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.
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.
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