It's not you being a grown-up, it's your idiot neighbors who click everything under the sun without regard to security. I think the solution is to block by default, and have a mechanism to open it up, as other posters have stated.
That's not incompetence, that's by design. The RFC for 587 submission states that it requires the use of SMTP-AUTH, rendering it useless for most forms of spam-spewing malware; an incompetent ISP will filter it, not open it.
But by the time you detect the spew, how many sites have already blacklisted your server?
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
There was a recent article that showed that the performance of anti-virus s/w has got worse over the past year or two. People who think that Windows can be secured are in denial! The basic problem is that it is difficult to run as a limited user. Quickbooks requires administrator rights, I recently came across video capture and editing s/w that requires admin rights (despite Studio running on the same machine perfectly well for limited users). I am sure there are other programs. Yes, I know about "run as", but my claim is that it is difficult.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Oooh, yeah let's regulate it. What would be the mechanism to open it up?
We had that a while back. It was called ARPANet. Progress is a circle and we improve by going backwards.
How about this: If you are an idiot who clicks on everything GET OFF THE DAMN TRAIN! A leave it for us grown ups.
There is a mechanism already - its called money. Pay more, get more. Nothing to do with security or idiot neighbours, purely about making more profit. Like everything these days.
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
Except that it's a very unlikely thing to say sarcastically.
... you just have to know. If you don't, just accept it because that's what the rest of us do. It's not the literal meaning of the phrase that matters.
Except that you're just wrong. The phrase "I could care less" is usually only about a notch above saying "fuck you, and the horse you rode in on." As the GP said, it's a colloquial expression and unless you've been exposed to it in the proper context you probably just won't get it. Attempting to analyze such expressions in any language using the kind of logic you were trying to apply is a fruitless exercise. Like a lot of other things in American English
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..