The ISP is the one who is violating the "cooperative spirit that makes the Net work"; MAPS just lets us know who the bad guys are so we can block 'em if we choose.
Also, RBL is used in a backbone and those using it have no choice in the matter.
Many have made this claim; despite many requests, I still have seen no evidence. I say it's bunk.
Sure, you can use delete on your own inbox. But what if your an ISP and your customers demand less spam? Will you delete for them?
And really, this just ignores the potential size of the problem. Sending a spam costs practically nothing to the sender. There are two million registered businesses in the US alone. So if spamming isn't fought tooth and nail, how many spams do you think you'll get once everybody does it?
Or another way to look at it: spamming a few million people costs about as much as the smallest newspaper display ad. How many ads like that are there in your daily paper? And how many daily papers are there in the world?
If you want to keep up with your "solution", you'll need to remap about half your keyboard to delete.
And what would the potentially legitimate use of spam software and 25 million addresses be? Decorating your apartment? A little light reading before bed?
And I'm sure there's a potentially legitimate use of "bulk-friendly hosting", too. Web pages for my bulk foods business? A place where bulky guys can get clothes?
Nmap is a tool which can be used for good or evil; I use it to check up on my own hosts to make sure my users aren't running anything insecure. Napster, as we've seen, is more ambiguous; it can be used for good, but the bulk of the activity is copyright violation, which is why the courts have taken such a dim view of it.
But bulk e-mail software that comes with millions of addresses and software for spidering sites to get yet more addresses has no purpose but spamming. There's nothing "conceivable" about the evil use here.
Yes. I I use blcheck for this, with qmail-qfilter to put it right into the SMTP chain, although you can use it with procmail, too. That way users can use their mail clients to decide what to trash and what to keep.
That's how MAPS should work, by blocking the bad stuff so that RBL users just don't see it. There isn't any need to punish innocent sites who happen to be on the same class C.
Wrong. Media3 is currently the number one ISP for live spam sites accoring spamhaus.org. MAPS has been talking with these guys for months about their various spam-friendly activities. If an ISP keeps allowing spammers in, MAPS should block 'em.
If MAPS successfully got Media3 to shut down the spammer's site, then MAPS WOULD be dealing in
censorship, wouldn't they?
These aren't just people who say that spam should be allowed. They are people who spam to draw traffic to their websites, people who sell spamming software, and people who provide spam-friendly hosts services.
If MAPS blocked people for advocating spam, like, say, the DMA, then they would be censoring. But they don't; they only block people who spam or those who help spammers. Their criterion is based on an activity, not an opinion. That's not censorship as far as I'm concerned.
10 years ago I wrote this program which stops elephants from walking down the highway. Since there's only been a couple of elephants found walking on the highway since then, my program must work.
When MAPS started the RBL, a lot of the spam was direct and obvious, coming straight from the spammer's network and advertising something on the spammer's network. Now, almost all of it is cloaked in a variety of ways; I almost never see a spam that obviously originates from the site that it is pushing.
So if ten years ago highway elephants were a big problem and today people were regularly caught disguising elephants as dump trucks, semis, and Yugos because your program didn't catch that, then you could rightly feel that you had made a difference.
[...] in all honesty, are you going to tell Peacefire.org to switch providers now because they're using the same service as MarketingMasters?
Yes. Although I support Peacefire's work (and even donated money to them), they should move. And if they want to stick with their spam-friendly ISP, then that's their choice, but my computers will stop talking to theirs. (And I probably won't give them money again, either.)
MAPS has taken the power they have and abused it.
It's not like they're pulling these judgements out of their collective ass or doing something secretive. They have a clear policy on what gets you in. According to a recent press release this ISP got listed for hosting spam-advertised sites. They are also clearly continuing to host sites that sell bulk-mail software and addresses. According to spamhaus.org, Media3 is the largest spam site hoster currently active.
RBL needs to be replaced. The original intention was to keep it as a list of sites that send spam.
I don't know if you've looked closely at any of your spam in the last couple of years, but the the vast majority of it now is from dialups, open relays, and weird foreign hosts. Making a "list of sites that send spam" won't do much good anymore; that's why they have expanded it to include relays and spam support services. As another poster mentioned, you have to follow the money to stop spam.
Still, if you think such a service would be more useful. you're welcome to start one. Note, though, that the only serious RBL competitor, ORBS, was substantially more aggressive than MAPS; I doubt an RBL-minus would be very popular.
---
The point here is not to punish a single spammer site; it's to punish an ISP that's been so badly behaved for so many months that there's nothing left to do but to ostracize them. It's unfortunate that banning an ISP harms their legit customers. (It's also unfortunate that boycotting, say, Microsoft or Starbucks or Nike harms a lot of perfectly nice employees.)
But how else do you suggest that we deal with a rogue ISP?
As with anything else, you should try to do business with reputable companies. These days, this is much easier than before the internet.
With an ISP, the first thing to do is read their AUP and the other agreements that you sign when you get service from them. Next, search for information about them.
With Media3, for example, it's pretty easy to find that they are a known spam-friendly ISP. If you think that's cool, then by all means use them. If not, maybe you should look elsewhere.
When that happens, it's called a "joe job". Generally, they're pretty obvious; people who spend their time doing things like this are usually pretty dim.
Occasionally, it's a real problem telling, in which case it's generally up to the judgement of the ISP, which can go well or go poorly.
Note that the RBL generally only contains recalcitrant spammers; I'm sure if they contacted somebody who said "it wasn't me", gave some reasonable explanation, and then put up a note saying how deplorable spam is, then MAPS would just keep an eye on 'em.
The point of the RBL, as opposed to the DUL or the RSS, let alone ORBS, is to only block those who are known and recalcitrant supports of spam.
The fact that that few spams are caught in the RBL is either a testament to their restraint in listing people or to the success of MAPS of driving spam support services off of the web. Either way, I'm still very glad it exists.
These people offer "25 million free addresses" with the purchase of their bulk software. They have ads for "bulk-friendly" hosting services. This site is all about enabling spammers, bucko.
Sendmail is a piece of software that can be used to spam. The folks at MarketingMasters offer software that is specifically designed for spamming, plus it comes with a bunch of addresses, probably including yours and mine. You see the difference?
This comment was not intended to be flamebait, despite what a moderator seems to think. I mean it as a serious and legitimate critique of the site.
Is this an article, and therefore theoretically objective? If so, it's a pretty poor fit with what I like to see in my news sources.
Is this just the usual news commentary? If so, where's the news, the carefully researched article by a journalist who has been picked by a publication and helped by an editor?
Or is this an editorial? And if so, is it considered a Slashdot-approved editorial, or just an opinion piece by some guy called "jamie"? And if so, what are his qualifications to speak?
Personally, I like Slashdot best when it posts news articles from other sources, possibly with a wry comment or two, and then lets us comment on them. Journalism is a tricky thing, and I'm generally not impressed when Slashdot tries it themselves. That's why I've turned off display of the Jon Katz articles, for example.
If they think this is a news article or an opinion piece that's worth publishing, then they should submit it to someplace like Salon or ZDNet or Wired, rather then using the power of Slashdot to push their own articles like this. They might discover that professional journalists and experienced editors at real news sites would have some suggestions that they missed. And once they get it accepted elsewhere, then they should by all means post it back here for discussion.
For just such reasons, they already have three different lists:
Realtime Blackhole List - a list of netblocks involved with spam origination, severe spam relaying, or spam support services
Dialup User List - A list of dialup netblocks
Relay Spam Stopper - a broader list of known spam relays
I guess you're asking them to split the RBL into two or three more parts. I personally don't see the need for this; in my eyes supporting spammers is as bad as being a spammer. But opinions differ, and if enough people ask for it I'm sure they'll add those lists (as they did with the DUL and RSS lists). Have you asked them yet?
Here in California, you can ask the phone company to set things up so that anybody trying to call anonymously is automatically rejected. In a year, this has caused only one problem with a legit caller, but I get telemarketing calls maybe once a week now.
Hooray for voluntary blocking! I wish I could get a service like MAPS for my telephone or my fax machine. Hell, I wish I could just block all phone calls from Florida; I don't have any friends there, and about half of the junk faxes I trace back come from there.
They are blocking an ISP who is hosting a spamware site and is therefore spam-friendly.
It is true that this ISP has other web servers, but how can you block an ISP without blocking their IP addresses?
As a guy who donated money to Peacefire, I'm disappointed that they're using a spam-friendly ISP. Hopefully they'll move to a more respectable service shortly, and they won't have these problems.
MAPS isn't "hiding behind" free association. All they do is publish a list; other people decide whether or not to use the list.
If indeed many people feel that MAPS is too extreme, then competitors will indeed appear. But to date, the only serious competitor I've seen is ORBS, which is more extreme than MAPS.
I agree that there is some collateral damage, but that strikes me as necessary. I use the RBL because I don't want to talk to spammers or anybody who supports them. This includes the ISP who is hosting the spammer software site. How could you block an ISP but not block its IP addresses?
Punishing innocent sites by mere association in this case is a cure worse than the disease.
The goal is not to punish the innocent sites; it's to refuse to trade packets with ISPs who support spam. If you want to show your support of such ISPs by putting your web servers there, go ahead. But I reserve the right to tell my computers not to talk to yours.
IPv4 addresses are not so plentifully available that one can simply block all questionable netblocks and expect there to be any unblocked addresses left for the good guys to reside in.
Well apparently one can do such a thing, as the RBL has been going for quite a while. And last I looked, major ISPs were not turning away new customers because they have run out of IP addresses.
Who are these "many" ISPs that create black-hole routes based on MAPS RBL?
I know that some ISPs block RBL-listed machines talking on or through their networks, but I've never seen a credible case of an ISP advertising bogus routes to RBL-listed sites.
He had no "press time"; this is the web fer chrissakes. And there's nothing urgent about this story; it'll be just as relevant next week as now.
If he did contact MAPS three months ago and still hasn't heard back, then he should have said so. Journalists often write things like, "despite repeated attempts to reach Paul Vixie and other MAPS spokespeople over the last three weeks, this reporter's calls were not returned."
If you're willing to do business with a company that supports spammers, then I don't want my boxes to talk to your boxes. But that's my choice to make, isn't it?
I also boycott a couple of companies whose business practices I don't like. Does this hurt their suppliers and their employees? Yes. Do I like that? No. But it's a price I'm willing to pay to put pressure on people who do things that I consider bad for society.
Sorry, my experience here comes from doing technical work for a medical advertising agency; their most basic stuff was four-color cards, going on to ridiculous 5- or 6-color brochures, which could be many dollars each. I didn't realize you could get a good mailer printed for so much less.
And of course, if you value your time at zero, then things look a lot cheaper. Wanna do some mailers for me, too?:-)
The only reason you see his name on that stuff is that he wrote useful code back at the dawn of time, stuff which has survived to this day.
Almost any code from ten or fifteen years ago was less paranoid than modern code; it was written for a simpler, more trusting world. It wasn't all that long ago that open relays became a problem, for example.
So don't knock him too much; it's just that most of the code that started back then wasn't even good enough to be in use today. And as a recent Slashdot article shows, he's well aware that a ground-up rewrite is needed to fix the problem.
You shouldn't tar MAPS with the ORBS brush. For the last year or so, all of my mail gets extra headers added based on which of the lists (ORBS, MAPS RBL, MAPS RSS, MAPS DUL) it matches.
I frequently find that ORBS would block mail I'd like to receive, whereas the MAPS RBL and RSS never do, and the DUL would only rarely. For a normal ISP, I'd guess that ORBS would be a nightmare, but the RBL would be pretty much OK.
Of course, for me, I keep all my spam so I can feed it to SpamCop.
Note that a lot of people use the RBL in just that way. For my users, I have it set up so that headers are added to each message indicating which lists (ORBS, MAPS RBL, MAPS DUL, MAPS RSS) the message matches. That way they can filter it as they please.
But we're considering moving to the more extreme version, where all traffic gets dropped. Why? Because the people on the RBL are not good neighbors, and we don't want to have anything to do with them. I don't want to hear from a spammer; neither do I want spam-friendly ISPs using the stuff I offer to the world.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is analogous to the ancient greek concept of ostracism.
Slashdot Mirror
They are blocking the ISP, which has hosted a whole mess of spammers for at least six months.
The ISP is the one who is violating the "cooperative spirit that makes the Net work"; MAPS just lets us know who the bad guys are so we can block 'em if we choose.
Also, RBL is used in a backbone and those using it have no choice in the matter.
Many have made this claim; despite many requests, I still have seen no evidence. I say it's bunk.
Is this just a troll?
Sure, you can use delete on your own inbox. But what if your an ISP and your customers demand less spam? Will you delete for them?
And really, this just ignores the potential size of the problem. Sending a spam costs practically nothing to the sender. There are two million registered businesses in the US alone. So if spamming isn't fought tooth and nail, how many spams do you think you'll get once everybody does it?
Or another way to look at it: spamming a few million people costs about as much as the smallest newspaper display ad. How many ads like that are there in your daily paper? And how many daily papers are there in the world?
If you want to keep up with your "solution", you'll need to remap about half your keyboard to delete.
And what would the potentially legitimate use of spam software and 25 million addresses be? Decorating your apartment? A little light reading before bed?
And I'm sure there's a potentially legitimate use of "bulk-friendly hosting", too. Web pages for my bulk foods business? A place where bulky guys can get clothes?
Nmap is a tool which can be used for good or evil; I use it to check up on my own hosts to make sure my users aren't running anything insecure. Napster, as we've seen, is more ambiguous; it can be used for good, but the bulk of the activity is copyright violation, which is why the courts have taken such a dim view of it.
But bulk e-mail software that comes with millions of addresses and software for spidering sites to get yet more addresses has no purpose but spamming. There's nothing "conceivable" about the evil use here.
One URL there was mangled; here's the right post:
Yes. I I use blcheck for this, with qmail-qfilter to put it right into the SMTP chain, although you can use it with procmail, too. That way users can use their mail clients to decide what to trash and what to keep.
Yes. I I use blcheck for this, with to put it right into the SMTP chain, although you can use it with procmail, too. That way users can use their mail clients to decide what to trash and what to keep.
That's how MAPS should work, by blocking the bad stuff so that RBL users just don't see it. There isn't any need to punish innocent sites who happen to be on the same class C.
Wrong. Media3 is currently the number one ISP for live spam sites accoring spamhaus.org. MAPS has been talking with these guys for months about their various spam-friendly activities. If an ISP keeps allowing spammers in, MAPS should block 'em.
If MAPS successfully got Media3 to shut down the spammer's site, then MAPS WOULD be dealing in
censorship, wouldn't they?
These aren't just people who say that spam should be allowed. They are people who spam to draw traffic to their websites, people who sell spamming software, and people who provide spam-friendly hosts services.
If MAPS blocked people for advocating spam, like, say, the DMA, then they would be censoring. But they don't; they only block people who spam or those who help spammers. Their criterion is based on an activity, not an opinion. That's not censorship as far as I'm concerned.
In fact, MAPS even goes so far as to give links to its various opponents on its web site. Censors? I don't think so.
When MAPS started the RBL, a lot of the spam was direct and obvious, coming straight from the spammer's network and advertising something on the spammer's network. Now, almost all of it is cloaked in a variety of ways; I almost never see a spam that obviously originates from the site that it is pushing.
So if ten years ago highway elephants were a big problem and today people were regularly caught disguising elephants as dump trucks, semis, and Yugos because your program didn't catch that, then you could rightly feel that you had made a difference.
And so it is with MAPS and the RBL.
[...] in all honesty, are you going to tell Peacefire.org to switch providers now because they're using the same service as MarketingMasters?
Yes. Although I support Peacefire's work (and even donated money to them), they should move. And if they want to stick with their spam-friendly ISP, then that's their choice, but my computers will stop talking to theirs. (And I probably won't give them money again, either.)
MAPS has taken the power they have and abused it.
It's not like they're pulling these judgements out of their collective ass or doing something secretive. They have a clear policy on what gets you in. According to a recent press release this ISP got listed for hosting spam-advertised sites. They are also clearly continuing to host sites that sell bulk-mail software and addresses. According to spamhaus.org, Media3 is the largest spam site hoster currently active.
RBL needs to be replaced. The original intention was to keep it as a list of sites that send spam.
I don't know if you've looked closely at any of your spam in the last couple of years, but the the vast majority of it now is from dialups, open relays, and weird foreign hosts. Making a "list of sites that send spam" won't do much good anymore; that's why they have expanded it to include relays and spam support services. As another poster mentioned, you have to follow the money to stop spam.
Still, if you think such a service would be more useful. you're welcome to start one. Note, though, that the only serious RBL competitor, ORBS, was substantially more aggressive than MAPS; I doubt an RBL-minus would be very popular.
---
The point here is not to punish a single spammer site; it's to punish an ISP that's been so badly behaved for so many months that there's nothing left to do but to ostracize them. It's unfortunate that banning an ISP harms their legit customers. (It's also unfortunate that boycotting, say, Microsoft or Starbucks or Nike harms a lot of perfectly nice employees.)
But how else do you suggest that we deal with a rogue ISP?
As with anything else, you should try to do business with reputable companies. These days, this is much easier than before the internet.
With an ISP, the first thing to do is read their AUP and the other agreements that you sign when you get service from them. Next, search for information about them.
With Media3, for example, it's pretty easy to find that they are a known spam-friendly ISP. If you think that's cool, then by all means use them. If not, maybe you should look elsewhere.
When that happens, it's called a "joe job". Generally, they're pretty obvious; people who spend their time doing things like this are usually pretty dim.
Occasionally, it's a real problem telling, in which case it's generally up to the judgement of the ISP, which can go well or go poorly.
Note that the RBL generally only contains recalcitrant spammers; I'm sure if they contacted somebody who said "it wasn't me", gave some reasonable explanation, and then put up a note saying how deplorable spam is, then MAPS would just keep an eye on 'em.
The point of the RBL, as opposed to the DUL or the RSS, let alone ORBS, is to only block those who are known and recalcitrant supports of spam.
The fact that that few spams are caught in the RBL is either a testament to their restraint in listing people or to the success of MAPS of driving spam support services off of the web. Either way, I'm still very glad it exists.
These people offer "25 million free addresses" with the purchase of their bulk software. They have ads for "bulk-friendly" hosting services. This site is all about enabling spammers, bucko.
Sendmail is a piece of software that can be used to spam. The folks at MarketingMasters offer software that is specifically designed for spamming, plus it comes with a bunch of addresses, probably including yours and mine. You see the difference?
This comment was not intended to be flamebait, despite what a moderator seems to think. I mean it as a serious and legitimate critique of the site.
Is this an article, and therefore theoretically objective? If so, it's a pretty poor fit with what I like to see in my news sources.
Is this just the usual news commentary? If so, where's the news, the carefully researched article by a journalist who has been picked by a publication and helped by an editor?
Or is this an editorial? And if so, is it considered a Slashdot-approved editorial, or just an opinion piece by some guy called "jamie"? And if so, what are his qualifications to speak?
Personally, I like Slashdot best when it posts news articles from other sources, possibly with a wry comment or two, and then lets us comment on them. Journalism is a tricky thing, and I'm generally not impressed when Slashdot tries it themselves. That's why I've turned off display of the Jon Katz articles, for example.
If they think this is a news article or an opinion piece that's worth publishing, then they should submit it to someplace like Salon or ZDNet or Wired, rather then using the power of Slashdot to push their own articles like this. They might discover that professional journalists and experienced editors at real news sites would have some suggestions that they missed. And once they get it accepted elsewhere, then they should by all means post it back here for discussion.
For just such reasons, they already have three different lists:
I guess you're asking them to split the RBL into two or three more parts. I personally don't see the need for this; in my eyes supporting spammers is as bad as being a spammer. But opinions differ, and if enough people ask for it I'm sure they'll add those lists (as they did with the DUL and RSS lists). Have you asked them yet?
Here in California, you can ask the phone company to set things up so that anybody trying to call anonymously is automatically rejected. In a year, this has caused only one problem with a legit caller, but I get telemarketing calls maybe once a week now.
Hooray for voluntary blocking! I wish I could get a service like MAPS for my telephone or my fax machine. Hell, I wish I could just block all phone calls from Florida; I don't have any friends there, and about half of the junk faxes I trace back come from there.
They are blocking an ISP who is hosting a spamware site and is therefore spam-friendly.
It is true that this ISP has other web servers, but how can you block an ISP without blocking their IP addresses?
As a guy who donated money to Peacefire, I'm disappointed that they're using a spam-friendly ISP. Hopefully they'll move to a more respectable service shortly, and they won't have these problems.
MAPS isn't "hiding behind" free association. All they do is publish a list; other people decide whether or not to use the list.
If indeed many people feel that MAPS is too extreme, then competitors will indeed appear. But to date, the only serious competitor I've seen is ORBS, which is more extreme than MAPS.
I agree that there is some collateral damage, but that strikes me as necessary. I use the RBL because I don't want to talk to spammers or anybody who supports them. This includes the ISP who is hosting the spammer software site. How could you block an ISP but not block its IP addresses?
Punishing innocent sites by mere association in this case is a cure worse than the disease.
The goal is not to punish the innocent sites; it's to refuse to trade packets with ISPs who support spam. If you want to show your support of such ISPs by putting your web servers there, go ahead. But I reserve the right to tell my computers not to talk to yours.
IPv4 addresses are not so plentifully available that one can simply block all questionable netblocks and expect there to be any unblocked addresses left for the good guys to reside in.
Well apparently one can do such a thing, as the RBL has been going for quite a while. And last I looked, major ISPs were not turning away new customers because they have run out of IP addresses.
Who are these "many" ISPs that create black-hole routes based on MAPS RBL?
I know that some ISPs block RBL-listed machines talking on or through their networks, but I've never seen a credible case of an ISP advertising bogus routes to RBL-listed sites.
He had no "press time"; this is the web fer chrissakes. And there's nothing urgent about this story; it'll be just as relevant next week as now.
If he did contact MAPS three months ago and still hasn't heard back, then he should have said so. Journalists often write things like, "despite repeated attempts to reach Paul Vixie and other MAPS spokespeople over the last three weeks, this reporter's calls were not returned."
If you're willing to do business with a company that supports spammers, then I don't want my boxes to talk to your boxes. But that's my choice to make, isn't it?
I also boycott a couple of companies whose business practices I don't like. Does this hurt their suppliers and their employees? Yes. Do I like that? No. But it's a price I'm willing to pay to put pressure on people who do things that I consider bad for society.
Sorry, my experience here comes from doing technical work for a medical advertising agency; their most basic stuff was four-color cards, going on to ridiculous 5- or 6-color brochures, which could be many dollars each. I didn't realize you could get a good mailer printed for so much less.
:-)
And of course, if you value your time at zero, then things look a lot cheaper. Wanna do some mailers for me, too?
The only reason you see his name on that stuff is that he wrote useful code back at the dawn of time, stuff which has survived to this day.
Almost any code from ten or fifteen years ago was less paranoid than modern code; it was written for a simpler, more trusting world. It wasn't all that long ago that open relays became a problem, for example.
So don't knock him too much; it's just that most of the code that started back then wasn't even good enough to be in use today. And as a recent Slashdot article shows, he's well aware that a ground-up rewrite is needed to fix the problem.
You shouldn't tar MAPS with the ORBS brush. For the last year or so, all of my mail gets extra headers added based on which of the lists (ORBS, MAPS RBL, MAPS RSS, MAPS DUL) it matches.
I frequently find that ORBS would block mail I'd like to receive, whereas the MAPS RBL and RSS never do, and the DUL would only rarely. For a normal ISP, I'd guess that ORBS would be a nightmare, but the RBL would be pretty much OK.
Of course, for me, I keep all my spam so I can feed it to SpamCop.
Note that a lot of people use the RBL in just that way. For my users, I have it set up so that headers are added to each message indicating which lists (ORBS, MAPS RBL, MAPS DUL, MAPS RSS) the message matches. That way they can filter it as they please.
But we're considering moving to the more extreme version, where all traffic gets dropped. Why? Because the people on the RBL are not good neighbors, and we don't want to have anything to do with them. I don't want to hear from a spammer; neither do I want spam-friendly ISPs using the stuff I offer to the world.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is analogous to the ancient greek concept of ostracism.