On Dec 31, 2014, at 5:16 AM, John Young <j...@pipeline.com> wrote: > http://cryptome.org/2014/12/gilmore-crypto-censored.htm
I would say that I am sorry for this off-topic rant, but if I were sufficiently sorry, I wouldn’t be sending it. I used to be a postmaster for a medium-sized university and worked as a consultant helping small and medium sized organizations set up their email. I’ve even managed to piss off enough spammers to have been targeted for attacks by them. (This is all long ago.) A DNS-based Real Time Blocking List (RBL), like sorbs.net, does not do any censorship or blocking itself. It merely publishes a list of IP addresses based on published criteria. Individual email administrators set up their systems to consult that list and take action as they see fit. So if 209.237.225.253 is listed in SORBS (unless it is listed in error, which can also happen) then it means at least some of the criteria for listing. This can include spam being repeatedly sent from it (with the owner’s consent or otherwise), or hosting pages advertised by spam. Typically an attempt has been made to contact the system or network admin. Now postmas...@example.com may chose to not accept SMTP connections from such parts of the network. Alice is free to send or support spam on her part of the network, and Bob is free to refuse to accept SMTP connections from Alice’s bit of the network. Now some sites and networks offer “bullet proof hosting”. That is, the network admins and hosting providers there simply send abuse reports to /dev/null. As a consequence a great deal of net abuse comes from such portions of the network. A postmaster using SORBs, Bob, is no more censorship than running a firewall is. If Alice thinks that her network is listed incorrectly (does not meet the SORBS listed criteria) there is a process for reporting that to SORBS. If she thinks that the SORBS listing criteria should not be used for blocking SMTP connections in general, then she can contact Bob, who chose to block based on SORBS listing. In this case Bob is the administrator of mail1.piermont.com. If Alice thinks that an exception should be made for her system or email, she can ask Bob to whitelist her otherwise blacklisted net. Cheers, -j _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
