I honestly didn't even know that these things had come to market. Last I'd heard, they were an idea being kicked around that might have just been greenlighted. I've never seen them for sale anywhere near where I live (and I live in the largest city in Kentucky).
I admit that I'm not a fanatic like some, but I have never heard that particular string used as a short way to refer to the Hitchiker's Guide series. I've seen HHGttG once or twice, but usually I just see the whole thing written out.
It took me a moment to figure out the meaning of the headline. I had to actually read some of the additional commentary. If I had to actually read some of the commentary before posting on all articles, how could I shoot off an ill-informed comment that so blatantly exposes my ignorance?
...though I got a 510W supply from PC Power & Cooling. Of course, my hard drives and all of the internal fans make enough noise as it is, no need to spend extra for a "quiet" power supply that isn't going to have any impact on the noise level of the room anyway.
Looks like I can't play 32bit games with the 64bit drivers, either. Apparently NVidia is working on that, so until then I'll stick with the 32bit drivers and a 32bit kernel.
Ahwell. I hear that the performance boost between 32-bit optimized and 64-bit optimized isn't that great anyway thanks in part to the Athlon 64's excellent handling of 32-bit data.
I don't have this problem. I can exit X gracefully and still do anything that I want, including restarting X. Occasionally I have a problem where the console doesn't show anything that I type (I get the bash prompt, any stdout output, but nothing that I type -- including carriage returns -- show up on screen), but this is rare, may have a different cause, does not carry over to other virtual terminals and goes away if I merely log out of the session. Perhaps I'm not enabling a certain feature that leads to this problem?
I've been using 2.6 on my Debian testing/unstable box for awhile, and I've not had problems -- at least, none that I didn't have with 2.4 (burning a CD while running motv with the bttv driver still causes a hard-lock) apart from getting wavetable MIDI from the emu10k1 driver (solution: build the driver as a module, not in the kernel -- for some reason/dev/sequencer won't work otherwise). I've also not had noticable problems with the previous driver release (with the patch applied), though I'm not sure what kind of problems I should expect.
I'm about to assemble a new machine with an Athlon 64 CPU. I know that I could use the 32-bit drivers and have them work, but I'd rather go with the ones designed specifically for my CPU -- unless someone has compared them and found them either identical or nearly so.
Why do you hate spam so much anyway? I hate it because it reduces the functionality of my email. I hate SPEWS, because it does exactly the same.
I hate spam because it reduces the functionability of email and the burden of accepting it -- the expense, primarly -- is forced upon people who don't want it.
SPEWS is used only by mail admins who WANT it. Even if it does, as you claim, reduce the functionality of email, it is an entirely voluntary service.
I also consider the whole attitude hypocritical. SPEWS refuses to accept any responsibility for blocking
That's because SPEWS doesn't actually do any blocking. The SPEWS list can be used for more than just blocking. This has been restated so many times that there's really no reason to keep uttering the falsehood that "SPEWS blocks mail".
but they expect me to take responsibility to find out whether my ISP's ISP's server host has a policy against their other customers harbouring spammers.
No, they just want to stop the spam by any means necessary. They'd probably like it if you took action to get rid of spammers on the network on which you occupy, but the IPs get listed in SPEWS because the ISP in question has made it clear that they're not going to listen to third parties regarding the crime problems eminating from their network.
Aside from the fact that this in not neccesarily possible, why should SPEWS expect me to take responsibibility, when they don't have the responsibility to admit that their actions harm ISPs that do not spam.
SPEWS does what it does as a "last resort" option. They've tried LARTs to the abuse desks at the appropriate ISPs. The ISP has refused to do anything at all. SPEWS is just a way of saying "These ISPs don't care if their customers are spammers, maybe you should filter or tag their mail".
Don't like the fact that you're on a netblock owned by an entity that doesn't listen to abuse reports? Stop blaming SPEWS. SPEWS didn't make the management at your ISP so clueless.
SPEWS does not make it clear what they do.
No, SPEWS does. A lot of people have misconceptions about what SPEWS does -- they assume that they've already got a general idea, so they skim the FAQ, miss important bits and forget to read for context, then come screaming that "SPEWS is blocking me! I'm not a spammer!" when, in fact, SPEWS isn't blocking ANYONE, and they're listing the spam-ridden ISP IP blocks, they're not specifically targetting the non-spamming customers of the ISP.
A lot of people know, but I suspect that a lot don't. The website really needs to be looked at to make sure this is made clear.
The people for whom SPEWS is best used are mail admins. If they can't figure out how SPEWS works from reading the website, then they should look at other information. If they STILL don't figure it out -- or if they decide to filter on SPEWS because it "sounds neat" without actually learning how SPEWS works, then they are incompetent. Incompetent mail admins are not the fault of SPEWS.
It doesn't make it particularly clear that it includes non-spamming IPs. I suspect most people expect it to behave like other lists.
It's their fault for not reading the SPEWS information completely. It's all on spews.org, they have no excuse for filtering and forgetting.
Hence they, and all their customers should be blocked. I think that will include everyone.
Some (a very few) have suggested doing things like this. SPEWS does not share this philosophy. I suspect that if they did, a lot fewer people would use SPEWS.
I think that the methods of SPEWS are rather tame. NAC.net has been a spam-problem for over a year, with notorious criminal spammers on their networks without any hint of action from NAC, and only NOW does BBL/DSLR find their IP blocks covered in a SPEWS listing and even then it's just a level 2 listing!
You see "fault", I see "standard operating procedure". SPEWS lists the IP addresses owned by known spam-supporters. That's what they claim to do, and that's what they do. It's not the fault of SPEWS that a scummy ISP will take on human shields.
They have managed to inlcude a lot of IP ranges leased by people who do not spam.
So? This is already known, it's been discussed to death.
I can not accept that a subscriber to an ISP always has a choice in whether they use that ISP.
True. This isn't the problem of SPEWS. SPEWS is not an ISP and does not run any ISPs.
SPEWS has a choice whether or not to make an exception.
Yes, they do. If they were to make an exception every time someone whined "But I'm not a spammer" after their crime-ridden ISP got listed, SPEWS would not be nearly as effective as they are. SPEWS does what they do because less drastic measures have been tried and failed. ISPs didn't take action when only their spammer's IPs were listed. SPEWS takes the next step by listing the entire ISP instead.
I know. One of my points is that people should not use it.
My point is that people should use it if they understand it and have a desire to use it. There are, however, people who think that the choice should be taken away entirely, that SPEWS should be sued out of existence (fat chance) and that ISPs should not be allowed to filter mail at all under penalty of law.
I'm surprised that if spam is so universally hated, they can't manage to come up with a practically unlimited defence fund by asking people to donate.
Most people only hate spam in as much as it hits their inboxes. As a result, the people who actually understand how bad spam is and how dangerous it is if left to continue don't have a lot of places from which to draw funds.
Since it's apparently just an opinion, it would be an open and shut case anyway. A motion to dismiss would be relatively inexpensive.
Yeah, that really worked well with MAPS RBL. Harris marketing had a perfectly legitimate entry, but they were able to use lots of lawyers with lots of legalese to litigate their way out of the RBL.
SPEWS's anonyminity is a DIRECT response to what happened to MAPS.
The only reason they would need to hide is if the legality of what they are doing is not as clear cut as they like to think.
No, they hide it because the fact that it is legal does not spare them from expensive litigation that will cost them a great deal of money even if they DO win. They're not a business. They don't make money for the service that they offer. They can't recoup the costs by expanding their service to more people. Being sued costs money, even if you win.
They're both identical situations, and you've just come up with another example of an external source using your computer to perform an action through means of a config file.
So you would actually say that Dan Pollock is preventing banner advertisements from reaching my computer?
Okay. You know what I would do if Dan Pollock's list weren't available? I'd compose my own. If SPEWS weren't available, ISPs would compose their own filter lists. Of course, the admins wouldn't have the time to check to see if the spammers ever got kicked off. As such, places like NAC.net would be tossed into the filters "forever", and their traffic would be rejected by hundreds of INDIVIDUAL filters across the world, with no chance of removal even if NAC.net terminated all exisitng spammers and had any new client who spammed shot. Do you really think that a better solution? Before you tell me that it won't happen, keep in mind that it's exactly what happened to AGIS.
Oh, I do have a problem with ISPs affecting the innocent.
Then tell NAC.net to stop allowing criminals to reduce the value of their service for their legitima
If regular mail deserves protection to ensure its integrity, so does email.
Wow. So because both entities use the letter string "m-a-i-l" in their name, they should both be subject to full-fledged government regulation,
What about a private intranet? Should they open up a closed mail system to allow external sources to send them mail?
What about when a mailserver goes down due to a technical problem. Should the admins be held legally responsible for the downtime, subject to criminal penalties for email being lost?
Can you give me something more tangible to justify your assertion that email should be subject to the same regulations as postal mail?
So long as they don't violate regulations, they can make their own RBL and subscribe to any external, compliant RBL.
So if an ISP determined that absolutely none of its customers wanted to receive mail from South America, China or the networks run by Cogentco, it would be okay for the ISP to refuse to accept mail from any mailservers hosted in South America, China or Cogentco, or do you support the US government forcing someone to accept unwanted email at their own expense?
What about faxes? Should people be required, by law, to accept unsolicited junk faxes at their expense?
However, where the RBLs fail, yes, the ISPs should carry that burden. They are carrying mail. If they can't handle the job, and handle it properly, they should go do something else.
Okay. So you do advocate forcing private entities to allow all kinds of network abuse to be perpetuated on their systems, and they should just eat the cost even though there are simple means for averting the damage.
This is mail.
No. This is electronic mail. There are many other ways that email can fail to reach a destination than just a blocklist. A server could go down. A router could go down. A hard drive could fail.
If you're telling me that email should be expected to be delivered with the same level of guarantee of postal mail, I'll tell you to lay off of the crack pipe.
This is mail. They shouldn't cut off legitimate email because it mixes in with email that they don't want to deliver.
Except that they own the equipment. They're legally allowed to refuse any packet that comes into their computer, regardless of the reason.
They shouldn't be delivering mail if their level of integrity puts money higher on their list of priorities than delivering valid letters.
What about blocking spam and thereby making the email system much more usable for their end-users? Or do you not care about the fact that under your utopian ideas, users would have to dig through hundreds of junk mails just to find a single legitimate piece of correspondence?
Physical mail is a HELL of a lot more expensive to deliver, and U.S. Postal Service has vowed to deliver through "rain, sleet, wind, snow" etc. How spineless is an ISP to fail to deliver a valid letter because someone told them that the server it comes from sends spam? That's pretty spineless.
Postal mail is a heavily regulated industry, apparently you want all ISPs to be subject to the same level of regulations. The cost of sending postal mail is paid by the sender, not the recipient. You're suggesting a system where the RECIPIENT is forced to accept and PAY for all incoming mail, even if they don't want it. Opposing that isn't being spineless, it's having common sense.
Postal mail, being physical, allows for a higher level of accountability. Would you push for criminal charges because of lost email when a server goes down? You don't get that kind of problem with postal mail -- if the mailbox is somehow inaccessable, the post office can attempt to redeliver. If a mailserver goes down, it's possible that your electrons may just dissipate into the ether. Are you going to sue because your recipient's ISP had a hard drive go bad?
The U.S. takes care of the U.S., Europe takes care of Europe, etc
Are you saying that you want INTERNATIONAL regulation of email?
The thing is, you can hold the ISPs themselves accountable, for blacklisting servers illegally through a renegade RBL.
What is your justification for this? Also, you didn't address my question about ISPs who decide to construct their own private filter lists, as has been done well before public RBLs existed.
Sure, your ISP can start using an RBL that operates out of Iran and DOESN'T adhere to guidelines, but if they operate in the U.S., they'll be the ones "illegally tampering with electronic mail."
And exactly why don't they have a right to control what networks are allowed to send mail to their servers? You've not yet offered justification for this.
All the non-techies out there signed up at RandomISP, Inc. will not have their mail filtered, and thus the problem of an RBL irresponsibly is drastically mitigated.
In other words, you DO want ISPs to bear the burden (billions of dollars per year) of processing and storing junk email messages without the option of stopping them at the router level.
Why do I think the users should be notified? So the users can take action in advance of the shutdown.
Okay. Say I want to block all Verizon traffic at the router, because Verizon is known to support criminal activity. How do I go about contacting EVERY Verizon user to let them know that they'll no longer be able to access my servers?
SPEWS isn't using innocent users who run honorable mail servers against their will, are they?
SPEWS uses their own machines. I don't know what you're trying to say here.
They aren't shutting blacklisting innocents by design, are they?
I can't parse this either.
I see no problem in requiring ISPs to notify all affected users when their IPs are threatened to be blacklisted.
I see your point. Fine. I will support legislation that will require spam-friendly ISPs like nac.net to notify their users that the spam-support of the ISP may well cause all outgoing mail to be blocked at the destination.
Make laws governing RBLs and then go after ISPs who illegally subject their U.S. customers' email to non-compliant RBLs.
And what kind of laws would you recommend? Would these laws only affect filtering of US-based IP addresses, or would ISPs also be regulated when it comes to filtering out known spam-ridden countries like China or Brazil? Why should this be regulated? Why should an ISP be forced, by law, to accept gigabytes of traffic that they know is garbage? Why do they not have control over what their privately owned machines accept and reject? What would allow an ISP to legally block IP addresses? What if an ISP decided to use their own private filter list rather than an RBL, would that be permitted? If not, how do you justify FORCING ISPs to accept traffic that they do not want?
Should the law require that you open up your machine so that I can access it at any time I desire?
While you're at it, make a law that says when an ISP receives a notice that any IPs may be blocked, they must notify all users of those IPs.
By answering (and admiting) this you also are forced to admit that SPEWS is irisponcible for NOT doing something about it (such as providing a recomeded warning for admins to give to users).
My car manual didn't come with a warning instructing me not to drive my vehicle into large crowds of people. Is the manufacturer of my car to blame if someone uses one of their cars to do that?
You believe what you want to believe. Obviously you're delusional enough to believe anything, given you think that the force of law should be used to prevent mail admins from rejecting packets as they choose.
Yes. It's being made deliberately, and maliciously less valuable.
Don't bitch to SPEWS. Your ISP is the one that allowed spammers to run rampant -- why are you whining to other people who no longer want to trade packets with your ISP? It's NOT THEIR FAULT THAT YOUR ISP ALLOWS CRIMINAL ACTIVITY ON THEIR NETWORK!
No. It's being made less valuable thanks to SPEWS' policy of overblocking.
SPEWS does not overblock. SPEWS lists IP space owned by spammers and spam-support outfits. Overblocking would be if they deliberately listed IP space not owned by spam-support outfits. Thus far, you've not demonstrated that they are doing this.
The delivery company has no choice but to put themselves at risk todeliver to me. However, it is possible to block spammer IP addresses without blocking my IP ranges.
Is it? What is to stop the spam-friendly ISP from moving the spammer to a new IP address in their network? It's been done before, for the purpose of evading IP filters. That's part of the reason that SPEWS does what it does.
Personally, I like to keep my correspondance private.
SPEWS does not.
There is justification for SPEWS remaining anonymous. Other blocklists weren't anonymous and had people who could be contacted. They got smacked with legal threats from big companies with lots of money over perfectly legitimate listings. As such, it was demonstrated that spammers who had money to throw around or spam-friendly ISPs with sufficient funding could litigate their way out of a listing without actually stopping the spam. SPEWS is a response to this problem.
Yes, so SPEWS listing those sites causes them to be blocked.
No, an ISP using SPEWS's list causes the mail to be blocked. SPEWS does not "cause" mail blockage any more than Dan Pollock "causes" advertising banners being blocked from my computer.
Hence, should SPEWS desire to cause a site to be blocked, they have that power.
And should an ISP decide that they don't like what SPEWS is offering, they have the power not to use SPEWS's lists. SPEWS can't force anyone to filter based upon SPEWS listings. The "power" that they have is so effortlessly taken away that I don't see how they can legitimately be blamed for email being lost.
They can keep the website up as long as they like. I'm not obliged to download it.
We're getting somewhere now. No one is obliged to use SPEWS, either.
It may have escaped your notice, but all I want to do is stop spam.
So does SPEWS. It's just that they have a different idea of effective methods for stopping spam as you, apparently.
I'll happily block it. I'll happily sue spammers, and encourage other people to do both. However, when the actions of anti-spammers start affecting the innocent, I have issues.
What about the actions of spam-friendly ISPs affecting the innocent? You don't seem to have a problem with that. Further, keep in mind that SPEWS's list is only effective upon mailservers where the admins CHOOSE to implement SPEWS-based filtering. This is their right. They can choose to filter mail based upon the number '5' appearing in the IP address, and it's perfectly legal, even though it may well affect the "innocent".
Well, this is fairly reasonable. How does SPEWS determine which ones are legitimate, and which are spammers though?
Typically, the legitimate ones don't have it happen very often.
And how is the ISP to know which complaints of spam are legitimate? A series of false spam complaints to an ISP will be indistinguishable form a series of legitimate complaints. How about malicious spam sent out in an attempt to discredit the website?
The possibility of a joe-job is very real, though oftentimes it's not terribly difficult to determine when a site has been joed and when it hasn't. The context of the spam messages themselves are often a dead giveaway (
I was sitting on the fence pretty much before you started in with your drivel. Now I'm dead-fucking-against SPEWS and their ilk.
I'm rather inclined to believe this, given that during the entire discussion you have demonstrated that you don't have a clue as to how SPEWS works and you've advocated legal action against an organization simply because they publish a list of IP addresses of known spam supporters.
You're like talking to a drunk who insists on driving.
You've run out of arguments, I see, so you're just resorting to moronic analogies.
Like I've said before, there is no legitimate complaint against the existence of SPEWS. If you don't like it, don't filter your mail with it. If you don't like that others filter their mail with it, tough shit -- you don't control their mailserver, so you have no say in what they accept or reject.
Which means I'm being punished for something that someone else did wrong.
Your ISP is being punished. Their netspace is being made less valuable. You just happen to be leasing netspace that has been rendered less valuable thanks to your ISP's refusal to act on spam complaints. If you were to move, the listing would not follow you. As such, it is not you being punished, it's your ISP and you're just being affected by their punishment. If your favourite resturaunt is punished in a lawsuit, and they have to raise their prices and cut their service to accomidate the cost of the punitive damages, the punishment on the resturaunt may impact you, but you are not the target of the punishment.
If I have a problem with a noisy neighbour, I am not going to disturb the sleep of his landlord's other tenants to apply pressure to the landlord.
No, but if you have a neighbour who arranges armed robberies to visitors of the property and your landlord knows about it but does nothing to stop it, a number of delivery companies may refuse to provide service in your area. They're not punishing you specifically, or any of your law-abiding neighbours, they're just protecting themselves and you happen to be impacted as a result.
To point out that they had made a mistake.
Post an inquiry to news.admin.net-abuse.email -- oftentimes alleged "mistakes" are not mistakes at all. In either case, you'll get a response either confirming that the listing is valid or confirming that it's a mistake and if it is a mistake you can expect the listing to be dropped within hours, possibly even minutes.
To see if they have further information proving that the IP addresses are used by spammers.
Typically that's documented in the SPEWS documentation. You don't need personal correspondence to "prove" that mastermailings.com is indeed a spammer, the evidence is rather readily available on public forums.
To help clarify why they were blocked.
They were blocked because the ISP to which they tried to send mail filters based upon SPEWS listings. It's up to the ISP to explain their blocking procedures, SPEWS has no control over them.
To explain the situation.
The situation is expained in the SPEWS FAQ. If you're listed, it is almost certainly because your ISP has been hosting a spammer and refusing to take action for several months.
To explain that they have cleaned up their act, and to ask to be removed from the list.
Post to NANAE, reference the SPEWS case ID, watch the listing vanish within minutes -- provided, of course, that all of the spammers are really gone. There are cases where an ISP claims to have cleaned up their act when they really just dropped a few spammers who hadn't paid their bills and moved the rest around on their network. In cases where the spammers are really all dead, the listings get dropped within hours.
Then why do IP addresses get blocked every time they add one to the list?
IP addresses get blocked because ISPs choose to filter based upon SPEWS listings. The ISPs running the mailservers are the ones doing the blocking. SPEWS isn't blocking any traffic, except possibly to their own machines (though SPEWS has no mailservers).
I have backed up my argument that SPEWS blocks IP addresses time and time again.
Repeating a falsehood does not make it into truth.
Nobody has convinced me otherwise.
Your delusions are your own problem.
Adding an IP address causes all SPEWS subscribers to block that IP address automatically. Cause and effect. And restating something does not make it true.
Dan Pollock adding an adserver to his sample hosts file causes people like me who use his listings to block all advertisement banners automatically. Cause and effect. Nonetheless, Dan Pollock is not blocking advertisements from my computer. Only I have the authority to do that.
Presumably they send spam complaints with full headers. That alone should be proof.
assert that crap they forward is hard proof,
SPEWS doesn't actually contact anyone, so how would you know how exactly what the operators send out?
then simply shut off IP blocks.
You claim to know how SPEWS works yet you assert stupid crap like this?
SPEWS does not shut off IP blocks. SPEWS is not capable of shutting off IP blocks. What the hell are you talkiing about?
Spammers are prepared to jump servers quickly.
True, but it's much easier for them when they have a permanent home thanks to a spam-friendly ISP. It's those ISPs that SPEWS targets, not the ones that kick off spammers after a single run.
We lost THOUSANDS of dollars because of SPEWS.
You lost THOUSANDS of dollars because your ISP ignored spam complaints for so long that a number of ISPs justifiably did not want to receive packets from your host's netspace. Stop blaming SPEWS when it was your ISP's negligence that caused this problem. SPEWS is just the messenger. If it weren't SPEWS, it would be another organization doing the same thing or something even more "drastic".
Frivolous lawsuits? That's in the eye of the beholder. What appears frivolous to you appears LOOOOONG overdue to me.
Well, yes, but I live in the USA where publishing opinions like "we think that it's a good idea not to accept email from these spam-friendly ISPs" is perfectly legal.
Thank god EVERYONE has a say, and not just the SPEWS facists.
That's true. You do have a say. You don't have to use SPEWS if you don't like it. Apparently, you want to take away the choice from ISPs who think that SPEWS is an effective spam-stopping solution. I fail to see how you can claim the moral high ground here.
So SPEWS has the authority to determine that an ISP is "crime-ridden?"
Their term is "spam support service", and they back up their claim with evidence. Of course, they have authority over no machine but their own. It is other ISPs who choose to use SPEWS's list for filtering that have the authority that stops your mail from reaching their servers -- and it's within their rights to do that.
Someone could create a site that lists IP addresses that contain "numbers that they don't like", and it would be perfectly legal for them to block mail from you simply because they don't like the arrangement of your IP address.
If an ISP hosts someone that is sending spam, they do so with full knowledge?
SPEWS does not list ISP's netblocks until it is clear that the ISP knows about the abuse but does nothing about it. Contrary to some assertions here, one spam run will not result in a SPEWS listing. It takes months of repeated abuse.
To top it all off, after making these determinations, there's every reason to blacklist whole IP blocks even when innocent bystanders use IPs on those blocks?
The listing STARTS with just the spammer's netspace. If no action is taken and the abuse continues, the listing expands to cover more IP ranges surrounding the spammer's assigned space. It's like the spammer is a blight that causes a festering rash to grow upon the ISP's network and slowly spread until the source is removed.
I'm not running away from anything, I'm running TOWARDS common sense and accountability
Odd that you say something like this when you advocate using frivilous lawsuits to shut down a means of holding ISPs accountable for their spam support.
You know what? I'm sick of this line of discussion.
Translation: you can't justify forcing ISPs to accept email that they don't want, so you're throwing a temper tantrum and running away, whining about how "evil" SPEWS is for listing factual information.
Apparently tou think that ISPs should be forced to take on the burden of processing gigabytes of junk email per day, just because you can't stand the idea that crime-ridden ISPs should be held accountable for what they allow on their networks.
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I honestly didn't even know that these things had come to market. Last I'd heard, they were an idea being kicked around that might have just been greenlighted. I've never seen them for sale anywhere near where I live (and I live in the largest city in Kentucky).
So if you fsck your hard drive, you need to fsck your file system.
True. Otherwise your data might get fscked.
There, now the joke is beyond stale.
I admit that I'm not a fanatic like some, but I have never heard that particular string used as a short way to refer to the Hitchiker's Guide series. I've seen HHGttG once or twice, but usually I just see the whole thing written out.
It took me a moment to figure out the meaning of the headline. I had to actually read some of the additional commentary. If I had to actually read some of the commentary before posting on all articles, how could I shoot off an ill-informed comment that so blatantly exposes my ignorance?
...though I got a 510W supply from PC Power & Cooling. Of course, my hard drives and all of the internal fans make enough noise as it is, no need to spend extra for a "quiet" power supply that isn't going to have any impact on the noise level of the room anyway.
Looks like I can't play 32bit games with the 64bit drivers, either. Apparently NVidia is working on that, so until then I'll stick with the 32bit drivers and a 32bit kernel.
Ahwell. I hear that the performance boost between 32-bit optimized and 64-bit optimized isn't that great anyway thanks in part to the Athlon 64's excellent handling of 32-bit data.
I don't have this problem. I can exit X gracefully and still do anything that I want, including restarting X. Occasionally I have a problem where the console doesn't show anything that I type (I get the bash prompt, any stdout output, but nothing that I type -- including carriage returns -- show up on screen), but this is rare, may have a different cause, does not carry over to other virtual terminals and goes away if I merely log out of the session. Perhaps I'm not enabling a certain feature that leads to this problem?
I've been using 2.6 on my Debian testing/unstable box for awhile, and I've not had problems -- at least, none that I didn't have with 2.4 (burning a CD while running motv with the bttv driver still causes a hard-lock) apart from getting wavetable MIDI from the emu10k1 driver (solution: build the driver as a module, not in the kernel -- for some reason /dev/sequencer won't work otherwise). I've also not had noticable problems with the previous driver release (with the patch applied), though I'm not sure what kind of problems I should expect.
I'm about to assemble a new machine with an Athlon 64 CPU. I know that I could use the 32-bit drivers and have them work, but I'd rather go with the ones designed specifically for my CPU -- unless someone has compared them and found them either identical or nearly so.
Why do you hate spam so much anyway? I hate it because it reduces the functionality of my email. I hate SPEWS, because it does exactly the same.
I hate spam because it reduces the functionability of email and the burden of accepting it -- the expense, primarly -- is forced upon people who don't want it.
SPEWS is used only by mail admins who WANT it. Even if it does, as you claim, reduce the functionality of email, it is an entirely voluntary service.
I also consider the whole attitude hypocritical. SPEWS refuses to accept any responsibility for blocking
That's because SPEWS doesn't actually do any blocking. The SPEWS list can be used for more than just blocking. This has been restated so many times that there's really no reason to keep uttering the falsehood that "SPEWS blocks mail".
but they expect me to take responsibility to find out whether my ISP's ISP's server host has a policy against their other customers harbouring spammers.
No, they just want to stop the spam by any means necessary. They'd probably like it if you took action to get rid of spammers on the network on which you occupy, but the IPs get listed in SPEWS because the ISP in question has made it clear that they're not going to listen to third parties regarding the crime problems eminating from their network.
Aside from the fact that this in not neccesarily possible, why should SPEWS expect me to take responsibibility, when they don't have the responsibility to admit that their actions harm ISPs that do not spam.
SPEWS does what it does as a "last resort" option. They've tried LARTs to the abuse desks at the appropriate ISPs. The ISP has refused to do anything at all. SPEWS is just a way of saying "These ISPs don't care if their customers are spammers, maybe you should filter or tag their mail".
Don't like the fact that you're on a netblock owned by an entity that doesn't listen to abuse reports? Stop blaming SPEWS. SPEWS didn't make the management at your ISP so clueless.
SPEWS does not make it clear what they do.
No, SPEWS does. A lot of people have misconceptions about what SPEWS does -- they assume that they've already got a general idea, so they skim the FAQ, miss important bits and forget to read for context, then come screaming that "SPEWS is blocking me! I'm not a spammer!" when, in fact, SPEWS isn't blocking ANYONE, and they're listing the spam-ridden ISP IP blocks, they're not specifically targetting the non-spamming customers of the ISP.
A lot of people know, but I suspect that a lot don't. The website really needs to be looked at to make sure this is made clear.
The people for whom SPEWS is best used are mail admins. If they can't figure out how SPEWS works from reading the website, then they should look at other information. If they STILL don't figure it out -- or if they decide to filter on SPEWS because it "sounds neat" without actually learning how SPEWS works, then they are incompetent. Incompetent mail admins are not the fault of SPEWS.
It doesn't make it particularly clear that it includes non-spamming IPs. I suspect most people expect it to behave like other lists.
It's their fault for not reading the SPEWS information completely. It's all on spews.org, they have no excuse for filtering and forgetting.
Hence they, and all their customers should be blocked. I think that will include everyone.
Some (a very few) have suggested doing things like this. SPEWS does not share this philosophy. I suspect that if they did, a lot fewer people would use SPEWS.
I think that the methods of SPEWS are rather tame. NAC.net has been a spam-problem for over a year, with notorious criminal spammers on their networks without any hint of action from NAC, and only NOW does BBL/DSLR find their IP blocks covered in a SPEWS listing and even then it's just a level 2 listing!
There are those (mail admins at ISPs) who have
It's their fault they're listing innocent IPs.
You see "fault", I see "standard operating procedure". SPEWS lists the IP addresses owned by known spam-supporters. That's what they claim to do, and that's what they do. It's not the fault of SPEWS that a scummy ISP will take on human shields.
They have managed to inlcude a lot of IP ranges leased by people who do not spam.
So? This is already known, it's been discussed to death.
I can not accept that a subscriber to an ISP always has a choice in whether they use that ISP.
True. This isn't the problem of SPEWS. SPEWS is not an ISP and does not run any ISPs.
SPEWS has a choice whether or not to make an exception.
Yes, they do. If they were to make an exception every time someone whined "But I'm not a spammer" after their crime-ridden ISP got listed, SPEWS would not be nearly as effective as they are. SPEWS does what they do because less drastic measures have been tried and failed. ISPs didn't take action when only their spammer's IPs were listed. SPEWS takes the next step by listing the entire ISP instead.
I know. One of my points is that people should not use it.
My point is that people should use it if they understand it and have a desire to use it. There are, however, people who think that the choice should be taken away entirely, that SPEWS should be sued out of existence (fat chance) and that ISPs should not be allowed to filter mail at all under penalty of law.
I'm surprised that if spam is so universally hated, they can't manage to come up with a practically unlimited defence fund by asking people to donate.
Most people only hate spam in as much as it hits their inboxes. As a result, the people who actually understand how bad spam is and how dangerous it is if left to continue don't have a lot of places from which to draw funds.
Since it's apparently just an opinion, it would be an open and shut case anyway. A motion to dismiss would be relatively inexpensive.
Yeah, that really worked well with MAPS RBL. Harris marketing had a perfectly legitimate entry, but they were able to use lots of lawyers with lots of legalese to litigate their way out of the RBL.
SPEWS's anonyminity is a DIRECT response to what happened to MAPS.
The only reason they would need to hide is if the legality of what they are doing is not as clear cut as they like to think.
No, they hide it because the fact that it is legal does not spare them from expensive litigation that will cost them a great deal of money even if they DO win. They're not a business. They don't make money for the service that they offer. They can't recoup the costs by expanding their service to more people. Being sued costs money, even if you win.
They're both identical situations, and you've just come up with another example of an external source using your computer to perform an action through means of a config file.
So you would actually say that Dan Pollock is preventing banner advertisements from reaching my computer?
Okay. You know what I would do if Dan Pollock's list weren't available? I'd compose my own. If SPEWS weren't available, ISPs would compose their own filter lists. Of course, the admins wouldn't have the time to check to see if the spammers ever got kicked off. As such, places like NAC.net would be tossed into the filters "forever", and their traffic would be rejected by hundreds of INDIVIDUAL filters across the world, with no chance of removal even if NAC.net terminated all exisitng spammers and had any new client who spammed shot. Do you really think that a better solution? Before you tell me that it won't happen, keep in mind that it's exactly what happened to AGIS.
Oh, I do have a problem with ISPs affecting the innocent.
Then tell NAC.net to stop allowing criminals to reduce the value of their service for their legitima
If regular mail deserves protection to ensure its integrity, so does email.
Wow. So because both entities use the letter string "m-a-i-l" in their name, they should both be subject to full-fledged government regulation,
What about a private intranet? Should they open up a closed mail system to allow external sources to send them mail?
What about when a mailserver goes down due to a technical problem. Should the admins be held legally responsible for the downtime, subject to criminal penalties for email being lost?
Can you give me something more tangible to justify your assertion that email should be subject to the same regulations as postal mail?
So long as they don't violate regulations, they can make their own RBL and subscribe to any external, compliant RBL.
So if an ISP determined that absolutely none of its customers wanted to receive mail from South America, China or the networks run by Cogentco, it would be okay for the ISP to refuse to accept mail from any mailservers hosted in South America, China or Cogentco, or do you support the US government forcing someone to accept unwanted email at their own expense?
What about faxes? Should people be required, by law, to accept unsolicited junk faxes at their expense?
However, where the RBLs fail, yes, the ISPs should carry that burden. They are carrying mail. If they can't handle the job, and handle it properly, they should go do something else.
Okay. So you do advocate forcing private entities to allow all kinds of network abuse to be perpetuated on their systems, and they should just eat the cost even though there are simple means for averting the damage.
This is mail.
No. This is electronic mail. There are many other ways that email can fail to reach a destination than just a blocklist. A server could go down. A router could go down. A hard drive could fail.
If you're telling me that email should be expected to be delivered with the same level of guarantee of postal mail, I'll tell you to lay off of the crack pipe.
This is mail. They shouldn't cut off legitimate email because it mixes in with email that they don't want to deliver.
Except that they own the equipment. They're legally allowed to refuse any packet that comes into their computer, regardless of the reason.
They shouldn't be delivering mail if their level of integrity puts money higher on their list of priorities than delivering valid letters.
What about blocking spam and thereby making the email system much more usable for their end-users? Or do you not care about the fact that under your utopian ideas, users would have to dig through hundreds of junk mails just to find a single legitimate piece of correspondence?
Physical mail is a HELL of a lot more expensive to deliver, and U.S. Postal Service has vowed to deliver through "rain, sleet, wind, snow" etc. How spineless is an ISP to fail to deliver a valid letter because someone told them that the server it comes from sends spam? That's pretty spineless.
Postal mail is a heavily regulated industry, apparently you want all ISPs to be subject to the same level of regulations. The cost of sending postal mail is paid by the sender, not the recipient. You're suggesting a system where the RECIPIENT is forced to accept and PAY for all incoming mail, even if they don't want it. Opposing that isn't being spineless, it's having common sense.
Postal mail, being physical, allows for a higher level of accountability. Would you push for criminal charges because of lost email when a server goes down? You don't get that kind of problem with postal mail -- if the mailbox is somehow inaccessable, the post office can attempt to redeliver. If a mailserver goes down, it's possible that your electrons may just dissipate into the ether. Are you going to sue because your recipient's ISP had a hard drive go bad?
To blacklist a single IP a
The U.S. takes care of the U.S., Europe takes care of Europe, etc
Are you saying that you want INTERNATIONAL regulation of email?
The thing is, you can hold the ISPs themselves accountable, for blacklisting servers illegally through a renegade RBL.
What is your justification for this? Also, you didn't address my question about ISPs who decide to construct their own private filter lists, as has been done well before public RBLs existed.
Sure, your ISP can start using an RBL that operates out of Iran and DOESN'T adhere to guidelines, but if they operate in the U.S., they'll be the ones "illegally tampering with electronic mail."
And exactly why don't they have a right to control what networks are allowed to send mail to their servers? You've not yet offered justification for this.
All the non-techies out there signed up at RandomISP, Inc. will not have their mail filtered, and thus the problem of an RBL irresponsibly is drastically mitigated.
In other words, you DO want ISPs to bear the burden (billions of dollars per year) of processing and storing junk email messages without the option of stopping them at the router level.
Why do I think the users should be notified? So the users can take action in advance of the shutdown.
Okay. Say I want to block all Verizon traffic at the router, because Verizon is known to support criminal activity. How do I go about contacting EVERY Verizon user to let them know that they'll no longer be able to access my servers?
SPEWS isn't using innocent users who run honorable mail servers against their will, are they?
SPEWS uses their own machines. I don't know what you're trying to say here.
They aren't shutting blacklisting innocents by design, are they?
I can't parse this either.
I see no problem in requiring ISPs to notify all affected users when their IPs are threatened to be blacklisted.
I see your point. Fine. I will support legislation that will require spam-friendly ISPs like nac.net to notify their users that the spam-support of the ISP may well cause all outgoing mail to be blocked at the destination.
Make laws governing RBLs and then go after ISPs who illegally subject their U.S. customers' email to non-compliant RBLs.
And what kind of laws would you recommend? Would these laws only affect filtering of US-based IP addresses, or would ISPs also be regulated when it comes to filtering out known spam-ridden countries like China or Brazil? Why should this be regulated? Why should an ISP be forced, by law, to accept gigabytes of traffic that they know is garbage? Why do they not have control over what their privately owned machines accept and reject? What would allow an ISP to legally block IP addresses? What if an ISP decided to use their own private filter list rather than an RBL, would that be permitted? If not, how do you justify FORCING ISPs to accept traffic that they do not want?
Should the law require that you open up your machine so that I can access it at any time I desire?
While you're at it, make a law that says when an ISP receives a notice that any IPs may be blocked, they must notify all users of those IPs.
Why?
The force of law governs physical postal mail, it should govern email.
Why? And how would this be implemented?
By answering (and admiting) this you also are forced to admit that SPEWS is irisponcible for NOT doing something about it (such as providing a recomeded warning for admins to give to users).
My car manual didn't come with a warning instructing me not to drive my vehicle into large crowds of people. Is the manufacturer of my car to blame if someone uses one of their cars to do that?
You believe what you want to believe. Obviously you're delusional enough to believe anything, given you think that the force of law should be used to prevent mail admins from rejecting packets as they choose.
I suppose you mean "disinclined."
That was the intended idea, but my wording was deliberate. I was being sarcastic.
Yes. It's being made deliberately, and maliciously less valuable.
Don't bitch to SPEWS. Your ISP is the one that allowed spammers to run rampant -- why are you whining to other people who no longer want to trade packets with your ISP? It's NOT THEIR FAULT THAT YOUR ISP ALLOWS CRIMINAL ACTIVITY ON THEIR NETWORK!
No. It's being made less valuable thanks to SPEWS' policy of overblocking.
SPEWS does not overblock. SPEWS lists IP space owned by spammers and spam-support outfits. Overblocking would be if they deliberately listed IP space not owned by spam-support outfits. Thus far, you've not demonstrated that they are doing this.
The delivery company has no choice but to put themselves at risk todeliver to me. However, it is possible to block spammer IP addresses without blocking my IP ranges.
Is it? What is to stop the spam-friendly ISP from moving the spammer to a new IP address in their network? It's been done before, for the purpose of evading IP filters. That's part of the reason that SPEWS does what it does.
Personally, I like to keep my correspondance private.
SPEWS does not.
There is justification for SPEWS remaining anonymous. Other blocklists weren't anonymous and had people who could be contacted. They got smacked with legal threats from big companies with lots of money over perfectly legitimate listings. As such, it was demonstrated that spammers who had money to throw around or spam-friendly ISPs with sufficient funding could litigate their way out of a listing without actually stopping the spam. SPEWS is a response to this problem.
Yes, so SPEWS listing those sites causes them to be blocked.
No, an ISP using SPEWS's list causes the mail to be blocked. SPEWS does not "cause" mail blockage any more than Dan Pollock "causes" advertising banners being blocked from my computer.
Hence, should SPEWS desire to cause a site to be blocked, they have that power.
And should an ISP decide that they don't like what SPEWS is offering, they have the power not to use SPEWS's lists. SPEWS can't force anyone to filter based upon SPEWS listings. The "power" that they have is so effortlessly taken away that I don't see how they can legitimately be blamed for email being lost.
They can keep the website up as long as they like. I'm not obliged to download it.
We're getting somewhere now. No one is obliged to use SPEWS, either.
It may have escaped your notice, but all I want to do is stop spam.
So does SPEWS. It's just that they have a different idea of effective methods for stopping spam as you, apparently.
I'll happily block it. I'll happily sue spammers, and encourage other people to do both. However, when the actions of anti-spammers start affecting the innocent, I have issues.
What about the actions of spam-friendly ISPs affecting the innocent? You don't seem to have a problem with that. Further, keep in mind that SPEWS's list is only effective upon mailservers where the admins CHOOSE to implement SPEWS-based filtering. This is their right. They can choose to filter mail based upon the number '5' appearing in the IP address, and it's perfectly legal, even though it may well affect the "innocent".
Well, this is fairly reasonable. How does SPEWS determine which ones are legitimate, and which are spammers though?
Typically, the legitimate ones don't have it happen very often.
And how is the ISP to know which complaints of spam are legitimate? A series of false spam complaints to an ISP will be indistinguishable form a series of legitimate complaints. How about malicious spam sent out in an attempt to discredit the website?
The possibility of a joe-job is very real, though oftentimes it's not terribly difficult to determine when a site has been joed and when it hasn't. The context of the spam messages themselves are often a dead giveaway (
I was sitting on the fence pretty much before you started in with your drivel. Now I'm dead-fucking-against SPEWS and their ilk.
I'm rather inclined to believe this, given that during the entire discussion you have demonstrated that you don't have a clue as to how SPEWS works and you've advocated legal action against an organization simply because they publish a list of IP addresses of known spam supporters.
You're like talking to a drunk who insists on driving.
You've run out of arguments, I see, so you're just resorting to moronic analogies.
Like I've said before, there is no legitimate complaint against the existence of SPEWS. If you don't like it, don't filter your mail with it. If you don't like that others filter their mail with it, tough shit -- you don't control their mailserver, so you have no say in what they accept or reject.
Which means I'm being punished for something that someone else did wrong.
Your ISP is being punished. Their netspace is being made less valuable. You just happen to be leasing netspace that has been rendered less valuable thanks to your ISP's refusal to act on spam complaints. If you were to move, the listing would not follow you. As such, it is not you being punished, it's your ISP and you're just being affected by their punishment. If your favourite resturaunt is punished in a lawsuit, and they have to raise their prices and cut their service to accomidate the cost of the punitive damages, the punishment on the resturaunt may impact you, but you are not the target of the punishment.
If I have a problem with a noisy neighbour, I am not going to disturb the sleep of his landlord's other tenants to apply pressure to the landlord.
No, but if you have a neighbour who arranges armed robberies to visitors of the property and your landlord knows about it but does nothing to stop it, a number of delivery companies may refuse to provide service in your area. They're not punishing you specifically, or any of your law-abiding neighbours, they're just protecting themselves and you happen to be impacted as a result.
To point out that they had made a mistake.
Post an inquiry to news.admin.net-abuse.email -- oftentimes alleged "mistakes" are not mistakes at all. In either case, you'll get a response either confirming that the listing is valid or confirming that it's a mistake and if it is a mistake you can expect the listing to be dropped within hours, possibly even minutes.
To see if they have further information proving that the IP addresses are used by spammers.
Typically that's documented in the SPEWS documentation. You don't need personal correspondence to "prove" that mastermailings.com is indeed a spammer, the evidence is rather readily available on public forums.
To help clarify why they were blocked.
They were blocked because the ISP to which they tried to send mail filters based upon SPEWS listings. It's up to the ISP to explain their blocking procedures, SPEWS has no control over them.
To explain the situation.
The situation is expained in the SPEWS FAQ. If you're listed, it is almost certainly because your ISP has been hosting a spammer and refusing to take action for several months.
To explain that they have cleaned up their act, and to ask to be removed from the list.
Post to NANAE, reference the SPEWS case ID, watch the listing vanish within minutes -- provided, of course, that all of the spammers are really gone. There are cases where an ISP claims to have cleaned up their act when they really just dropped a few spammers who hadn't paid their bills and moved the rest around on their network. In cases where the spammers are really all dead, the listings get dropped within hours.
Then why do IP addresses get blocked every time they add one to the list?
IP addresses get blocked because ISPs choose to filter based upon SPEWS listings. The ISPs running the mailservers are the ones doing the blocking. SPEWS isn't blocking any traffic, except possibly to their own machines (though SPEWS has no mailservers).
I have backed up my argument that SPEWS blocks IP addresses time and time again.
Repeating a falsehood does not make it into truth.
Nobody has convinced me otherwise.
Your delusions are your own problem.
Adding an IP address causes all SPEWS subscribers to block that IP address automatically. Cause and effect. And restating something does not make it true.
Dan Pollock adding an adserver to his sample hosts file causes people like me who use his listings to block all advertisement banners automatically. Cause and effect. Nonetheless, Dan Pollock is not blocking advertisements from my computer. Only I have the authority to do that.
They send notices to ISP's with ZERO hard proof,
Presumably they send spam complaints with full headers. That alone should be proof.
assert that crap they forward is hard proof,
SPEWS doesn't actually contact anyone, so how would you know how exactly what the operators send out?
then simply shut off IP blocks.
You claim to know how SPEWS works yet you assert stupid crap like this?
SPEWS does not shut off IP blocks. SPEWS is not capable of shutting off IP blocks. What the hell are you talkiing about?
Spammers are prepared to jump servers quickly.
True, but it's much easier for them when they have a permanent home thanks to a spam-friendly ISP. It's those ISPs that SPEWS targets, not the ones that kick off spammers after a single run.
We lost THOUSANDS of dollars because of SPEWS.
You lost THOUSANDS of dollars because your ISP ignored spam complaints for so long that a number of ISPs justifiably did not want to receive packets from your host's netspace. Stop blaming SPEWS when it was your ISP's negligence that caused this problem. SPEWS is just the messenger. If it weren't SPEWS, it would be another organization doing the same thing or something even more "drastic".
Frivolous lawsuits? That's in the eye of the beholder. What appears frivolous to you appears LOOOOONG overdue to me.
Well, yes, but I live in the USA where publishing opinions like "we think that it's a good idea not to accept email from these spam-friendly ISPs" is perfectly legal.
Thank god EVERYONE has a say, and not just the SPEWS facists.
That's true. You do have a say. You don't have to use SPEWS if you don't like it. Apparently, you want to take away the choice from ISPs who think that SPEWS is an effective spam-stopping solution. I fail to see how you can claim the moral high ground here.
So SPEWS has the authority to determine that an ISP is "crime-ridden?"
Their term is "spam support service", and they back up their claim with evidence. Of course, they have authority over no machine but their own. It is other ISPs who choose to use SPEWS's list for filtering that have the authority that stops your mail from reaching their servers -- and it's within their rights to do that.
Someone could create a site that lists IP addresses that contain "numbers that they don't like", and it would be perfectly legal for them to block mail from you simply because they don't like the arrangement of your IP address.
If an ISP hosts someone that is sending spam, they do so with full knowledge?
SPEWS does not list ISP's netblocks until it is clear that the ISP knows about the abuse but does nothing about it. Contrary to some assertions here, one spam run will not result in a SPEWS listing. It takes months of repeated abuse.
To top it all off, after making these determinations, there's every reason to blacklist whole IP blocks even when innocent bystanders use IPs on those blocks?
The listing STARTS with just the spammer's netspace. If no action is taken and the abuse continues, the listing expands to cover more IP ranges surrounding the spammer's assigned space. It's like the spammer is a blight that causes a festering rash to grow upon the ISP's network and slowly spread until the source is removed.
I'm not running away from anything, I'm running TOWARDS common sense and accountability
Odd that you say something like this when you advocate using frivilous lawsuits to shut down a means of holding ISPs accountable for their spam support.
You know what? I'm sick of this line of discussion.
Translation: you can't justify forcing ISPs to accept email that they don't want, so you're throwing a temper tantrum and running away, whining about how "evil" SPEWS is for listing factual information.
Apparently tou think that ISPs should be forced to take on the burden of processing gigabytes of junk email per day, just because you can't stand the idea that crime-ridden ISPs should be held accountable for what they allow on their networks.
Following that logic, we should boycot AT&T, they do business with criminals and allow them to use their phone system.
Amongst the many flaws that I can point out in this asinine assertion, I can note that ISPs are not common carriers. Please use a better analogy.