John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > It was hard to get from paragraph to paragraph without finding > approving mentions of blacklists. I am a victim of many such > blacklists. May Amir never appear on one, or his unthinking > acceptance of blacklisting might change.
I'm afraid that I use blacklists. My servers get about 30,000 spams and virii directed at me (that is me, Perry Metzger, personally) every night that are blocked by blacklists. I would be unable to write you this email if I didn't use blacklists, because I'd have no working email at all. (To be fair, the onslaught has diminished recently -- I'm now down to perhaps 20k a night. There is no functional difference.) I've also been blacklisted myself, and I've had to deal with it. I understand your position, but you should understand that for many of us spam, virus spew, etc. is not merely an annoyance but has the ability to literally make it impossible to use email. Using a combination of blacklists and other mechanisms, I get the spam levels down to the point where they are merely an annoyance, but without them I'd be incapable of receiving email any longer. An analogy I like to use here is that while your neighbor using a flashlight in the night might be an "annoyance", and turning on floodlights in the night might be a "substantial annoyance", bathing your house in hundreds of megawatts of light day and night goes beyond mere "annoyance" and eliminates your ability to enjoy the use of your property. A few unwanted emails are a mere annoyance, but at the levels I've reached, they go beyond annoyance. As much as I dislike blacklists etc., I couldn't operate without them so I use them. I wish I lived in a world where you couldn't just go out and lease the use of 8000 zombie machines on the internet pre-broken into by Ukrainian gangsters for your spamming pleasure, where people couldn't send me phishing emails without being caught and punished for fraud, etc. -- in short where folks who do things that even libertarians dislike were punished. However, we don't live in an ideal world -- we live in a world where a government monopoly runs law enforcement and that law enforcement is nigh well worthless. I can't just buy the other government's law enforcement since there is none, so I do what I can on my own to make my machines livable. In a better world maybe we won't need firewalls, policies where cable modem users have port 25 blocked unless they ask for it to be unblocked, spam blacklists, vast amounts of personnel time and money spent at large organizations worrying about spam, security, etc., but that better world isn't coming any time soon. > His analysis made me think of clinical reviews of experiments done > on human subjects in prison camps -- careful to focus on the facts > while ignoring the obvious moral problems. > > Interspersed were discussions of various kinds of port blocking. The > Internet is too good for people who'd censor other peoples' > communications, whether by port number (application) or by IP address > (person). It saddens me to see many of my friends among that lot. John, I admire you for living a life without compromises. However, I cannot afford such a life. As it stands, I wouldn't blame the people who block ports. Most of them, like me, are just trying to keep using the internet as best as they can. I would blame the criminals. I don't mean the people who merely send out unsolicited email from machines they themselves own that doesn't pretend to come from other people. I mean the people who systematically break in to thousands of computers (surely you don't believe breaking in to someone's computer to gain its use against the will of the owner is okay) so they can send out their notes to a few million people claiming to be their bank and directing them to yet another machine they've broken in to where they collect the passwords of the victims. I would also blame the law enforcement agencies who essentially do nothing to these people. Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
