willhill wrote:
Scott, what you said is both insulting and wrong. I understand the issues but don't agree with you. It is a matter of principles and I'm not ashamed of that. My intent was not to insult you. I feel that this list is a discussion of technical issues focused on using Linux. I have deliberately and specifically avoided "moral" or other non-technical aspects. I am dealing with the situation as it is, not as it should be. And at least there are viable technical workarounds, things you can do with your Linux machine. That said, what Cox does is no different from pretty much any other email vendor, including Google. They scan both header and body content. The only way to stop that with technology is to encrypt the body of the email. I have always thought that, at best, outbound port 25 blocking and email scanning by providers were at best a bandaid to the spam and virus problem. Solving it with technology involves changing how email on the internet works at a very fundamental level. Scanning and blocking are, technologically, relatively effective right now. As Shannon points out, the average user is happy by and large. They see the results in their Inbox and Junk boxes. But that behavior for the provider is a slippery slope. They don't even offer the option of an unfettered pipe. Of course there's no demand for it, because people don't even recognize the costs vs benefits tradeoff. And, providers could offer an unfettered pipe and still prevent nefarious activity. The average user don't grasp that there is a problem here. The ISPs are on a slippery slope. They basically accepted blame for a problem that was not their fault.(1) And now they've slid further into user content regulation by filtering bittorrent and (reportedly) ftp transfers. Even actively altering packets rather than just preventing their transport. They've been doing the RIAA's dirty work for years, effectively regulating content residing on their customers' hard drives. And now they want immunity from lawsuits so they can slurp up content and forward it to the US government for monitoring. My inclination is to believe that this is more stupidity and taking the easy way out on the part of the morons at the top of these companies rather than malicious intent. They don't understand the implications what they are doing -- technically or morally. Of course, neither does the US government or the legal system at this point. So we work around with technology. I don't think they ISPs care a whit that you want to run a local mailserver and that's not what they are trying to prevent with their filtering and blocking. They want to make $ and not lose customers. If they don't filter and email doesn't get delivered because people stop accepting incoming mail from your ISP, customers will leave. So they start blocking and filtering because they want to make $. It's a coarse methodology and it has other ramifications that both you and I have already mentioned but they either don't care or simply don't get it. I think that for the most part, it's more ignorance than a willful attack on individual liberty. The results are the same regardless of motivation. And why do email vendors not ship their products with encryption turned on by default? Imagine a user starts up thunderbird for the first time and adds his account. As part of the new account wizard, it generates or imports keys and uploads them to keyservers. When you send a user a message, it checks the keyserver. If the key is not there, it doesn't encrypt and perhaps warns the user. The US government used to treat strong encryption as munitions and transfer of that technology to non-US citizens was considered an illegal arms shipment and a federal crime. This was rescinded by an executive order by the Clinton administration. But that damage was long done so the idea of encrypting all in-transit data by default is pretty much dead. We send everything in the clear. IPv6 could change that(4), but we're a long way from an all IPv6 internet.... (1) In my opinion it's the fault of the spammers and virus writers first and foremost. It's also partly the fault of the OS vendor and the user. The latter needs some education though (2) http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hJKgeE0Z-SivATjok-utYBdh9wDwD8UFTUR81 (3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography and http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo_crypt_9611_memo.htm - the 1996 order removing most export controls (4) "IPsec is a mandatory part of IPv6 (mandatory to implement, not mandatory to use), and is optional for use with IPv4." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPsec . (5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunks Your dismissal of principles is more disturbing than your insult. Technology use should be guided by principles rather than the converse. The whole point of the exercise is to overcome limitations and improve the world for people. All of us must exercise moral judgment or we can be used as tools and do things we should be ashamed of.I think I've got both technical and moral issues right on this one. From a technical perspective, dumb networks are more efficient than "smart" ones. >From a moral perspective, censorship is wrong and censorship to support monopoly software shortcomings is doing something wrong for the sake of something bad. You can argue that this is the way things are but that only proves that things are not as they should be. There's no difference between the bits I'm uploading here in this email and the same bits sent by my own mail or web server. It's wrong for Cox to keep me from running either and that's one aim of their goofey email filter. The problem you have pointed out is not caused by people like me, it's caused by an OS that's so easy to abuse that it's responsible for the majority of the world's spam. As moral implementers of technology, we owe it to people to recommend software that works and eliminate software that creates problems. Doing otherwise only makes things harder. Networks, like software, are better when they don't have owners. Information is always better when you can get it from the source. Network owners have a tendency to get in the way and exploit their position. The most egregious example of that is state controlled, broadcast media. The more control we allow network owners to exert, the less good networks will do. On Tuesday 29 January 2008 11:22 pm, Scott Harney wrote: |
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