[brlug-general] Alarm! Political Censorship of Email.

[willhill]

If those filters and port blocks did anything to block spam, I'd believe you.  
I can tell you that AOL and Hotmails spam filters are largely ineffective 
because my wife uses one and my mom used to use the other until it became 
unbearable.  You and I both know that the vast majority of spam now comes 
from botnets of home PCs on broadband connections and we also know that spam  
outnumbers legitmate email even after filters.  

The real answer to the botnet problem is OS diversification.  At least one in 
four computers is part of a botnet.  If ISPs really cared, they would not 
still be promoting the monoculture.  

Net neutrality is ultimately an issue of political control.  The ability to 
filter the internet is the ability to filter opinion and it will be used that 
way.  That's not the way the internet is supposed to work and technically  
the filters are bottlenecks that throttle performance.  The example blocking 
is more than Hotmail and AOL.  It's all of the domains controlled by 
Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo and it reeks of government induced collusion.  If 
you want to know what a corporate controlled, government censored internet 
will look like, turn on your TV.  A free internet is cutting into that 
censorship and control and that's the reason the FCC came out against network 
neutrality.  

TruthOut recommends dumping "free" email, but that won't get solve their 
problem.  If AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo all decide to filter TruthOut, they 
will do it at all levels and it will work here just as well as it does in 
China.

On Thursday 20 September 2007 8:14 am, Tim Fournet wrote:
> Also, SMTP servers blocking incoming mail from misconfigured servers,
> and ISPs blocking incoming TCP/25 connections to home IP ranges have
> nothing to do with each other, except for being two separate measures of
> blocking SPAM.