I work at the abuse dept. of a large dutch ISP and we rely heavily on sorbs. When I started working there one of my collegues convinced us that there is no way you could be able to contact sorbs and I thought that to be true. We found out however that it is really not that hard to get in touch with them and if you follow their guidlines, you never have to pay for delisting. The paying part is mainly to scare of spammers delisting adresses they do not own. They use a smal set of totaly acceptable rules to delist adresses from their DUL list (if u use a mailserver on a dynamic adres, go get a static one. If you can't, you should be using your ISP's mailserver). Their rules: 1. Only the owner of the adress space may contact them, as listed in one of the five RIR databases (RIPE, ARIN etc). We always use abuse@isp.com, because this is a known adress in RIPE. 2. The IP adress must be known as static and have a PTR-record stating it is static (mail.domain.com is acceptable). 3. It must have a correct A-record. 4. The TTL in of the A-record must be 86400 sec. If you contact them in the way they wish to be contacted (just read their website, it's not that hard), they will delist you in 24-48 hours. However, if you aren't the owner of the adress space or the simple rules are not followed, your request wil be ignored. Everyone who thinks they can't get through to sorbs just isn't reading their guidelines, it's that simple.
Everybody tries to have an effect on the lawmakers, the only problem is that the lawmakers always seem to only listen to the wrong voices. My own second problem, is that the opinion of the company (e.g. the board and the marketing dep.) seems to be that this is not a real problem, we handled it ok and it is not important enough. We do try have an influence but our voice isn't always heard.
It is true that we have to decide which one we believe, the complaint, or the customer. We always work together with our legal dep. if there is any doubt whatsoever. We always try to only work with evidence, because in the end we may have to show everything in court. However, this rarely happens since the laws in The Netherlands are much different then the laws in the USA. For instance, the complaints of the MPAA and RIAA are mostly dismissed since we can only act if the material is on our own servers. The privacy of customers is very important and we are not allowed to check the contents of a customers computer. Only when they use a public service (web server, ftp) we can check the contents, in every other case it would be an illegal form of hacking and only the Dutch authorities have the right to investigate this. This is also true about p2p trafic, so the complaints about sharing have no way to be found illegal, because we don't have any real evidence. The complaining party doesn't give us any evidence because if they did, it would have been illegal and can not be used in the courtroom. Changes are going to happend because the copyrights issue is being heavily discussed in the european union. I fear the day that we have to give the customers name and adress to complaining party, but this is just my own opinion. The company will only do what the laws tell us and try to protect the privacy of our customers as best as it can, simply because doing otherwise will make a lot of people go to other ISP's and it will cost us a lot of money.
I happen to work at the abuse department of one of the ISP's who deleted the content(No name mentioned, but it is the biggest in Europe, I believe). What I like the world to know, is that the test done isn't done realy carefull. After we received the complaint we checked the site and concluded that the mentioned text was shown. We then sent a notice of warning to the "customer", in which we asked the person to respond to this message by mail or phone if the complaint was not accurate. After giving the customer a few days to respond, we heard noting. We know from experience that everybody who is wrongly acused/warned will respond within a few days. After not hearing from the customer, whe decided to pull the website. If it was a big issue we would have asked our legal department to take a look at the case, but we concluded this wasn't so. We didn't check the original of the text, since we are not working there to be experts of literature, just to keep our network clean. I also mailed the guy who did the test and asked him why he didn't respond to our warning notice, but he hasn't returned a message to me.
Dear Anonymoes coward, this has nothing to do with the fact that both languages are somewhat similar for non Germanic speakers. The real issue is that there has been long tradition of Dutch not liking German(language/people etc.) Some say it has to do with WW II, but I think it is just a cultural phenomenon, just like Greeks/Turks and Irish/Scots, maybe even USA/Canada. Pleas try to think before jumping to conclusions (hmz, seems I've heard that being said before on/.)
They are screaming:"Computer nerd started fire and takes down entire block of houses!" I've always questioned this myself since I always leave my computers running and the athlons keep getting so hot. My parents used to hate it when I left home and left the computers running, but now I've got my own place it's much bigger an issue than before. I do like the fact that most of my Macs hardly use their fans, or don't have fans at all. This keeps me a little less paranoid when I'm not at home. It's also a bit of a problem that in my place (small town in The Netherland) does not have broadband access and I have no possibility at all to check up on my systems when I'm away. Anybody got a few hints fow me?
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I work at the abuse dept. of a large dutch ISP and we rely heavily on sorbs. When I started working there one of my collegues convinced us that there is no way you could be able to contact sorbs and I thought that to be true. We found out however that it is really not that hard to get in touch with them and if you follow their guidlines, you never have to pay for delisting. The paying part is mainly to scare of spammers delisting adresses they do not own. They use a smal set of totaly acceptable rules to delist adresses from their DUL list (if u use a mailserver on a dynamic adres, go get a static one. If you can't, you should be using your ISP's mailserver). Their rules:
1. Only the owner of the adress space may contact them, as listed in one of the five RIR databases (RIPE, ARIN etc). We always use abuse@isp.com, because this is a known adress in RIPE.
2. The IP adress must be known as static and have a PTR-record stating it is static (mail.domain.com is acceptable).
3. It must have a correct A-record.
4. The TTL in of the A-record must be 86400 sec.
If you contact them in the way they wish to be contacted (just read their website, it's not that hard), they will delist you in 24-48 hours. However, if you aren't the owner of the adress space or the simple rules are not followed, your request wil be ignored. Everyone who thinks they can't get through to sorbs just isn't reading their guidelines, it's that simple.
Everybody tries to have an effect on the lawmakers, the only problem is that the lawmakers always seem to only listen to the wrong voices. My own second problem, is that the opinion of the company (e.g. the board and the marketing dep.) seems to be that this is not a real problem, we handled it ok and it is not important enough. We do try have an influence but our voice isn't always heard.
It is true that we have to decide which one we believe, the complaint, or the customer. We always work together with our legal dep. if there is any doubt whatsoever. We always try to only work with evidence, because in the end we may have to show everything in court. However, this rarely happens since the laws in The Netherlands are much different then the laws in the USA. For instance, the complaints of the MPAA and RIAA are mostly dismissed since we can only act if the material is on our own servers. The privacy of customers is very important and we are not allowed to check the contents of a customers computer. Only when they use a public service (web server, ftp) we can check the contents, in every other case it would be an illegal form of hacking and only the Dutch authorities have the right to investigate this. This is also true about p2p trafic, so the complaints about sharing have no way to be found illegal, because we don't have any real evidence. The complaining party doesn't give us any evidence because if they did, it would have been illegal and can not be used in the courtroom. Changes are going to happend because the copyrights issue is being heavily discussed in the european union. I fear the day that we have to give the customers name and adress to complaining party, but this is just my own opinion. The company will only do what the laws tell us and try to protect the privacy of our customers as best as it can, simply because doing otherwise will make a lot of people go to other ISP's and it will cost us a lot of money.
I happen to work at the abuse department of one of the ISP's who deleted the content(No name mentioned, but it is the biggest in Europe, I believe). What I like the world to know, is that the test done isn't done realy carefull. After we received the complaint we checked the site and concluded that the mentioned text was shown. We then sent a notice of warning to the "customer", in which we asked the person to respond to this message by mail or phone if the complaint was not accurate. After giving the customer a few days to respond, we heard noting. We know from experience that everybody who is wrongly acused/warned will respond within a few days. After not hearing from the customer, whe decided to pull the website. If it was a big issue we would have asked our legal department to take a look at the case, but we concluded this wasn't so. We didn't check the original of the text, since we are not working there to be experts of literature, just to keep our network clean. I also mailed the guy who did the test and asked him why he didn't respond to our warning notice, but he hasn't returned a message to me.
Dear Anonymoes coward, this has nothing to do with the fact that both languages are somewhat similar for non Germanic speakers. The real issue is that there has been long tradition of Dutch not liking German(language/people etc.) Some say it has to do with WW II, but I think it is just a cultural phenomenon, just like Greeks/Turks and Irish/Scots, maybe even USA/Canada. Pleas try to think before jumping to conclusions (hmz, seems I've heard that being said before on /.)
They are screaming:"Computer nerd started fire and takes down entire block of houses!"
I've always questioned this myself since I always leave my computers running and the athlons keep getting so hot. My parents used to hate it when I left home and left the computers running, but now I've got my own place it's much bigger an issue than before. I do like the fact that most of my Macs hardly use their fans, or don't have fans at all. This keeps me a little less paranoid when I'm not at home. It's also a bit of a problem that in my place (small town in The Netherland) does not have broadband access and I have no possibility at all to check up on my systems when I'm away. Anybody got a few hints fow me?