Collins Richey wrote: > On Sat, 06 Sep 2003 11:40:58 -0600 > Andrew Mathews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> And the alternative is? They have to fight an ever escalating battle >> with the spammers, who, by the way, don't seem to give a shit about >> "innocent" users either. They're fighting fire with fire, and >> unfortunately, some people are caught in the middle. But if you're >> blaming the Sysadmins or DNSBL's for your woes, you're blaming the >> wrong people. If the friggin' spammers weren't being the abusive >> assholes that they are, NONE of this would be necessary. It's like >> saying "Don't back that fire truck over my flower bed! I'd rather let >> the fire burn down my house!" Or a dictum from a CEO who has *no* >> concept of what they demand: Monday: "Turn off those filters! I can't >> get mail from Hotmail!" Tuesday: "Why didn't you fix the spam >> problem? Are you ignorant?" Wednesday: "I can't get mail from >> Hotmail again!" Thursday: "Why do I have 100 spam messages again?" >> Friday: "You're incompetent, so I'm firing you." > > What all of us are describing is a more insidious thing. Yes, there > is lots of spam, but inventive mail filters can be devised to filter > much of it to/dev/null. I'm only interested in the little guy: me. > My computer is not infected with anything, and I resent it when one > of the big guys (you in this case, or anyone who subscribes to the > kill anything in a broad range theory) decides to make my life > difficult because I have a superficial resemblance (i.e. similar ip > address) to someone who happens to be a bad guy.
My ISP recently undertook to remove some of our spam by blacklisting certain providers. However, he sent requests to their help desks first to see if they would do anything about it. He only blacklisted those that refused to either answer the queries or do anything about the problem. The result from my point of view has been that 80% of my spam stopped by the end of the week that he was doing this. Some time in the '60's/'70's a (US) Supreme Court Justice, in writing the majority opinion for a landmark case, wrote, "I'd rather turn ten criminals out on the street than jail one innocent man." Unfortunately, in today's sociological climate (in the US) he has turned ten murderers out on the street, each of whom has gone on murdering, and as a result he has condemned ten innocent people to death and still has the murderers on the street. For my money, I'd rather see the innocent guy in jail and the murderers off the street. Actually, I'd rather see the murderers buried (alive or dead, I don't care) and the innocents still on the street. However, as all this applies to our spam problem (yes, it is relevant), how much spam are you willing to accept? We had one person already say he'd rather cut 80% of his spam, even if it meant losing some legitimate traffic. Perhaps if the penalty for spamming was severe enough it would reduce the threat. Say, incarceration for 10-20 years for knowingly participating, loss of internet access privileges for 2 years for unknowingly participating (with that elevating to a knowing participation if you abused the loss and/or got "used" again). Yeah, throw them in the pen with the "real" crackers! Of course, this means I'd better go study my security stuff a bit more... Tom :-}) Thomas A. Condon Plain Text Emails Don't Pass Viruses! _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
