[brlug-general] Microsoft Admits to and Defends Political Censorship of Email.

[willhill]

That's it?  Two people sided with spamcop four years ago.  That's all the 
combined search might of Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and their apologists can dig 
up on short notice?  Somehow, I'm not convinced that truthout is a notorious 
spammer.  Nor does this explain the initial lockstep behavior of Yahoo and 
AOL.

There have been lots of articles about political spam, none of which mentions 
truthout.

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/11/20/political_spam/
http://spamvertized.org/  (nothing on whole site)
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1975260,00.asp
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-10-31-election-spam_x.htm
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,115379-page,1/article.html

The recent block looks more like a case of first they ignore you, then they 
laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.  Until recently, the reports 
about truthout have been few but mostly favorable.  Searching for "political 
spam truthout" I found links like this:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006654.html
"Both MoveOn and truthout are very good about managing their lists so that one 
can sub and unsub and resub at will. This makes them Not Spammers."

but not much else.  I would expect much more if there really was a problem.  
Political blogs are a dime for a dozen billion, and bloggers hate spam with a 
passion.  With 4 million monthly readers and stories that often scoop 
mainstream media, it looks like the powers that be have taken notice and  
fighting.  

Finding truth will be harder as the story breaks and the spin really starts.  

Once again, I say that freedom to do what you want with bandwith you pay for 
is the only viable solution.  Port blocks are the primary censorship that 
makes secondary monkey business like this possible.  The political opinions 
and truth of those opinions are irelevant side issues.  The real issue is 
internet and software freedom.


On Friday 21 September 2007 11:30 am, Tim Fournet wrote:
> This is my last posting on this issue. I rarely take Microsoft's side,
> but I still believe they are right in this case.