Re: [Marxism] Political censorship via spam filtering

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Einde O'Callaghan" <einde@xxxxxx>

> I think it's necessary to read the whole article before passing judgement
> since it's based on discussions with senior managers of his ISP. I've
> hterefore taken the liberty of including it below

I did read it completely.

I undersign the statement by Les. If you want my job, you can have it. 10
straight hours of configuring Exchange servers with spam filters, which is a
typical day for me.

Now, my initial objection and skepticism to the email was based upon the
"blacklist" argument, illustrated by this quote:

"They confirmed that not only Spam Manager and AOL, but other ISP spam
filters world-wide, use the same black list, which is US-based."

Not only is this stament not true, but I doubt the ISP told the person the
statement. If they did, they probably have no idea what they are talking
about or worse, they lied on purpose:

Let me lead you on a little known secret... IS/IT is such a wide field, that
most people within it are not all encompassing possesors of knowledge. I
myself are an IS/Architect guy, but making my living doing
organizational/network IT. I am not a programmer (even if I do read code)
and I am not a hardware person (even if I can install most hardware and
configure its CP or OS).

Yet the whole business was built in the 1990s upon the ignorance and
wide-eyed admiration of people (I made a ton of money at the time based on
this, most went into sex, drugs, rock n roll and the revolution). In the ISP
business, this mentality is still pervasive.

Techs, and even Managers, will say anything to get you of their backs, in
particular using the percived "prestige" of saying they have the pressumably
ultra-secure blacklist as A-fucking-O-fucking-L. Sometimes these "white
lies" blow in thier face, but most of the time they work, so there is no
reason to modify behaivior.

This was my initial impression, but there is more:

I have used and installed "Spam Manager" as it is a cheap, stable commercial
solution, and hence has appeal in the non-profit sector (bulk of my surplus
eaters). It DOES NOT do server-side text bounces, just DNS Blacklisting
(there is a client-side SM)

SM uses the DNSBL community-run DNS blacklisting systems for their
blacklists.

In their website, SM developer "Eon Technologies" <http://www.eontech.com/>
provides these links for explanation of the DNSBL community:

http://ordb.org/faq

http://www.spamhaus.org

http://pk.greens.org/about/spamstuff.html

http://spam.abuse.net

Notice how they link a "Greens" site.

In other words, there is no sinister government black list, but a community
supported black list, to which even I contribute with some regularity. As
Les mentioned, *monitoring* is what most states have concentrated their
efforts in, including this list, not locking out.

Now, that I know of, NO ISP outside of the few countries with laws regarding
this (ie Germany, Singapore, China, etc) has server-side text filtering of
spam or non-bouncing blocking. And most, including AOL, provide at least
limited bounceback to banned domains and IPs.

Even Hotmail and Yahoo have "Junk Mail" folders, not automatic deletion. My
own email host basically tags email it feels is spam with "[spam]" in the
subject line, which my filters route towards a folder were I can evaluate if
they are indeed spam.

Most of the problems generated by Spam Blockers are due to people not being
careful with how they delete email (ie use the "junk" button instead of the
"delete" one) or don't read the documentation regarding their anti-spam
solution (ie, people who dont bother to add the emails or mailinglists to
their address books).

For some reason I can't understand, people keep on wanting computers to not
have any learning edge while continually adding new features such as spam
blockers. If people treated cars like they treat computers, we would have
double the car deaths...

Now, I also join with Les. The minute I see a concerted effort to ban
political speech in the internet email system (and by nature I will see this
before a lot of people do), I would raise the voice of alarm. It is a very
real possibility. Likewise, if a localized effort by an individual ISP
arrises, I will join the effort to make them pay.

But conspiracy, well, we can talk about it over beers...

sks



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