Subject: Re: [Asrg] Content filter abuse for censorship

From: "Alan DeKok" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 17:29:23 -0400

J C Lawrence <[email-masked]> wrote:
> This is but one of my concerns with RMX.  RMX enforcement defines
> SMTP gatewaying and choke pointing.

  And how, exactly, is this different in principle from MX records?

>  When all mail necessarily passes thru points you control, the
> temptations and rewards for abuse are large.

  Existing corporate firewalls?  ISP's routers?

  <note to self: Why am I even having this conversation?>

  Alan DeKok.
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From: J C Lawrence <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 May 2003 14:04:15 -0700

On Wed, 7 May 2003 13:03:57 -0700  
Phillip Hallam-Baker <Hallam-Baker> wrote:

> There is no difference. I have spent most of my life designing
> technology to break open those closed systems. So I am going to do
> everything I can to warn people of what the consequences are when such
> self-appointed censors intervene.

Excellent, I'll happily, even insistently join you in that campaign and
shout my lungs out.

> Remember that most users of the Internet have absolutely no control
> over their environment in the way that members of the IETF take for
> granted. So they do not have the ability to move on.

Quite.  There's a freedom there, but an expensive one.  While there are
market forces, as I've argued already on the list to and with you, too
high a cost or difficulty is equivalent to impossible.  Again, there's a
question of balances.

> If someone joins a cult of their own free will that is fine. But the
> way that these filters are being applied is much closer to the case of
> Adelphia TV which bought out the cable system of LA and then decided
> to drop all the programming that did not meet their fine moral
> principals. Now that Adelphia is bankrupt and the Riggas family is
> facing fraud charges there are many in LA asking whose moral
> principals were at fault.

Fair dinkum and a decent parallel if a bit weak given the current ease
in ISP mobility and SMTP handling (cf Hotmail).  This is but one of my
concerns with RMX.  RMX enforcement defines SMTP gatewaying and choke
pointing.  When all mail necessarily passes thru points you control, the
temptations and rewards for abuse are large.  I've no wish to build
architectures which make such abuses easy or tempting.  

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
[email-masked]               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 13:03:57 -0700

There is no difference. I have spent most of my life designing technology to
break open those closed systems. So I am going to do everything I can to
warn people of what the consequences are when such self-appointed censors
intervene.

I was the person who sold the Clinton-Gore campaign on the Web as a
political tool when there were less than 100 users because I wanted to break
the hold of the Murdoch press on political discourse.

Remember that most users of the Internet have absolutely no control over
their environment in the way that members of the IETF take for granted. So
they do not have the ability to move on.

If someone joins a cult of their own free will that is fine. But the way
that these filters are being applied is much closer to the case of Adelphia
TV which bought out the cable system of LA and then decided to drop all the
programming that did not meet their fine moral principals. Now that Adelphia
is bankrupt and the Riggas family is facing fraud charges there are many in
LA asking whose moral principals were at fault.

> Some religious orders dictate whom their members may and may 
> not consort
> with, what media channels they may receive, etc.  Some members (and
> others) of those orders follows those dictates, others 
> variously stray.
> 
> What's the difference?