More censorware stupidity, from the anti-spam camp

[Declan McCullagh]

On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 01:07:29PM -0700, Stanton McCandlish wrote:
> If/when MAPS dies, this problem is going to *explode*.  Hardly anyone
> used ORBS and this has already caused a lot of people severe headaches
> that still continue.  But, maybe the problem will be so big if/when
> that happens that blacklists will largely be simply abandoned.

In principle I'm not sure if this is a terribly difficult problem to
solve. If the costs to subscribing to antispamlists are still not as
great as the (growing) problem of spam, admins will still want a
service and someone will probably create it.

Given sufficient demand of this sort, a standard interface may well
emerge. This would allow sites to subscribe to a antispamlist
maintainer uber-service that would selectively add and drop
MAPS/ORBS/etc. as they become more and less useful. This may be a pay
service. It would allow ISPs and individual users not to worry about
what happens if one service dies; within a few moments, one hopes, the
maintainer service would remove it. Queries would go to the maintainer
service, not the individual antispamlists.

The maintainer service could also provide the useful feature of a
standard interface; give it an IP address and it would query the
antispamlist vendors using their individual different protocols.

> NB: I'm not against individual spam filtering - I do it agressively
> myself, and subscribe to several group-maintained *invidual-use*
> blacklists that I've chosen to trust (more or less).  I'm referring to
> ISP-level "stealth blocking", esp. that based on the technical
> capabilities of the sending site, rather than said site being a known
> spam house.

Obviously ISPs see a benefit to using antispamlists. Just arguing
against them isn't very persuasive; it doesn't give them a way to solve
their growing spam problem.

If EFF is concerned about this policy area (and I recognize it may be
just your personal opinion), it may want to provide the useful service
of recommending ways to improve the protocols and what marketing
flacks call "best practices."

If people begin to care about what you call stealth blocking, ISPs
will probably begin to disclose it. Perhaps an ISP trade association
will recommend a link on the home page. Then you could take your
business to an ISP, if you care enough, that does not subscribe to
antispamlists -- as long as you're willing to pay more because of the
additional bandwidth, storage, and personnel costs imposed by the
higher volume of spam.

-Declan