That night his machine is mirrored by the Homeland Security Gestapo in Patriot Act Sneak-and-Peak acting on reports that he is a religious fanatic and possibly a terrorist.
- sigh - if only the "patriot" "act" helped get rid of those religious fanatics...
Generally, if something you own or that is under your control causes something that results in some form of law-breaking and/or civil problems, you are considered accountable. If your car breaks go out and you hit someone, you're almost certainly going to be considered at fault. Same thing goes for animals under your control, and any number of other examples. In general, you are expected to be knowledgeable enough to control/maintain your possessions, or hire someone who can do so for you. Why should computers be any different?
Shall an old lady driving her 1967 Shelby Cobra to the church be deemed responsible if her engine explodes, and a piece kills a passing baby in a stroller, because the engine was improperly designed in the first place???
Any hosting provider could inadvertantly host a spammer, heck I've been blacklisted because a client of mine was involved with spammers elsewhere outside my services and the client had not once used my servers as part of his spammer resources, how am I supposed to know that he is involved elsewhere though? I was never informed of it, just one day SPEWS has us listed and even has some of our secondary DNS servers listed, none of which had anything to do with propogating any actual spam.
Well, you were providing some service to a spammer, so that's the reason why SPEWS listed you because you did not terminate the service when SPEWS complained to you (of course, SPEWS complaints are NOT advertised as such, so you ignore your ABUSE inbox at your peril).
And yet somehow, magically, we are supposed to just know our client is a spammer.
There is nothing magic. SPEWS will allow you to host a spammer, and they won't list you if you promptly terminate the spammer when they complain about it. You got blacklisted because you IGNORED complaints about the spammer.
They never did explain to me why they didn't also list the guys cable company, his telco, his other utilities he used outside his spamming activities, I mean fair is fair, if you want to punish spammers just list every possible service company they deal with and be done with it.
When you got listed, you obviously didn't read the SPEWS FAQ. You got included because the network ownwer(s) above you simply did not remove their pet spammers in due time. You were most likely "collateral damage".
I'm at least 4 degrees removed from the spammer, but I'm still on the stupid blacklist. Care to explain how that makes sense, or what possible influence I could exert on my ISP?
By moving out and stopping giving him your money, maybe???
<morbo>We sysadmins have a vastly bigger intelligence than you, puny humans, so it is no wonder your puny little human brains cannot understand what we do.
</morbo>
Paul Graham has a significant number of articles on fighting spam, and has done work on improving Bayesian spam filtering.
Bayesian filters are a pretty ineffective way of fightting spam. It's just an automatic "delete" button, but you still have to pay for the bandwidth and computer ressource (storage, cpu cycles) your network uses to receive the spam (and worse, to run the bayesian filter and it's database - I know, I used to run one but when each fucking incoming email had to plod through 120 megabytes of database).
Blacklisting is much more effective, because it stops the spam BEFORE it gets transmitted.
There are many, many private blocklists that are not advertised anywhere.
Here is my very own private/etc/mail/access blocklist which I use on my own mail server:
# 12.217.112 550 Mediacom. Heh. What a fucking spamming cesspool. So why not eat shit and die??? 12.217.113 550 Mediacom. Heh. What a fucking spamming cesspool. So why not eat shit and die??? 12.217.114 550 Mediacom. Heh. What a fucking spamming cesspool. So why not eat shit and die??? 12.217.115 550 Mediacom. Heh. What a fucking spamming cesspool. So why not eat shit and die??? 12.217.116 550 Mediacom. Heh. What a fucking spamming cesspool. So why not eat shit and die??? 12.217.117 550 Mediacom. Heh. What a fucking spamming cesspool. So why not eat shit and die??? 12.217.118 550 Mediacom. Heh. What a fucking spamming cesspool. So why not eat shit and die??? 12.217.119 550 Mediacom. Heh. What a fucking spamming cesspool. So why not eat shit and die??? 24 550 Comcast, when you'll have cleaned your zombies, you can knock here. Not before. 24.174 550 Chuck Jones must be spinning in his grave when he see he's associated with spam. Close port 25, fuckers. 59.0 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.10 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.1 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.11 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.12 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.13 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.14 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.15 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.16 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.17 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.18 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.19 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.2 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.20 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.21 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.22 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.23 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.24 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.25 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.26 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.27 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.28 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.29 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.3 550 It's not surprizing that a country split in two like Korea would have a totally fucked-up "internet". 59.30 5
No wonder my sister is disenchanted by email. Her yahoo account got spammed to no end, then she can't get emails from most of her friends since they get bounced back by her ISP's stupid blacklist.
Harsh, stupid, and ineffective. My IP is in a couple of blacklists because my ISP's ISP's ISP has a customer who has a customer that used to send spam, so some ridiculously huge netblock (/16?) is listed because of them.
I cannot switch ISPs. They're the only one in my small city that provides the hosting-friendly services I need. My ISP probably can't switch to a wholly different upstream, either, since connectivity to my city is somewhat limited.
Your ISP would not have been listed if he had read his ABUSE mailbox, and ditched the spammer as soon as complaints started to flow-in. Eventually, when clients like you will get tired of being blacklisted, they will move to a spam-unfriendly ISP, leaving the spamhaust to wither and die.
What? He's the only ISP in town? You poor sucker. That's the price to pay to live in hicksville... No wonder they were spam-friendly...
Well, though noogies then. Either endure your blocking, or smarthost your mail.
So...it's okay if he goes to Federal Pound-Him-In-The-Ass penitentiary just because he rented a car from a place that also rented a car to a crack dealer?
Bad analogy. It's more like a pizza joint refusing to deliver to the block you live in because twice last week it's delivery boys were raped by the crack dealers who live upstairs from you.
Your ISP may not allow spammers, but it really can't do a whole lot to stop every zombie before it sends any spam.
Au contraire, mon cher.
It's very easy to pre-emptively block every zombie before it sends any spam. Just block port 25 at the router and voilà! Instant spic-and-span network!
Oh, NEAT. So you can afford the downtime of a service/site that must be available 99.999% of the time to find and move to another colo provider and deal with weeks of inavailability inbetween (due to the SBL block) every time SBL decides to block a slew of subnets around you just because some jerkoff decided to spam from it?
You mean that you were not competent enough to think of setting-up a backup plan in case of disruption? Something along the lines of a unlisted smarthost welllll outside of the tainted netblock your server farm is on?
What I've never understood is how a human-run operation that blacklists based on human decisions, and which by blacklisting an organisation can interfere with both their business and their reputation, isn't breaking about half a dozen laws that would subject them to more-or-less open-ended damage suits. Can any lawyer reading this please explain why this doesn't count under things like defamation legislation?
Truth is an absolute defense against defamitory statements. But, of course, a spammer with deep-pockets can expensively harass a blocklist operator into oblivion, so this is why more serious blocklists are safely located well outside of the reach of US law, like SPEWS, which is located in Siberia.
Isn't it ironic that, in order to preserve one's free speech, one has to move to the old archvillain Soviet-Union???
Anyway, they shouldn't be blocking entire blocks of IPs. That doesn't even make sense. What does one guy on one IP out of hundreds or thousands who spammed for most of a day before he got caught have to do with my server which has run clean and reliable and secure and in good faith (including SPF and everything else) for the better part of a decade? As Paul Graham already stated, this is just a strongarm tactic to harass as many innocent parties as possible. There's no other explanation for it. Are two spammers really worth denying tens of thousands of (in the case of Paul Graham) Yahoo customers?
That Paul Graham is terminally clueless. When a hosting provider provides services to a spammer, he is a spam-supporter (as well as the other clients who pay him), so it is only fair that the whole network be listed as the spamhaus it is.
However, a spammer with false credentials faked his way into a hosting account with my colo provider and as a result, SBL blocked multiple entire submnets, rendering my entire site and service useless for almost an entire month (we deal with auctions, meaning nobody was getting closed notices, won notices, outbid notices, addresses to send payment, registration emails, lost password emails - and when they complained, I couldn't respond to help them and explain it to them).
Your ISP is entirely to blame for this. If he acted in a timely manner and disconnected the spammer as soon as the spamming complaints came in, he would never had been listed.
But your ISP obviously routed the abuse mailbox to Dave Null, hence the blacklisting.
Nothing forces you to do business with that ISP; you just move with your feet.
What? Do I hear about a contract? Well, your ISP did break his contract of providing unbroken connectivity, so you're free to go, and, better yet, the ISP is liable for your moving expenses!!!
What they do is allow others to block email between two diffrent people, simply because they run the mail servers that sit between them. If it was only individual users who were using these blocklists, it would be a diffrent issue. But it's not.
I operate my OWN MAIL SERVER ON MY VERY OWN NETWORK. Those are MY PRIVATE PROPERTY, so I MAKE MY OWN GODDAMMED RULES and I DECIDE WHO CAN CONNECT TO MY NETWORK OR NOT. For this, blocklists are invaluable because other people do the gruntwork of discovering the IP addresses of others.
In a nutshell, it's "MY NETWORK, MY RULES". Got any problem with that???
We've been blacklisted before and the sysadmins who run these things often WILL NOT remove you, no matter what. I'd take all the SPAM anyday vs. not being able to send legitimate emails.
If you are stupid enough to remain on a blacklisted network, you only deserve to have your mail blocked.
When your ISP is blacklisted, he is selling you tainted goods. So the only logical course is to move to a more respectable ISP who doesn't get listed; the idea is to force innocent collateral damage to move out of spam-friendly networks.
It's like a credit bureau: credit bureaus tell the lenders if you're trusty enough to be lent some money. When you are turned-down, it's not the credit bureau you blame but the lender. Blacklists are the same: they tell the receiving e-mail server that you are spammy or not. In any case, the "fault" isn't the blocklist but the receiving mail server.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as you don't make other's lives miserable...
"Spank the monkey, and win a 1-week trip to Neverland".
What part of "MY NETWORK, MY RULES" don't you get?
That's because only spammers use the "report was in error", "complaintant requested this email", or "virus killed" excuses.
Usally, colo farm computers don't get zombied...
Well, despite that, he whines like a spanked spammer on NANAE.
<morbo>We sysadmins have a vastly bigger intelligence than you, puny humans, so it is no wonder your puny little human brains cannot understand what we do. </morbo>
Blacklisting is much more effective, because it stops the spam BEFORE it gets transmitted.
Here is my very own private /etc/mail/access blocklist which I use on my own mail server:
What? He's the only ISP in town? You poor sucker. That's the price to pay to live in hicksville... No wonder they were spam-friendly...
Well, though noogies then. Either endure your blocking, or smarthost your mail.
It's very easy to pre-emptively block every zombie before it sends any spam. Just block port 25 at the router and voilà! Instant spic-and-span network!
Isn't it ironic that, in order to preserve one's free speech, one has to move to the old archvillain Soviet-Union???
But your ISP obviously routed the abuse mailbox to Dave Null, hence the blacklisting.
Nothing forces you to do business with that ISP; you just move with your feet.
What? Do I hear about a contract? Well, your ISP did break his contract of providing unbroken connectivity, so you're free to go, and, better yet, the ISP is liable for your moving expenses!!!
In a nutshell, it's "MY NETWORK, MY RULES". Got any problem with that???
When your ISP is blacklisted, he is selling you tainted goods. So the only logical course is to move to a more respectable ISP who doesn't get listed; the idea is to force innocent collateral damage to move out of spam-friendly networks.
It's like a credit bureau: credit bureaus tell the lenders if you're trusty enough to be lent some money. When you are turned-down, it's not the credit bureau you blame but the lender. Blacklists are the same: they tell the receiving e-mail server that you are spammy or not. In any case, the "fault" isn't the blocklist but the receiving mail server.