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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: EFF whitepaper
on Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 01:06:09PM -0800, Tom (UnitedLayer) wrote: > On Mon, 15 Nov 2004, Steven Champeon wrote: > > John Gilmore runs a well-known open relay at toad.com, and for some > > reason thinks that free, anonymous speech is important enough to let > > spammers drown it out through sheer volume. > > Someone famous said something about paying a high price for free speech, I > think this perhaps would fall under that category. I know - I too, pay a high price to maintain my own mail servers. > Mr Gilmore spends quite a bit of time tending to his mail server to ensure > that spammers do not abuse it. Congrats. So do I. > Any spammer who spends time pumping mail through his server is going > to realize quite quickly that its not worth their time. Its a very old > slow machine on a T1 with other intentional slowdowns added to the > MTA, and some amount of spam filtering. I would say it would have a > hard time passing more than 1 message a minute. Great. And this affects those of us with not-so-old, not-so-slow machines how? The bottom line is that Gilmore, and the EFF, have taken a very soft stance on spam, believing it to be less important than "free speech" or "anonymous speech". Oh, well. I believe that the EFF already has all the support it needs, and so I don't contribute to their efforts to make my life more difficult. > I would think that most spammers would give up and go abuse an open proxy > somewhere, they're much more plentiful and less cluefully tended. Oh, probably. Or one of the million-host proxy botnets. Or another open proxy. Or another open relay. Or a hacked webmail server, etc. etc. etc. The existence of other more preferable alternatives doesn't obviate the fact that the EFF has not been tough enough on spam. http://www.eff.org/Spam_cybersquatting_abuse/Spam/position_on_junk_email.php Wow. So, no antispam measure with any possibility of blocking legitimate mail should be adopted. In other words, we should just go back to 1993? http://eff.org/wp/?f=SpamCollateralDamage.html Wow. So, any collateral damage is unacceptable? Even when the source of the so-called "legitimate" mail is a spammer, pure and simple, with bad ideas about what constitutes mailing list management? Granted, they're "working with others" to "define" things that most of us have known about for years. Gee, thanks, guys. Why not spend some time using the best practices already written up? Hell, does the EFF even do subscription confirmations yet? Or do they assume that anyone capable of filling out a Web form is incapable of lying or mistyping their email address? RFC2505 is five years old and a BCP now. Its first admonition is to put an end to unauthorized relaying. Second is to provide trace information in Received: headers. Oops! Both essentially outlaw anonymous speech via email. In a nutshell, email requires accountability. The EFF apparently thinks that is too high a price to ask for email. -- join us! http://hesketh.com/about/careers/web_designer.html join us! hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2554 w: http://hesketh.com join us! http://hesketh.com/about/careers/account_manager.html join us!
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