Slashdot Mirror
Anti-TPP Website Being Blacklisted
so.dan writes: The CTO of Fight for the Future — the non-profit activism group behind Battle for the Net, Blackout Congress, and Stop Fast Track — Jeff Lyon, is seeking advice regarding a problem with facing the website they created — stopfasttrack.com — to fight the secret Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.
The site been blacklisted by Twitter, Facebook, and major email providers as malicious/spam. Over the last week, nobody has been able to post the website on social networks, or send any emails with their URL. Lyon has posted a summary of the relevant details on Reddit in the hope of obtaining useful feedback regarding what the cause might be. However, none of the answers there right now seem particularly useful, so I'm hoping the Slashdot community can help him out by posting here.
Lyon indicates that the blackout has occurred at a particularly crucial point in the campaign to kill the TPP, as most members of the House of Representatives would likely vote against it were it brought to a vote now, and as pro-TPP interests have started to escalate their lobbying efforts on the House to counteract what would otherwise be a no vote.
The site been blacklisted by Twitter, Facebook, and major email providers as malicious/spam. Over the last week, nobody has been able to post the website on social networks, or send any emails with their URL. Lyon has posted a summary of the relevant details on Reddit in the hope of obtaining useful feedback regarding what the cause might be. However, none of the answers there right now seem particularly useful, so I'm hoping the Slashdot community can help him out by posting here.
Lyon indicates that the blackout has occurred at a particularly crucial point in the campaign to kill the TPP, as most members of the House of Representatives would likely vote against it were it brought to a vote now, and as pro-TPP interests have started to escalate their lobbying efforts on the House to counteract what would otherwise be a no vote.
So, he's using a domain without an SPF record (allowing it to be spoofed), and Cloudflare hosting which is notorius for spam and botnets. The same domain name with .RU extension is already associated with generating spam.
Furthermore, his homepage is chocka-block with links, that anyone could mistake for a link-farm / spam page.
There's no grand conspiracy here, just a webmaster who's not terribly savvy and some overzealous AI heuristics at Spamhaus, FB and Twitter playing it safe.
Nothing more to see here, please move along.
From the comments below the article....
1) Site was on spamhaus's blacklist.
2) Someone with more exerience than the poster suggested he add SPF records.
3) Poster added SPF records and thanked the other person.
4) Site is no longer on spamhaus's blacklist.
I got tired of reading comments before I figured out if this resolved all the poster's complaints.
1. Were you in fact spamming? If you injected your message lots of places where it was off topic, then you were spamming and earned your ban. If you failed to follow email best practices (this means *confirmed* opt-in prior to receiving any list content) then you were spamming and earned your ban.
2. Has the web site been hacked with malicious code? Assume yes until you can get a clean bill of health by bona fide security expert.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The site isn't claiming that they're being censored, or that it's a Constitutional free speech issue, just that they're being blocked. It's possible that some anti-spam rule triggered against their site for some reason - anti-spam systems use statistical models and rules, and aren't always right, which is why they all have some appeal mechanism to get human judgement involved. So right now they're trying to get enough public visibility to the issue, demonstrating that the site is legitimate and that many people care about it, which gives whoever's blocking the site to have an incentive to pay attention and fix it.
If they don't raise a fuss, they'll almost certainly be ignored and stay blocked, which isn't a good outcome.
If I had to guess, the site might have gotten flagged by one of the black-listing services, and since many people subscribe to those services the one flag could cause them to be blocked everywhere. So if they can get enough attention to get that service to un-block them, it'll get better everywhere.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
True, but that accelerated after NAFTA. In part because the promised protections used to get the votes to pass NAFTA were not delivered on. That history of lying to get profitable deals passed is why it's important not to agree to TPP, etc., without knowing what's actually in it, and not to believe promises about the future.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Huh? There were plenty of huge multinational organizations when the first amendment was created. Part of the revolutionary war was because of several and all but two of the original 13 colonies was sponsored/created by them. They largely operated under Proprietary charters and many of the state names are derived from them. Most of them were revoked and a royal charter was in place by the 1760s but even then, we have the Boston Tea Party which was a protest over taxes created to reward the failing East India Company.
The site isn't claiming that they're being censored, or that it's a Constitutional free speech issue, just that they're being blocked.
So, I posted a link to the Stop Fast Track website on Facebook, to see if it would be blocked, and it wasn't. I can see the website link from Facebook, my friends can see the website and post on it. So, if it was a mistake to block it, it's fixed now. Get all fired up people.
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.