From: "Tim" <ignored_mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Tim:
Blocking an entire country's TLD *is* a racist act.
Res:
and now from your previous childish rant,
Trying to win an argument by claiming your opponent is being childish
because they won't cave into your view, is a rather poor way at trying
to win it. What I see as childish, here, is you trying to justify
racist-like behaviour and claiming that it isn't.
i am also now a racist because I block entire ISP domains
Yes, that's the very definition of being prejudicial, since you want to
be pedantic about what YOU think the term racist means. Whether you
want to be pedantic about "racist" being only a specific race is being
wet. There isn't a "countryist" similar term. If you're prejudiced
against an entire country, that's seen as a racist act by those in that
country. Likewise, is advocating that response. Whether that be Korea,
Russia, or any other commonly believed by be spam source. If you
blocked the whole of my country, I'd regard it the same way, whether I
was Black, Caucasian, Yellow, or whatever. And you'll find that most
citizens of any country will feel similarly.
Tim, are you a spammer? maybe you are (since having such a hissy fit)
one of the ones i justifiably block access to, who knows because im
not about to tell you what network I manage, but those who furiously
argue the point of black lists, tend to be.
No, I'm not. And I'd be first in line buying $5 a punch tickets to beat
up a spammer. Quite frankly, if I were, this would be the least of my
worries, there's a plethora of ways to circumvent that lame attempt at
dealing with spam. But it's next to impossible to do legit internet
activity when some idiot sabotages the internet by making certain top
level domains unworkable.
Incompetent admins, who cannot manage spam properly, and resort to carte
blanche blocking, ARE another problem in themselves. Likewise for any
other seriously stupid ideas they implement about how to tell apart spam
from non-spam. It takes a hell of a good two-by-four whacking over
their head to make them realise that what they do is NOT a good
solution, it's clear that you need quite a lot more. Yes, the very
notion of black lists is flawed, the implementation of them even more
so.
You are STILL attacking the wrong thing, Tim. There are properties
of spam that are worth blocking over. Chiefly these are properties
that appear when you apply greylisting. "<I don't know you so I'm
going to pretend> I am busy, please try again in XX minutes." Few
spammers retry. Another good indicator is "not sent to anybody at
this address." (That properly requires the envelope.) Once these
really obvious spams are blocked outright, ideally not processed,
you mark the rest as ham or spam based on collections of message
characteristics. Then you feed them on to the user appropriately
marked. Perhaps you place "particularly spammy" email into a
separate email feed, a spam feed. But in either case the addressee
gets the email and disposes of it herself.
As it turns out for me and many other people "China" is a very good
indicator of "It's not for me." Many other countries are even more
assuredly not for me. And as it turns out any language other than
English is wasted on me. (I have remarkably little facility with
languages other than English and computer languages. A wee touch of
lysdexia sees to that.) So I mark "not English" as spam with a high
score so I don't even bother to look at it. In that regard I am
not a racist, languageist, or anything other than pragmatist. If I
can't read it why bother to try or to risk malware in the email?
Automatically discarding email from a given nation or region of the
world can be foolish. It can also be quite practical if you never
get email from those countries that is legitimate and have no
expectation whatsoever that this will change. (I note that mailing
lists like this one have people from some amazing places. And these
people often provide help in remarkably enviable English. So I fall
back to "it's likely to be foolish." Calling it racist due to a
coincidence of geography is rather revealing of your own prejudices,
isn't it?
{^_^}
