Spam is an ISP's headache
on
ORBS Forks
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· Score: 3
While there is no question that Brown was too often a bulldog, a service like ORBS noticeably helped cut down on spam for our ISP that services about 16,000 customers. Significantly.
Anyone who says that spam should only be blocked/fought at the recipient level doesn't have to run a mail server for thousands of customers. Spam bogs down our mail server often and we also have to respond to complaints from our customers, etc.
There is a lot of room between censorship and giving spammers free reign. A responsible and level-headed version of ORBS is very possible and quite welcome to me. For example, they can help notify us, and our customers who run their own mail servers, when a mail server allows open relays and we can try to get that blocked before a spammer compromises their machine and our bandwidth.
Spam doesn't only affect the mail boxes of end users, after all. Most spammers are reprehensible and a couple of procmail filters isn't enough to keep this in check. I just hope that one or more organizations will step up, learn from the mistakes as well as the successes of ORBS and help us no drown in spam.
Well said in your comments about the GPL but your "BTW" parenthetical remark at the end is college boy relativism that dilutes the sensibleness of your preceeding comments. It's the ol', "murder doesn't _really_ matter because we all suffer and then eventually die anyway" disassociated notion. I only say this because I hate to see good comments swiped away by their author. Some things _do_ matter and affect us all. Now that I'm warmed up, though, I'd like people to question the popular use of the terms "moral" and "immoral" (they've been used in the mp3 debate extensively, for example) and consider using the terms "ethical" and "unethical" instead. The word "moral" refers to the Latin word for "custom" and has a status quo, even religious connotation to it in general use whereas "ethical" comes from the Greek word for character (ethos) and has more of a self-reflective connotation and encourage individuals to deliberately decide for themselves. Just because something is against the law doesn't make it wrong... or right, after all. We should decide for ourselves, but with a sense of social responsibility, how to conduct ourselves in the world. My point is this: aren't we trying to create a better future with different standards and practices than we now have? This has to address the real concerns of real people which aren't always about needing more "E" in their lives. How do we carry ourselves in the world; how do we treat each other; how do we formulate a sense of ourselves; what kind of world do we really want? One of the reasons why I like to read the forums on slashdot is because so many of you are asking these questions because you know that some things do matter. I really enjoy how often exactly that happens in forums like in slashdot and just want to encourage more of it. I hope my words are a useful drop in the ol' ocean.
Slashdot Mirror
While there is no question that Brown was too often a bulldog, a service like ORBS noticeably helped cut down on spam for our ISP that services about 16,000 customers. Significantly.
Anyone who says that spam should only be blocked/fought at the recipient level doesn't have to run a mail server for thousands of customers. Spam bogs down our mail server often and we also have to respond to complaints from our customers, etc.
There is a lot of room between censorship and giving spammers free reign. A responsible and level-headed version of ORBS is very possible and quite welcome to me. For example, they can help notify us, and our customers who run their own mail servers, when a mail server allows open relays and we can try to get that blocked before a spammer compromises their machine and our bandwidth.
Spam doesn't only affect the mail boxes of end users, after all. Most spammers are reprehensible and a couple of procmail filters isn't enough to keep this in check. I just hope that one or more organizations will step up, learn from the mistakes as well as the successes of ORBS and help us no drown in spam.
Well said in your comments about the GPL but your "BTW" parenthetical remark at the end is college boy relativism that dilutes the sensibleness of your preceeding comments. It's the ol', "murder doesn't _really_ matter because we all suffer and then eventually die anyway" disassociated notion. I only say this because I hate to see good comments swiped away by their author. Some things _do_ matter and affect us all. Now that I'm warmed up, though, I'd like people to question the popular use of the terms "moral" and "immoral" (they've been used in the mp3 debate extensively, for example) and consider using the terms "ethical" and "unethical" instead. The word "moral" refers to the Latin word for "custom" and has a status quo, even religious connotation to it in general use whereas "ethical" comes from the Greek word for character (ethos) and has more of a self-reflective connotation and encourage individuals to deliberately decide for themselves. Just because something is against the law doesn't make it wrong... or right, after all. We should decide for ourselves, but with a sense of social responsibility, how to conduct ourselves in the world. My point is this: aren't we trying to create a better future with different standards and practices than we now have? This has to address the real concerns of real people which aren't always about needing more "E" in their lives. How do we carry ourselves in the world; how do we treat each other; how do we formulate a sense of ourselves; what kind of world do we really want? One of the reasons why I like to read the forums on slashdot is because so many of you are asking these questions because you know that some things do matter. I really enjoy how often exactly that happens in forums like in slashdot and just want to encourage more of it. I hope my words are a useful drop in the ol' ocean.