"Bernie Pannell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 11:48 PM, Scott Sinclair <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> And seeming you brought up blacklists, and what it seems, rfc-ignorant.org,
>> maybe you would like to check out these, if you are going with amnet
>> http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/tools/lookup.php?domain=amnet.com.au
>
> I'm a little confused, the lookup on amnet returns /almost/ identical
> results to my ISP aanet:
>
> http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/tools/lookup.php?domain=amnet.com.au&full=1
> http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/tools/lookup.php?domain=aanet.com.au&full=1
>
> Hmm, the lookup on iinet shows almost identical entries too:
> http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/tools/lookup.php?domain=iinet.com.au&full=1
>
> What does this mean?
Simple: The RFC-ignorant people have strong opinions about what the
appropriate information available through whois should be.
Australia, by policy, did not include all the information they wanted in
whois, so they blacklisted .au -- everything in Australia -- for that
reason, in their "whois is not RFC compliant" blacklist.
iinet has only whois entries, which are not (in my opinion) particularly
valid complaints. The other two have missing abuse and/or postmaster
email addresses, which are a much more valid complaints.
Overall, the RFC-ignorant blacklists are (in my opinion) of limited
value: they tend to paint a *hugely* broad brush in many cases, which
limits use.
While I also have some sympathy for the "broken windows" theory of crime
prevention, which is more or less the same theory that they blacklist
RFC violations on[1], it is looking more shaky as time goes by[2] -- and
the connection between the social behaviour in the physical world and on
the Internet is certainly not clear.
I, personally, would not use any of their lists as indicative of
anything significant in terms of spam problems, trusting more to
"reactive" lists such as the Spamhaus services.
Regards,
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] The whois example is a case where I think they are mistaken, the
postmaster and abuse cases much less so.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
