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Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted to politics and technology. Launched in 1994 by Declan McCullagh, the mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of culture, technology, politics, and law. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site.
A federal district court in Massachusetts last month denied a request by an accused spam-friendly ISP for an injunction against the Mail Abuse Prevention System, which maintains a list of "offending" sites: http://mail-abuse.org/pressreleases/2001-01-02.html The reasoning: "There is a serious question whether MAPS's assertion that Media3 is 'spam-friendly' is defamatory because the statement appears to be accurate." The decision is at: http://pub.bna.com/eclr/00cv12524.htm Background on a related lawsuit is: http://www.politechbot.com/p-01281.html Recently I've done some investigation into spam statistics. Contrary to what I wrote in a message here last July, the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List -- at issue in the lawsuit -- is *not* one of the best ways to stop spam. Another service, called the Relay Spam Stopper and also provided by MAPS, is far more effective in practice: http://status.hiwaay.net/spam.shtml Both follow the same principle of a list of "offending" IP addresses that should be quarantined. But RSS is updated more quickly and is semi-automated. RBL is slower: http://www.mail-abuse.org/rss/ Some observers have said this raises censorship concerns; MAPS correctly replies that it's an exercise of private property rights -- a spammer does not have the right to force you to use your computing resources to accept their messages: http://www.mail-abuse.org/rss/rights.html -Declan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if it remains intact. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------