"First of all, we have to recognize the fact that, unlike property
or personal saftey, information is not a finite resource."
Yes, but people seem to neglect the fact that it requires finite
resources to create information. There's essentially no
per-copy cost for purely digital information, but the overhead still
exists. Intellectual Property laws allow people and corporations to
both recover that cost and then further benefit from the investment
required to create the information.
"As a result, the number of people who sampled and bought so
outweighed the number of people who stole that during the period that
Napster was fully operational cd sales *increased* by 5%. As soon as
Napster was gutted cd sales *fell* by 5%"
Slashdot
| Napster Alternatives Coming Strong -- Napster may be dead, but
its heirs have expanded the kingdom. If anything, I'd argue that the
5% figure is more of a reflection of how spending on luxury goods is
tied to the state of the economy.
For people with a short attention span, the article takes a long time
just to say:
Economy bad. People out of work. Luxury spending allegedly curtailed.
"First, you didn't "save" any money on the trench coat unless you
didn't buy it. If you paid $200, you didn't save any money. If you
paid $100 instead, you don't have an "extra" $100 in your pocket. You
have $100 less than you started with."
I was using an actual real-world example (with the prices rounded off
slightly). I went to the Macy's and found a trenchcoat I liked. I
looked at the $200 price tag, decided it was acceptable, and took it
to the cash register intent on purchasing it. Once there, I found out
it was on sale (as they were having a big 40-50% off clearance thing)
when it rang up as $100 less than I was expecting. As my intended
purchase came out $100 below the budgeted amount, I saved $100. If it
had came out to $1 (for example, if I was their one hundredth customer
of the day or something silly), I would have saved $199. If there was
no discount, I would have saved $0. Up until discovering the sale, I
had already allocated the money to the purchase of the trenchcoat, so
it was a financial benefit in my favor.
"It has even been argued that trading may increase sales."
There's a big gray area here. There's pretty much no question that
promoting pretty much any item for sale generally increases sales.
It's also accepted (as evidenced by who pays who with radio) that
giving away promotional pieces of your product in some form helps
promote that product at a cost. The goal is to thus maximize the
increased sale/lost sale balance of giving the product away.
Given the gray area (which I think is also shaped differently
depending on whether we're looking at an already heavily promoted act
(such as Britney Spears) versus an independent (such
as... err... someone I've never, ever heard of), it makes things
trickier to decide. However, I feel the decision is fundamentally
want that should be made by the person with the rights to the work
(the artist or the label the artist has assigned those rights to --
yes, I hate record contracts, too, but I don't feel that disolves the
copyright protection on the work).
I still feel that there's financial benefit on the part of at least
some (not necessarily even half) of the "pirates" to justify term.
However, in the aggregate, I feel it still boils down to the rights of
the artist to control how the work gets given away.
"So let's make CDs like software and license the use rather than
sell them, and prohibit their transfer in the EULA."
I don't see how that changes things. I was under the impression that,
despite the EULA, software trading and music trading are viewed more
or less the same under the law.
"You are making an assumption here. You are assuming the individual
would buy the CD if the P2P service was unavailable."
Quite true. It is unfair to assume that it's always the case. I
can't say that it's true in even 50% of the cases. However, it's true
in at least some cases. Thus, there's at least some financial gain,
justifying the term "piracy" (which was the original purpose of this
mini-discussion).
"most people do not believe it is ethically wrong (as proven by the
sheer usage volume of services like Napster and MusicCity)."
...and most people do not believe criminal activity is ethically wrong
(as proven by the sheer volume of people in American prisons.
Hand-waving ascertations of popularity (which doesn't address whether
50% of people who listen to music utilize Napster) don't prove the
point. Futhermore, even though someone does something doesn't mean
they don't believe it's not wrong. If I had a quarter for every time
I did something that I felt guilty over, I'd have enough money to get
myself into even more trouble.:)
"I have to say that the Metallica-vs-Napster case was the first and
only correctly-handled scenario I've seen. Metallica identified actual
users of the Napster service who were pirating material and demanded
that Napster take steps to assist enforcement of the law by blocking
those users."
Unfortunately, you left out the ending part, where the banned users
spent all of 10 minutes reinstalling Napster and then going, "Hello.
My name is Mr. errr... Jones! That's it! Mr. Jones. I am a new user
who would like to join your service, and I'm certainly not that
MetallicaFan231 guy who you banned last week. You need a username?
Uh, how about Metall1caFan231?"
The unfortunate truth is that Metallica's theoretically[*] reasonable
effort to go after the directly responsible parties failed due to poor
accountability. In light of this, the RIAA has been going after the
"common link", as unreasonable as this may be. It sucks and it's
frustrating to have certain free speech protections trampled by the
RIAA's crusade. On the other hand, I'm sure the RIAA thinks it sucks
and it's frustrating to have certain copyright protections trampled by
a hydra-like enemy. It's an ugly situation all around.
[*] I say theoretically as it's my understanding that Metallica may
have gone overboard with their criteria and fingered legitimate users
because of it. I still agree with fundamental principle of going
after the individuals actually providing the songs.
"Piracy is the word bandied by the distributors, but piracy
connotes financial gain and I doubt that many users of P2P services
ever saw financial gain."
If there's a sale and I receive 50% off on the purchase of a $200
trenchcoat that I was going to buy anyway, then that's a net financial
gain of $100. Everything regarding my possessions is the same as if
the sale hadn't existed, except that I've got an extra $100 in my
pocket. The gain comes at the willing sacrifice of money on the part
of the seller. Of course the seller benefits, hopefully, by selling
merchandise to people who wouldn't have bought otherwise, but in the
case of someone who was going to make the purchase regardless, it's a
win only for the purchaser.
Similarly, if I was going to buy a CD but instead grab the mp3s off of
a P2P service, I receive a net financial gain equivilant to the
purchase price of the CD minus the cost of not having the physical CD
(which can be close to zero for people who almost exclusively use
their legally purchased CDs in mp3 form and/or have a CD burner).
Furthermore, this gain comes from the unwilling sacrifice of sales by
the copyright holder.
"Why not just write their own one-click fix utility"
Oh, great. If a simple non-system-related application can screw up
and delete an entire partition, I can just imagine something as
low-level as a file undeleter reflashing your BIOS with garbage.
Seriously, though, when you're mucking about with file recovery and
such, you want lots of looking at the code, lots of testing, and all
those other software engineering things that take lots of time and
effort but produce better, safer, more stable code. It's not the kind
of thing you rush out the door, and it's not the kind of thing that'd
get done in time to appease customers that currently have boat
anchors sitting on their desks. Using an existing product is the
obvious choice.
"The policy is a blanket ban on anything that can be used to
contain or conceal Something Nasty."
It is? I'm glad we live in a world where terrorists can't afford to
get the 3COM logo printed on the side of a bag that can contain or
conceal Something Nasty. I'm glad we live in a world where terrorists
also can't just get a bag in the show, carry it back to their hotel
room, place Something Nasty inside it, and then carry it back to the
show.
The policy is not a blanket ban on anything that can be used to
contain or conceal Something Nasty. Instead, it's a case of making
sure your front door is locked, while at the same time leaving your
windows wide, wide open.
"And if you had followed the CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS to delete the old
iTunes first, you never would have encountered the bug in the first
place,"
Still, there are certain reasonable expectations and assumptions that
people make when it comes to reading the directions. For example,
while there are generally instructions on, say, a box of toothpicks,
it would be unreasonable for a manufacturer to produce toothpicks that
explode if you use them improperly. As long as I don't try and stab
myself with it, I expect the tootpick user-error problems to be
limited to failing to remove food and the occasional splinter.
With a car or a handgun, on the other hand, it's not unreasonable for
a user to read the manual cover to cover (possibly multiple times),
reference it again as necessary, even obtain additional instruction
and certification for using the device. These are things that're
inherently dangerous if misused.
With application-level software, reasonable expectations of the
problems of a failed install include:
The new version doesn't work
Both versions are installed but unusable
The user-created data associated with the old version gets wiped
out by the installer (generally the worst case scenario and borderline
unreasonable)
Personally, I generally backup the data from the previous install to
another directory (if it's something I can't live without), then go
ahead with the install. At worst, I expect that I'll have to
uninstall both versions, maybe manually clean up a few files, and then
start over. A few extra minutes of work in exchange for a few minutes
of laziness. In the long run, I've found that I win.
Now, if the software were something other than just a standard
application, I'd take more care. You can bet that I'd be a lot more
paranoid when using software that's supposed to fiddle with
partitions, as that's something you'd reasonably expect to be able to
destroy your harddrive. But reading for the directions for absolutely
everything would just be insane. I don't have that much free time.
"he got the </scheme> right, but didn't figure out that the <scheme> opening tag would be missing."
That's arguably more of a style issue, where the opening is implicit, as it would ruin the flow to preface the start of it with "<scheme>". It's similar to how people'll mention getting off their soap box at the end of a rant, but never mentioning getting up there in the first place.
Since the issue was raised (during the original question story) that he codes his site himself in PHP (geek point #4,748,234 in his collection), it stands to reason that he probably knows how to balance HTML tags.
"Actually, the main problem with checking with the casinos is that
they themselves are trying to move to digital."
Or that could, theoretically, be a solution. If the original poster's
application is something that doesn't compete with the casinos, it
might be worthwhile for them to partner with a casino to distribute
some of the development costs. It'd be a win-win situation. The
tricky part would be getting the ball rolling in the first place.
"I sincerely hope that it's not that slashdot readers are only
aware of social issues when they become "geek-compatible"."
Fortunately, this issue has already been addressed. CmdrTaco has set
up a special site that covers many social issues and current events,
rather than those that're just "geek-compatible". The site format's
substantially different, but it does do what you ask. The site is the
Cmdrtaco News Network. Cowboy Neal
has also set up a site with additional material: More Stuff -- laeN yoBwoC.
Re:Since when is that old?
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 2
"But the one that really had me hooked was Neuromancer."
Check out Uplink (www.introversion.co.uk). They've got demo versions for both Windows and Linux. The gameplay is similar to the non-VR (I forget the exact term they used) hacking portions of Neuromancer, only with more depth. You have to worry about bouncing through different machines and erasing your logs to avoid being traced.
"in most cases where there are no websites there is nothing else
either. Personally, people who sit on domain names without using them
piss me off."
That's could be impossible to prove, though. As long as a domain name
points to a valid DNS server, you can't really tell how it's being
used. There's no obligation for the domain name itself, without a
hostname, to point to a valid server. It's possible that the
fictional domain erasmus.invalid lacks any records, while
foo.erasmus.invalid is a regular host.
There's also no obligation for a user to host publically available
services. Just because there's no web or mail server running on
foo.erasmus.invalid doesn't mean I can't ssh into it to, say, play
Nethack with a bunch of friends. The less public services I run, the
less likely someone is to remotely root my machine and do an 'rm -rf/'.
In addition to the time and effort of reinstalling, I'd be really
annoyed if it made me lose a character that had just cleared the
castle and looked very ascension-worthy.
"This is the only amusing thing in this otherwise vitriolic
post."
Vitriolic? The artificially pretentious language used should've made
it sufficiently clear that the author was either joking or insane. I
could certainly understand if the post was just "Football is for
stupid people" or something similar, but the poster went well out of
his way to create an amusing, over-the-top statement that at the same
time had a ring of truth to it (with regard to non-sports fans missing
the inherent humor in the article).
And I find it even more amusing that numerous members of the Slashdot
crowd failed to catch the rather blatant humor in a post in a thread
titled "File this one under Humor".
"but it seems to me that companies should not own patents."
It's these same companies that spend money on R&D. Just as a company
pays a worker $x/hour (plus expenses) to make widgets, it's paying a
scientist $y/hour (plus expenses) to come up with new and unique ideas
for widgets. It seems odd for a company to invest all that money,
only to not own the fruits of that labor.
Even independent scientists generally benefit from being able to sell
their patent to a company. Take Thomas Edison, for example. When he
invented the electric light bulb, he had no interest in building a
production facility. He just wanted to spend his time continuing to
create new and different things (which we should all be thankful for).
So he sold his patent to a company (GE, I believe, though my memory's
not the best) for a sum of money that exceeded his original asking
price. Edison was happy as he got more money than he expected,
allowing him to continue to invent. GE was happy as they could
actually afford to manufacture light bulbs and make a sizeable profit
selling them.
Now one could argue that a ban on corporations owning patents would
have meant they'd have licensed it from Edison, allowing him to
continue to receive money. However, the sale of the patent could've
just as easily been reworded in terms of an exclusive, flat rate, 17
year (or whatever the patent lifetime was) contract.
"some moderator didn't read that part and just blindly "-1,
Troll"ed it."
It's also possible that the moderator decided it was a troll based on
the fact that the same joke gets made every single time we've got a
Linux exploit/bug. One could easily argue that "MS is secure, Linux
isn't" is in the same class of painfully over-used jokes as "Imagine a
Beowulf cluster of these."
It's a shame there's no way for moderators to include a brief comment
indicating why they decided to moderate something up or down. If, for
example, we had two moderators and one gave it "+1 Funny; Satire", and
the other gave it "-1 Troll; 3,748,241st time this joke has been
used", I'd be hard-pressed to metamod either moderator down.
"I don't see why an outright flame should get commented up like
that."
You are quite correct in that such a flame should never have gotten
moderated up like it did. The reason, however, is that the story at
the top level of Slashdot should've never been posted in the first
place with thinly-veiled, unsubstantiated implied allegations of
potential theft.
An issue the article fails to address is that the provider subscribing
to a given blacklist may choose how to handle that information.
Automatically rejecting emails is only one choice (and happens to be
what we use where I work). Another option is to merely flag messages
from blacklisted addresses, so that they can wind up in a lower
priority "junk mail" folder that is still manually reviewed. Yet
another option, the worst of the bunch and also the only one mentioned
in the article, is for a server to silently discard all blocked mail
with no error being returned.
Slashdot Mirror
That shouldn't matter.
Once upon a time, the Constitution was worth a whole lot more than just 6000 lives.
Yes, but people seem to neglect the fact that it requires finite resources to create information. There's essentially no per-copy cost for purely digital information, but the overhead still exists. Intellectual Property laws allow people and corporations to both recover that cost and then further benefit from the investment required to create the information.
Slashdot | Napster Alternatives Coming Strong -- Napster may be dead, but its heirs have expanded the kingdom. If anything, I'd argue that the 5% figure is more of a reflection of how spending on luxury goods is tied to the state of the economy.
For people with a short attention span, the article takes a long time just to say:
Economy bad. People out of work. Luxury spending allegedly curtailed.
I was using an actual real-world example (with the prices rounded off slightly). I went to the Macy's and found a trenchcoat I liked. I looked at the $200 price tag, decided it was acceptable, and took it to the cash register intent on purchasing it. Once there, I found out it was on sale (as they were having a big 40-50% off clearance thing) when it rang up as $100 less than I was expecting. As my intended purchase came out $100 below the budgeted amount, I saved $100. If it had came out to $1 (for example, if I was their one hundredth customer of the day or something silly), I would have saved $199. If there was no discount, I would have saved $0. Up until discovering the sale, I had already allocated the money to the purchase of the trenchcoat, so it was a financial benefit in my favor.
"It has even been argued that trading may increase sales."
There's a big gray area here. There's pretty much no question that promoting pretty much any item for sale generally increases sales. It's also accepted (as evidenced by who pays who with radio) that giving away promotional pieces of your product in some form helps promote that product at a cost. The goal is to thus maximize the increased sale/lost sale balance of giving the product away.
Given the gray area (which I think is also shaped differently depending on whether we're looking at an already heavily promoted act (such as Britney Spears) versus an independent (such as... err... someone I've never, ever heard of), it makes things trickier to decide. However, I feel the decision is fundamentally want that should be made by the person with the rights to the work (the artist or the label the artist has assigned those rights to -- yes, I hate record contracts, too, but I don't feel that disolves the copyright protection on the work).
I still feel that there's financial benefit on the part of at least some (not necessarily even half) of the "pirates" to justify term. However, in the aggregate, I feel it still boils down to the rights of the artist to control how the work gets given away.
"So let's make CDs like software and license the use rather than sell them, and prohibit their transfer in the EULA."
I don't see how that changes things. I was under the impression that, despite the EULA, software trading and music trading are viewed more or less the same under the law.
Quite true. It is unfair to assume that it's always the case. I can't say that it's true in even 50% of the cases. However, it's true in at least some cases. Thus, there's at least some financial gain, justifying the term "piracy" (which was the original purpose of this mini-discussion).
"I have to say that the Metallica-vs-Napster case was the first and only correctly-handled scenario I've seen. Metallica identified actual users of the Napster service who were pirating material and demanded that Napster take steps to assist enforcement of the law by blocking those users."
Unfortunately, you left out the ending part, where the banned users spent all of 10 minutes reinstalling Napster and then going, "Hello. My name is Mr. errr... Jones! That's it! Mr. Jones. I am a new user who would like to join your service, and I'm certainly not that MetallicaFan231 guy who you banned last week. You need a username? Uh, how about Metall1caFan231?"
The unfortunate truth is that Metallica's theoretically[*] reasonable effort to go after the directly responsible parties failed due to poor accountability. In light of this, the RIAA has been going after the "common link", as unreasonable as this may be. It sucks and it's frustrating to have certain free speech protections trampled by the RIAA's crusade. On the other hand, I'm sure the RIAA thinks it sucks and it's frustrating to have certain copyright protections trampled by a hydra-like enemy. It's an ugly situation all around.
[*] I say theoretically as it's my understanding that Metallica may have gone overboard with their criteria and fingered legitimate users because of it. I still agree with fundamental principle of going after the individuals actually providing the songs.
If there's a sale and I receive 50% off on the purchase of a $200 trenchcoat that I was going to buy anyway, then that's a net financial gain of $100. Everything regarding my possessions is the same as if the sale hadn't existed, except that I've got an extra $100 in my pocket. The gain comes at the willing sacrifice of money on the part of the seller. Of course the seller benefits, hopefully, by selling merchandise to people who wouldn't have bought otherwise, but in the case of someone who was going to make the purchase regardless, it's a win only for the purchaser.
Similarly, if I was going to buy a CD but instead grab the mp3s off of a P2P service, I receive a net financial gain equivilant to the purchase price of the CD minus the cost of not having the physical CD (which can be close to zero for people who almost exclusively use their legally purchased CDs in mp3 form and/or have a CD burner). Furthermore, this gain comes from the unwilling sacrifice of sales by the copyright holder.
Oh, great. If a simple non-system-related application can screw up and delete an entire partition, I can just imagine something as low-level as a file undeleter reflashing your BIOS with garbage.
Seriously, though, when you're mucking about with file recovery and such, you want lots of looking at the code, lots of testing, and all those other software engineering things that take lots of time and effort but produce better, safer, more stable code. It's not the kind of thing you rush out the door, and it's not the kind of thing that'd get done in time to appease customers that currently have boat anchors sitting on their desks. Using an existing product is the obvious choice.
It is? I'm glad we live in a world where terrorists can't afford to get the 3COM logo printed on the side of a bag that can contain or conceal Something Nasty. I'm glad we live in a world where terrorists also can't just get a bag in the show, carry it back to their hotel room, place Something Nasty inside it, and then carry it back to the show.
The policy is not a blanket ban on anything that can be used to contain or conceal Something Nasty. Instead, it's a case of making sure your front door is locked, while at the same time leaving your windows wide, wide open.
Still, there are certain reasonable expectations and assumptions that people make when it comes to reading the directions. For example, while there are generally instructions on, say, a box of toothpicks, it would be unreasonable for a manufacturer to produce toothpicks that explode if you use them improperly. As long as I don't try and stab myself with it, I expect the tootpick user-error problems to be limited to failing to remove food and the occasional splinter.
With a car or a handgun, on the other hand, it's not unreasonable for a user to read the manual cover to cover (possibly multiple times), reference it again as necessary, even obtain additional instruction and certification for using the device. These are things that're inherently dangerous if misused.
With application-level software, reasonable expectations of the problems of a failed install include:
Personally, I generally backup the data from the previous install to another directory (if it's something I can't live without), then go ahead with the install. At worst, I expect that I'll have to uninstall both versions, maybe manually clean up a few files, and then start over. A few extra minutes of work in exchange for a few minutes of laziness. In the long run, I've found that I win.
Now, if the software were something other than just a standard application, I'd take more care. You can bet that I'd be a lot more paranoid when using software that's supposed to fiddle with partitions, as that's something you'd reasonably expect to be able to destroy your harddrive. But reading for the directions for absolutely everything would just be insane. I don't have that much free time.
It's still better (and geekier) than, say, golf or bowling. At least in Nethack, you have some multiplayer crossover due to bones files.
That's arguably more of a style issue, where the opening is implicit, as it would ruin the flow to preface the start of it with "<scheme>". It's similar to how people'll mention getting off their soap box at the end of a rant, but never mentioning getting up there in the first place.
Since the issue was raised (during the original question story) that he codes his site himself in PHP (geek point #4,748,234 in his collection), it stands to reason that he probably knows how to balance HTML tags.
The more I read, the cooler Wil Wheaton gets. Any more, and he'll start single-handedly reversing the Greenhouse Effect.
Or that could, theoretically, be a solution. If the original poster's application is something that doesn't compete with the casinos, it might be worthwhile for them to partner with a casino to distribute some of the development costs. It'd be a win-win situation. The tricky part would be getting the ball rolling in the first place.
This is incorrect. You want to use abuse@[127.0.0.1] as the address.
There's a fourth:
Fortunately, this issue has already been addressed. CmdrTaco has set up a special site that covers many social issues and current events, rather than those that're just "geek-compatible". The site format's substantially different, but it does do what you ask. The site is the Cmdrtaco News Network. Cowboy Neal has also set up a site with additional material: More Stuff -- laeN yoBwoC.
Check out Uplink (www.introversion.co.uk). They've got demo versions for both Windows and Linux. The gameplay is similar to the non-VR (I forget the exact term they used) hacking portions of Neuromancer, only with more depth. You have to worry about bouncing through different machines and erasing your logs to avoid being traced.
That's could be impossible to prove, though. As long as a domain name points to a valid DNS server, you can't really tell how it's being used. There's no obligation for the domain name itself, without a hostname, to point to a valid server. It's possible that the fictional domain erasmus.invalid lacks any records, while foo.erasmus.invalid is a regular host.
There's also no obligation for a user to host publically available services. Just because there's no web or mail server running on foo.erasmus.invalid doesn't mean I can't ssh into it to, say, play Nethack with a bunch of friends. The less public services I run, the less likely someone is to remotely root my machine and do an 'rm -rf /'.
In addition to the time and effort of reinstalling, I'd be really
annoyed if it made me lose a character that had just cleared the
castle and looked very ascension-worthy.
Vitriolic? The artificially pretentious language used should've made it sufficiently clear that the author was either joking or insane. I could certainly understand if the post was just "Football is for stupid people" or something similar, but the poster went well out of his way to create an amusing, over-the-top statement that at the same time had a ring of truth to it (with regard to non-sports fans missing the inherent humor in the article).
And I find it even more amusing that numerous members of the Slashdot crowd failed to catch the rather blatant humor in a post in a thread titled "File this one under Humor".
It's these same companies that spend money on R&D. Just as a company pays a worker $x/hour (plus expenses) to make widgets, it's paying a scientist $y/hour (plus expenses) to come up with new and unique ideas for widgets. It seems odd for a company to invest all that money, only to not own the fruits of that labor.
Even independent scientists generally benefit from being able to sell their patent to a company. Take Thomas Edison, for example. When he invented the electric light bulb, he had no interest in building a production facility. He just wanted to spend his time continuing to create new and different things (which we should all be thankful for). So he sold his patent to a company (GE, I believe, though my memory's not the best) for a sum of money that exceeded his original asking price. Edison was happy as he got more money than he expected, allowing him to continue to invent. GE was happy as they could actually afford to manufacture light bulbs and make a sizeable profit selling them.
Now one could argue that a ban on corporations owning patents would have meant they'd have licensed it from Edison, allowing him to continue to receive money. However, the sale of the patent could've just as easily been reworded in terms of an exclusive, flat rate, 17 year (or whatever the patent lifetime was) contract.
It's also possible that the moderator decided it was a troll based on the fact that the same joke gets made every single time we've got a Linux exploit/bug. One could easily argue that "MS is secure, Linux isn't" is in the same class of painfully over-used jokes as "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these."
It's a shame there's no way for moderators to include a brief comment indicating why they decided to moderate something up or down. If, for example, we had two moderators and one gave it "+1 Funny; Satire", and the other gave it "-1 Troll; 3,748,241st time this joke has been used", I'd be hard-pressed to metamod either moderator down.
You are quite correct in that such a flame should never have gotten moderated up like it did. The reason, however, is that the story at the top level of Slashdot should've never been posted in the first place with thinly-veiled, unsubstantiated implied allegations of potential theft.
An issue the article fails to address is that the provider subscribing to a given blacklist may choose how to handle that information. Automatically rejecting emails is only one choice (and happens to be what we use where I work). Another option is to merely flag messages from blacklisted addresses, so that they can wind up in a lower priority "junk mail" folder that is still manually reviewed. Yet another option, the worst of the bunch and also the only one mentioned in the article, is for a server to silently discard all blocked mail with no error being returned.