Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Wed, Mar 17, 2004 at 11:27:39PM -0500, Tanner Lovelace wrote:
> Steven Champeon said the following on 3/17/04 6:05 PM:
> 
> >You don't deal with SPEWS. SPEWS deals with you. Nobody knows who SPEWS
> >is, either, FWIW. Basically, you need to find another provider if they're
> >too dumb or too slow or too greedy to keep spammers off their network.
> 
> You know, it's attitudes like this that confirm my opinion of blacklists
> and people who support them.  This is irresponsible in the extreme and
> people who use this blacklist are nothing more than lazy idiots who
> can't be bothered to manage their own spam filters.

Well, I'm sorry to have to burst your bubble, Tanner, but I don't think I
qualify as a lazy idiot who can't be bothered to manage my own spam filters.
And I use SPEWS level one as an ipchains/iptables filter.
 
> >Who was the spammer? What's the listing? Which level are they on - one
> >or two?
> 
> Who cares!  They're gone.  Do you cut down an entire forest
> because one tree is sick?  No, but that's exactly what SPEWS does.

Actually, yes, some do. You certainly cull entire herds because one cow
has BSE. But as has been shown time and again, spam is highly metaphor
resistant, so let's not go there.

Bottom line: we wouldn't have half the spam we get today if more ISPs
refused to provide IPs and co-lo space and bandwidth to the spammers. I
am for any measure that pushes that lesson as hard as it can in their face.

That said, I've had bad experiences with the level 2 listings, which once
included one of our clients, so I don't use them at the ipchains level.

 http://www.spews.org/faq.html (see Q21-22)

As for why they're anonymous, it's also been shown time and again that 
spammers are the scum of the universe, dangerous thugs or brain dead
morons, or both, and it's quite reasonable for anyone running a service
like SPEWS to keep their participation sub rosa.

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