At 09:37 AM 10/15/2008, Lauren Weinstein wrote:
It's not only important that ISP operations, policies, and
performance characteristics actually *be* transparent (which is
unfortunately generally not the case today)
To some extent, this is true. But if an ISP reveals precisely what
it is doing to combat spam, you can bet that the spammers will take
advantage of that information in every conceivable way to pump spam
through to that ISP's users. We allow our users to turn spam
filtering off if they dare, but play our cards close to our vest as
to how we filter. It's necessary.
--Brett Glass
[ Just to be clear, I was not speaking specifically about
transparency related to anti-spam, but rather in regards to a
much broader range of Internet/ISP-related issues. As for spam
(and most other technology areas) in general I find the
"Security Through Obscurity" argument to be usually not very
convincing. However, I do strongly agree that subscribers
should be able to turn off ISP-based spam filtering if they
wish. This is a very important element of basic choice.
-- Lauren Weinstein
NNSquad Moderator ]
