I am the head of IT for a large dental practice and we use wireless keyboards and mice in all of our operatories, at our front desk area, and in a couple of other areas -- because the owners wanted it that way, over my objections. They sign the paychecks so after I made sure they understood my objections, I gave them what they asked for.
That was an incredibly stupid thing to post. You are just doing what your bosses told you, but that does not help the fact that you have just admitted to being a direct accessory, and in fact a facilitator, to SERIOUS HIPAA violations. Your workplace should be shut down immediately. I hope you don't end up being held criminally responsible.
And of course, in this context, the fact that YOU received the email is completely irrelevant anyway, because if you had NOT received it, you would not be attempting to classify it in the first place.
But doesn't the fact that *I* received the message equally indicate that it's *not* spam? I don't understand. Jane getting the message indicates that it's spam, me getting it indicates that it's not.
You are absolutely correct -- both facts are individual pieces of evidence. But the MAGNITUDE of the change in probability due to these facts is not always (in fact, usually isn't) exactly the same. On the whole, you "win" by decreasing your uncertainty.
I'm thinking that was not written by an EE (or anybody else that commonly speaks about electronics and efficiency.) I would suppose they operate at 1.5 volts and consume some number of amps.
If you're going to be pedantic, don't talk about "consuming amps." The current flowing into the circuit from power is exactly the same as the current flowing out of the circuit to ground (otherwise, the circuit would be building up a charge). Where exactly does this current get "consumed?" It doesn't. What gets consumed is ENERGY. Not volts. Not current. Energy.
Even more pedantic, there's no such thing as "consuming energy" either. The closest you might get is "increasing entropy."
At least once a week there seems to be another flashy technique to filter or block spam. Great.
It's not "flashy." It's called information theory and statistics. It is an extremely powerful concept that has far more important potential uses than simply filtering spam email. Every new advancement in automated classification and knowledge extraction is VITALLY IMPORTANT to our ability to cope in a world which has suddenly been flooding with SO MUCH information. This power tool is being applied to what some might see as a "silly" problem, but the fact remains that spam is a powerful motivation to researchers to push further limits in the fields of pattern recognition, information and natural language processing.
If you're against the advancement of information processing techniques, then... uh, okay, I guess. If you can't see beyond spam, you are terribly short sighted.
So, if I understood the article correctly, this technology will classify more email as spam the more spam you have received.
No, that's not how it works at all. Let me try putting it as a concrete example. You have a friend, Jane, who likes to swap stupid chain emails, subscribes to all kinds of "voluntary spam," and generally receives 1000 spam mails a day. Jane's a great lady, don't get me wrong, but you know the type of person I mean. You talk to her in real life, but over email she is incredibly annoying, as most of her messages are essentially meaningless.
Now, let's say that BOTH YOU AND JANE receive the same message M. Now, you know Jane, and you know the kind of messages she typically received (mindless, at least in YOUR eyes). What are the chances that this message M is something that YOU will be interested in? Probably very low. The vast majority of email Jane receives is "crap," at least according to your definition, and so the very fact that Jane received message M greatly increases the likelihood that it is "crap."
Also, I think ads in PDF's are a bad idea. PDF's load too slowly as it is.
Correction: Adobe's Reader loads too slowly. The horrific meltdown which occurs when you open a PDF is not PDF's fault, but the software which processes it. PDF itself is a relatively simple data format, although it specifies a lot of features. If you are content to simply read well-formatted text and graphics, you could try a different reader like FoxIt or a free option like xpdf. You'll find that PDF is not a bloated, slow format at all. Don't confuse the software with the format.
The only issue is that if the author wrote the code at work, it's not his to give away.
That may be true now, but plenty of the old-timers I work with have brought code in that they originally developed elsewhere. At the time this was done (early '90s) I don't think people saw much wrong in taking "boilerplate" or otherwise generally useful code from site to site. It's the kind of toolset that makes a person more useful as a programmer. I find it odd that today this fundamental boilerplate is fiercely guarded by companies along with the truly innovative code, and the result is that people keep reinventing the wheel every place they are employed.
It's one thing to steal a piece of code that is actually innovative. But what if we're talking about something a little more mundane, like a logging layer? Maybe company policy says you can't take it with you, but that's just stupid from an engineering standpoint. The whole world would benefit if we could just stop writing this damn boilerplate all the time and get to the good stuff.
I would not have even posted if I hadn't been accused of being a "spammer," which is the typical response when I criticize RBL. This happens so often that by default I give a pointer to our paper. The point is, there is no reason to give up our freedom on the Internet because of a few dickheads. I believe this fervently enough that I've done research work on the topic to try to improve the situation. Am I overly opinionated? Probably. But I see absolutely no reason why normal Internet users should be victimized by these systems when there are perfectly acceptable alternatives.
We could also cut down on terrorism by strip searching everybody the moment they step outside their front door. This is morally reprehensible to me, as is the prejudice inherent in RBL systems. The price we pay in a free society in return for NOT getting anal probes on a daily basis is that a few bad apples slip through. And the price we pay for fair, content-based spam filtering is that sometimes a few bad messages get through.
An MD5 hash is a pseudo-unique identifier of a piece of data based on its contents. Everything you've said is exactly the entire PURPOSE of a hash function. Boil down a piece of data to some fixed size code, and use this to index things. MD5, on top of being a hash, is a SECURE hash (well, relative term).
I don't want any credit**, just implement it and let me know when it's up and running!
Thank God you don't want credit, because nobody is going to give you any for coming up with something that's been around since paper punch cards and is the basis of efficient lookup of objects in practically every application you've ever used.
Rainbow tables? Salting breaks it.
Precomupted dictionaries? Salting breaks it.
Brute force and compare against the whole pw list? Salting breaks it.
Salting adds some fixed number of bits of difficulty, it doesn't make anything impossible. In practice, the salt can be made SO large that the multiplier becomes insane (imagine a 12 character password with 1024 characters of cryptographically random salt added to it). But as far as theory goes, salt just makes brute force more work, it doesn't eliminate it as an attack.
sanity checks have to go at each point writing to the buffer.
Answer 1: Yeah, writing good software requires effort.
Answer 2: Centralize the code which accesses the buffer, and put sanity checks there. Then just call this code. I know this "structured programming" concept is pretty bleeding-edge stuff, being only 40 years or so old, but hey. Sometimes you just gotta learn something new.
A spammer who published a paper on automated classification of spam, and devised a neural network/information clustering technique which was shown to be even more effective than Bayesian filtering -- in fact, more effective than ANY other known content-based method at the time? Yeah, okay, chief. So tell me, what the hell have YOU been doing to combat the spam problem, aside from widesweeping, ill-advised, technically flawed, misanthropic methods?
Filter the content, not the physical source. We could beat the spammers by shutting down the whole damn Internet, but that's not a real solution. It's a solution for the simple-minded and the impatient. Who cares if a few percent of spam gets through? WE HAVE OUR FREEDOM BACK. Your attitude seems to be, "Who cares if we give up our free use of the Internet because of a few dickheads -- at least I don't have to deal with the inconvenience of spam messages."
I'm willing to put in the work to make an open, spam-free Internet a reality. How about you? Or would you prefer to just yank my network connection so you don't have to hear my "whining" any more?
Aren't we prideful. Do you work for Microsoft or something? Everyone makes mistakes. In the real world, you should program in as many sanity checks as you can. Over compensating for potential problems will usually lead to more secure and stable programs, or at the very least make it fail in a less catastrophic way.
Where did I say we didn't need sanity checks? What I said was, this DOESN'T EVEN COUNT as a sanity check. You could do all this crap so that you feel comfortable AVOIDING real sanity checks, OR, you could check if the index you are about to reference is in range or not. THAT'S a sanity check. I really can't imagine how you read the complete opposite of what I meant.
What r00t is suggesting is like pointing a gun at your wife but hey, at least you made sure she was wearing a bulletproof vest. What I'm suggesting is to not point the gun at your wife at all.
Buggy software is a fact of life for the most part - it is created by humans and we all make mistakes.
When is the last time you were driving and the road just COLLAPSED? The bridge fell down? Your car spontaneously burst into flames? When's the last time you plugged an electrical appliance into a wall and got shocked? Last time your plasma television went nuts and shot laser beams at your cat? When's the last time the case of your box fan failed and the blades went flying through the air, decapitating you?
When's the last time you saw a piece of software crash?
It's true. Humans aren't perfect. And yet we somehow design bridges (for the most part) that DON'T fail, cars that DON'T explode, appliances that DON'T electrocute us, and televisions that DON'T shoot laser beams. When these things do, rarely, occur, we hold the engineers LEGALLY RESPONSIBLE for the consequences.
We programmers are used to working under a "fog of wizardom" where our actions are taken as mysterious, inexplicable, incomprehensible, and genius. We coasted for decades by pulling the wool over the world's eyes this way. But the reality is, writing code is no more complicated than building a bridge or putting together a car engine. We consider these sorts of workers "blue collar." Most programmers today don't even design the code they write -- they write to a specification written by somebody who is probably only marginally more competent than they are. The world is waking up to the reality that most programmers, like most people in general, absolutely suck at what they do. And this "fog of wizardom" is going to dissipate. Rapidly.
The day is coming where software writers will be held accountable for the flaws they create, at least those which result in actual harm, whether human or financial. I suspect that a great many programmers will simply drop out of the workforce rather than face legal consequences for their failures.
Oh, you mean that a USER could compromise THEIR PERSONAL FILES... well, that does suck, but you have backups, right?
"That hacker stole all my steamy emails between me and my mistress and threatened to tell my wife unless I pay him $10,000! Thank God at least I have backups!"
None of what you just described counts as a "sanity check." It's more like putting an immensely complicated band-aid on the problem so that when things do explode they explode in a predictable way. This can be a good thing in certain fields. If failure of your software might cause somebody's death, then yes, you want complete assurance that things cannot silently go wrong. But failing that, this is nothing but a poor substitute for good coding practice.
If you have so much doubt in your own code, why do you trust yourself to correctly execute this complex plan? "Well, I package it up in a function so I only have to get it right once." Yeah... Ever thought of applying that concept to, I don't know, THE REST OF YOUR CODE?
A sincere Thank You for your efforts, identifying the issue and alerting the Devs, and correcting the problem.
This is the way things were meant to work, as so eloquently put elsewhere.
Yeah. A sincere thank you to the engineers who designed that bridge which fell down due to not one, but multiple catastrophic flaws. I'm sure you'll do better next time. This is the way engineering is supposed to work.
How are you going to patch embedded devices that have hardware vulnerabilities?
What the hell does this argument have to do with Open Source? I'm sorry, was there some memo I missed that explains how embedded closed source software is easier to update than embedded open source software? You want a reasoned debate, how about we exclude the open/closed crap altogether, as it is totally irrelevant?
Having said that, I agree. The "many eyes shallow bugs" argument is absurd. It's like going to a country where the national motto is: "Flurbistan: Who cares about the murder rate, we have a 100% conviction rate!" As if patching bugs quickly is somehow a consolation for people who have been compromised by them. Better idea: Don't release buggy shit in the first place.
If you're getting hammered with DoS attacks, spam, interweb herpaids or whatever TFA is about, you block the source. Blocking an IP address has nothing to do with some irrational fear of 32-bit numbers - it blocks the person using that number from destroying your network.
Key point being the word "your" in "your network." Do whatever the hell you want on your own network. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about ISPs who take it upon themselves to filter the email to their own users based on criteria the users have no say over and probably zero knowledge of. Yes, it's a free market, blah blah blah. Let's see how you like changing providers every couple of months because they start using RBL. I take it you've never been on the losing end of an RBL -- I have. I couldn't email several important people because their ISPs started using various RBLs. So I'm in the same net block with a thousand other people, one of whom is maybe a spammer, therefore *I* have to change providers? Fuck you very much.
If you think blacklisting is unethical, then you must think that ignoring something for any reason(or for no reason at all) is unethical. I doubt you actually believe this.
Not an equivalent for comparison. It's not ME who chooses to ignore something. It's a piece of software on a server that I have no control over. My mom didn't have a choice when her ISP started blocking my emails. Except of course to change ISPs to one which has a sane policy. And I'm not switching hosting services just because my IP somehow made it into a blacklist. Believe me, I checked it out and could not ascertain just why in the hell my IP (actually the whole net block) was on the list. The hosting service is outstanding and has very proactive spam measures.
Some mail server administrator who thinks he's God decided that he should get to choose which mail gets delivered and which doesn't. That breaks a fundamental trust between customer and service provider. "We're going to block these mails -- if you don't like it, switch providers." Sounds like blackmail to me. Leveraging the very VICTIMS of spam, taking advantage of their ire, frustration, and helplessness to further your own political goals. It's slime at its lowest.
Being a sysadmin doesn't make you God. Maybe back when we were all 15 and swapping warez over 2400 BPS modems, the sysop was "God." Most of us have grown up since then.
Well then you obviously are not on the receiving end of millions of spam emails every day that *COULD* have been rejected outright if only you'd been using an SBL. Or you have so much free time to delete all of the junk emails, in which case where do you work?
I use a Bayesian filter, perhaps you've heard of it? It filters about 300 messages a day. That's down, from about 3000 a day a year ago. Filter the content, not the source.
Why should I waste all of my time looking and and handling spam emails I never wanted, requested, or occasionally specifically asked to not to receive?
No idea. Why DO you? I don't.
If you don't like block lists, don't use them.
I was unable to email my own mother for over 3 months because her ISP uses RBL and my IP was in a banned block. So yes, I wasn't using it, but the recipient was, without her knowledge or even informed consent. The fact is, we don't GET a choice. We're at the mercy of rabid sysadmins.
Slashdot Mirror
If we're all gone, who the hell cares whether the planet is reseeded? It sounds self-centered, and it is. But the question cries out for an answer.
I am the head of IT for a large dental practice and we use wireless keyboards and mice in all of our operatories, at our front desk area, and in a couple of other areas -- because the owners wanted it that way, over my objections. They sign the paychecks so after I made sure they understood my objections, I gave them what they asked for.
That was an incredibly stupid thing to post. You are just doing what your bosses told you, but that does not help the fact that you have just admitted to being a direct accessory, and in fact a facilitator, to SERIOUS HIPAA violations. Your workplace should be shut down immediately. I hope you don't end up being held criminally responsible.
And of course, in this context, the fact that YOU received the email is completely irrelevant anyway, because if you had NOT received it, you would not be attempting to classify it in the first place.
But doesn't the fact that *I* received the message equally indicate that it's *not* spam? I don't understand. Jane getting the message indicates that it's spam, me getting it indicates that it's not.
You are absolutely correct -- both facts are individual pieces of evidence. But the MAGNITUDE of the change in probability due to these facts is not always (in fact, usually isn't) exactly the same. On the whole, you "win" by decreasing your uncertainty.
I'm thinking that was not written by an EE (or anybody else that commonly speaks about electronics and efficiency.) I would suppose they operate at 1.5 volts and consume some number of amps.
If you're going to be pedantic, don't talk about "consuming amps." The current flowing into the circuit from power is exactly the same as the current flowing out of the circuit to ground (otherwise, the circuit would be building up a charge). Where exactly does this current get "consumed?" It doesn't. What gets consumed is ENERGY. Not volts. Not current. Energy.
Even more pedantic, there's no such thing as "consuming energy" either. The closest you might get is "increasing entropy."
Voltage has no impact on resistance.
Let me introduce you to my friend, Diode.
At least once a week there seems to be another flashy technique to filter or block spam. Great.
It's not "flashy." It's called information theory and statistics. It is an extremely powerful concept that has far more important potential uses than simply filtering spam email. Every new advancement in automated classification and knowledge extraction is VITALLY IMPORTANT to our ability to cope in a world which has suddenly been flooding with SO MUCH information. This power tool is being applied to what some might see as a "silly" problem, but the fact remains that spam is a powerful motivation to researchers to push further limits in the fields of pattern recognition, information and natural language processing.
If you're against the advancement of information processing techniques, then... uh, okay, I guess. If you can't see beyond spam, you are terribly short sighted.
So, if I understood the article correctly, this technology will classify more email as spam the more spam you have received.
No, that's not how it works at all. Let me try putting it as a concrete example. You have a friend, Jane, who likes to swap stupid chain emails, subscribes to all kinds of "voluntary spam," and generally receives 1000 spam mails a day. Jane's a great lady, don't get me wrong, but you know the type of person I mean. You talk to her in real life, but over email she is incredibly annoying, as most of her messages are essentially meaningless.
Now, let's say that BOTH YOU AND JANE receive the same message M. Now, you know Jane, and you know the kind of messages she typically received (mindless, at least in YOUR eyes). What are the chances that this message M is something that YOU will be interested in? Probably very low. The vast majority of email Jane receives is "crap," at least according to your definition, and so the very fact that Jane received message M greatly increases the likelihood that it is "crap."
Does that make better sense?
Also, I think ads in PDF's are a bad idea. PDF's load too slowly as it is.
Correction: Adobe's Reader loads too slowly. The horrific meltdown which occurs when you open a PDF is not PDF's fault, but the software which processes it. PDF itself is a relatively simple data format, although it specifies a lot of features. If you are content to simply read well-formatted text and graphics, you could try a different reader like FoxIt or a free option like xpdf. You'll find that PDF is not a bloated, slow format at all. Don't confuse the software with the format.
The only issue is that if the author wrote the code at work, it's not his to give away.
That may be true now, but plenty of the old-timers I work with have brought code in that they originally developed elsewhere. At the time this was done (early '90s) I don't think people saw much wrong in taking "boilerplate" or otherwise generally useful code from site to site. It's the kind of toolset that makes a person more useful as a programmer. I find it odd that today this fundamental boilerplate is fiercely guarded by companies along with the truly innovative code, and the result is that people keep reinventing the wheel every place they are employed.
It's one thing to steal a piece of code that is actually innovative. But what if we're talking about something a little more mundane, like a logging layer? Maybe company policy says you can't take it with you, but that's just stupid from an engineering standpoint. The whole world would benefit if we could just stop writing this damn boilerplate all the time and get to the good stuff.
so only 30% of US household were NOT passed by cable, and have access to it.
Huh? I parsed that as 70% of houses have cable PASSING BY, i.e., accessible to them. Spectacularly poor choice of wording.
I would not have even posted if I hadn't been accused of being a "spammer," which is the typical response when I criticize RBL. This happens so often that by default I give a pointer to our paper. The point is, there is no reason to give up our freedom on the Internet because of a few dickheads. I believe this fervently enough that I've done research work on the topic to try to improve the situation. Am I overly opinionated? Probably. But I see absolutely no reason why normal Internet users should be victimized by these systems when there are perfectly acceptable alternatives.
We could also cut down on terrorism by strip searching everybody the moment they step outside their front door. This is morally reprehensible to me, as is the prejudice inherent in RBL systems. The price we pay in a free society in return for NOT getting anal probes on a daily basis is that a few bad apples slip through. And the price we pay for fair, content-based spam filtering is that sometimes a few bad messages get through.
An MD5 hash is a pseudo-unique identifier of a piece of data based on its contents. Everything you've said is exactly the entire PURPOSE of a hash function. Boil down a piece of data to some fixed size code, and use this to index things. MD5, on top of being a hash, is a SECURE hash (well, relative term).
I don't want any credit**, just implement it and let me know when it's up and running!
Thank God you don't want credit, because nobody is going to give you any for coming up with something that's been around since paper punch cards and is the basis of efficient lookup of objects in practically every application you've ever used.
Rainbow tables? Salting breaks it. Precomupted dictionaries? Salting breaks it. Brute force and compare against the whole pw list? Salting breaks it.
Salting adds some fixed number of bits of difficulty, it doesn't make anything impossible. In practice, the salt can be made SO large that the multiplier becomes insane (imagine a 12 character password with 1024 characters of cryptographically random salt added to it). But as far as theory goes, salt just makes brute force more work, it doesn't eliminate it as an attack.
sanity checks have to go at each point writing to the buffer.
Answer 1: Yeah, writing good software requires effort.
Answer 2: Centralize the code which accesses the buffer, and put sanity checks there. Then just call this code. I know this "structured programming" concept is pretty bleeding-edge stuff, being only 40 years or so old, but hey. Sometimes you just gotta learn something new.
Wah wah wah! Grow up. You sound like a spammer.
A spammer who published a paper on automated classification of spam, and devised a neural network/information clustering technique which was shown to be even more effective than Bayesian filtering -- in fact, more effective than ANY other known content-based method at the time? Yeah, okay, chief. So tell me, what the hell have YOU been doing to combat the spam problem, aside from widesweeping, ill-advised, technically flawed, misanthropic methods?
Filter the content, not the physical source. We could beat the spammers by shutting down the whole damn Internet, but that's not a real solution. It's a solution for the simple-minded and the impatient. Who cares if a few percent of spam gets through? WE HAVE OUR FREEDOM BACK. Your attitude seems to be, "Who cares if we give up our free use of the Internet because of a few dickheads -- at least I don't have to deal with the inconvenience of spam messages."
I'm willing to put in the work to make an open, spam-free Internet a reality. How about you? Or would you prefer to just yank my network connection so you don't have to hear my "whining" any more?
Aren't we prideful. Do you work for Microsoft or something? Everyone makes mistakes. In the real world, you should program in as many sanity checks as you can. Over compensating for potential problems will usually lead to more secure and stable programs, or at the very least make it fail in a less catastrophic way.
Where did I say we didn't need sanity checks? What I said was, this DOESN'T EVEN COUNT as a sanity check. You could do all this crap so that you feel comfortable AVOIDING real sanity checks, OR, you could check if the index you are about to reference is in range or not. THAT'S a sanity check. I really can't imagine how you read the complete opposite of what I meant.
What r00t is suggesting is like pointing a gun at your wife but hey, at least you made sure she was wearing a bulletproof vest. What I'm suggesting is to not point the gun at your wife at all.
Buggy software is a fact of life for the most part - it is created by humans and we all make mistakes.
When is the last time you were driving and the road just COLLAPSED? The bridge fell down? Your car spontaneously burst into flames? When's the last time you plugged an electrical appliance into a wall and got shocked? Last time your plasma television went nuts and shot laser beams at your cat? When's the last time the case of your box fan failed and the blades went flying through the air, decapitating you?
When's the last time you saw a piece of software crash?
It's true. Humans aren't perfect. And yet we somehow design bridges (for the most part) that DON'T fail, cars that DON'T explode, appliances that DON'T electrocute us, and televisions that DON'T shoot laser beams. When these things do, rarely, occur, we hold the engineers LEGALLY RESPONSIBLE for the consequences.
We programmers are used to working under a "fog of wizardom" where our actions are taken as mysterious, inexplicable, incomprehensible, and genius. We coasted for decades by pulling the wool over the world's eyes this way. But the reality is, writing code is no more complicated than building a bridge or putting together a car engine. We consider these sorts of workers "blue collar." Most programmers today don't even design the code they write -- they write to a specification written by somebody who is probably only marginally more competent than they are. The world is waking up to the reality that most programmers, like most people in general, absolutely suck at what they do. And this "fog of wizardom" is going to dissipate. Rapidly.
The day is coming where software writers will be held accountable for the flaws they create, at least those which result in actual harm, whether human or financial. I suspect that a great many programmers will simply drop out of the workforce rather than face legal consequences for their failures.
Oh, you mean that a USER could compromise THEIR PERSONAL FILES... well, that does suck, but you have backups, right?
"That hacker stole all my steamy emails between me and my mistress and threatened to tell my wife unless I pay him $10,000! Thank God at least I have backups!"
None of what you just described counts as a "sanity check." It's more like putting an immensely complicated band-aid on the problem so that when things do explode they explode in a predictable way. This can be a good thing in certain fields. If failure of your software might cause somebody's death, then yes, you want complete assurance that things cannot silently go wrong. But failing that, this is nothing but a poor substitute for good coding practice.
If you have so much doubt in your own code, why do you trust yourself to correctly execute this complex plan? "Well, I package it up in a function so I only have to get it right once." Yeah... Ever thought of applying that concept to, I don't know, THE REST OF YOUR CODE?
A sincere Thank You for your efforts, identifying the issue and alerting the Devs, and correcting the problem. This is the way things were meant to work, as so eloquently put elsewhere.
Yeah. A sincere thank you to the engineers who designed that bridge which fell down due to not one, but multiple catastrophic flaws. I'm sure you'll do better next time. This is the way engineering is supposed to work.
Wait, no it isn't.
How are you going to patch embedded devices that have hardware vulnerabilities?
What the hell does this argument have to do with Open Source? I'm sorry, was there some memo I missed that explains how embedded closed source software is easier to update than embedded open source software? You want a reasoned debate, how about we exclude the open/closed crap altogether, as it is totally irrelevant?
Having said that, I agree. The "many eyes shallow bugs" argument is absurd. It's like going to a country where the national motto is: "Flurbistan: Who cares about the murder rate, we have a 100% conviction rate!" As if patching bugs quickly is somehow a consolation for people who have been compromised by them. Better idea: Don't release buggy shit in the first place.
If you're getting hammered with DoS attacks, spam, interweb herpaids or whatever TFA is about, you block the source. Blocking an IP address has nothing to do with some irrational fear of 32-bit numbers - it blocks the person using that number from destroying your network.
Key point being the word "your" in "your network." Do whatever the hell you want on your own network. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about ISPs who take it upon themselves to filter the email to their own users based on criteria the users have no say over and probably zero knowledge of. Yes, it's a free market, blah blah blah. Let's see how you like changing providers every couple of months because they start using RBL. I take it you've never been on the losing end of an RBL -- I have. I couldn't email several important people because their ISPs started using various RBLs. So I'm in the same net block with a thousand other people, one of whom is maybe a spammer, therefore *I* have to change providers? Fuck you very much.
If you think blacklisting is unethical, then you must think that ignoring something for any reason(or for no reason at all) is unethical. I doubt you actually believe this.
Not an equivalent for comparison. It's not ME who chooses to ignore something. It's a piece of software on a server that I have no control over. My mom didn't have a choice when her ISP started blocking my emails. Except of course to change ISPs to one which has a sane policy. And I'm not switching hosting services just because my IP somehow made it into a blacklist. Believe me, I checked it out and could not ascertain just why in the hell my IP (actually the whole net block) was on the list. The hosting service is outstanding and has very proactive spam measures.
Some mail server administrator who thinks he's God decided that he should get to choose which mail gets delivered and which doesn't. That breaks a fundamental trust between customer and service provider. "We're going to block these mails -- if you don't like it, switch providers." Sounds like blackmail to me. Leveraging the very VICTIMS of spam, taking advantage of their ire, frustration, and helplessness to further your own political goals. It's slime at its lowest.
Being a sysadmin doesn't make you God. Maybe back when we were all 15 and swapping warez over 2400 BPS modems, the sysop was "God." Most of us have grown up since then.
Well then you obviously are not on the receiving end of millions of spam emails every day that *COULD* have been rejected outright if only you'd been using an SBL. Or you have so much free time to delete all of the junk emails, in which case where do you work?
I use a Bayesian filter, perhaps you've heard of it? It filters about 300 messages a day. That's down, from about 3000 a day a year ago. Filter the content, not the source.
Why should I waste all of my time looking and and handling spam emails I never wanted, requested, or occasionally specifically asked to not to receive?
No idea. Why DO you? I don't.
If you don't like block lists, don't use them.
I was unable to email my own mother for over 3 months because her ISP uses RBL and my IP was in a banned block. So yes, I wasn't using it, but the recipient was, without her knowledge or even informed consent. The fact is, we don't GET a choice. We're at the mercy of rabid sysadmins.