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Keystone SpamKops

August 16, 2002 by

Earlier this week, my ISP shut off this site, because the site had appeared on a list of “spammers” published by an outfit called SpamCop.

Apparently, this happened because one person, whose identity I was not allowed to learn, had sent SpamCop an accusation saying that he had received an unwanted email message, which I was not allowed to see, that did not come from me but that did mention my web site. On that “evidence” SpamCop declared me guilty of spamming and decreed that my site should be shut down. Never mind that I had never sent a single email message from the site. Never mind that the site was not selling anything.

Naturally, I was not allowed to see the accusation, or to learn who had submitted it, or to rebut it, or even to communicate with an actual human being at SpamCop. You see, they’re not interested in listening to complaints from spammers.

With help from my ISP, I eventually learned that the offending message was sent on a legitimate mailing list, and that the person who had complained was indeed subscribed to that list, and had erroneously reported the message as unsolicited. Ironically, the offending message was sent by someone who liked my site and wanted to recommend it to others. Everybody involved (me, my ISP, the person who filed the complaint, and the author of the message) agreed that the report was an error, and we all told this to SpamCop. Naturally, SpamCop failed to respond and continued to block the site.

Why did my ISP shut me down? According to the ISP, SpamCop’s policy is to put all of the ISP’s accounts on the block list if the ISP does not shut down the accused party’s site.

Note the similarities to the worst type of Stalinist “justice” system: conviction is based on a single anonymous complaint; conviction is based not on anything the accused did but is instead based on favorable comments about him by the “wrong” people; the evidence is withheld from the accused; there is no procedure for challenging erroneous or malicious accusations; and others are punished based on mere proximity to the accused (leading to shunning of the accused, even if he is
clearly innocent).

Note also that the “evidence” against me consisted only of a single unsigned email message which would have been trivial for anyone to forge. Thus SpamCop provides an easy denial of service attack against a web site.

The only bright spot in this picture is that our real justice system allows lawsuits to be filed against guys like SpamCop for libel and/or defamation. My guess is that eventually somebody will do that and put SpamCop out of business.

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We're Back

August 16, 2002 by

Well, we’re back on the air after a three-day interruption of service. The interruption was due to bogosity at SpamCop, which I’ll explain more fully in the next post.

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Fuzzy Language, Fuzzy Thinking

August 10, 2002 by

One of the things I’ve learned in working with lawyers is that the language you use to describe something can powerfully shape your listeners’ ideas about it. Unless you’re very careful, you can fool yourself in the same way.

Many have remarked upon the rhetorical trick of using the word “piracy,” which denotes a type of violent crime long hated and feared – and still too common – to describe a lesser infraction. Calling infringement “piracy” makes it sound worse than it is.

But the use of “piracy” hides yet another rhetorical trick. The meaning of “piracy” is vague and expansive, while the more accurate term “infringement” has a precise and limited meaning. “Piracy” is often used even when no infringement is taking place; in these cases “piracy” really just means “any activity that makes a copyright owner unhappy.”

All right then; you may admit that “piracy” is an inaccurate term. But it is a colorful term, and like it or not, it is in common use. So, you might ask, what’s the problem with using it?

The problem is that fuzzy language leads to fuzzy thinking, and you may be fooling yourself by using fuzzy language. Fortunately, there is an easy way to tell if you’re falling into this trap. Try expressing your ideas using the precise term rather than the fuzzy one (e.g. using “infringement” rather than “piracy”). If your ideas still make sense, then you’re in good shape; but if your ideas sound weak when expressed in this way, then the fuzzy term has clouded your thinking.

This method works, but it’s a hassle to keep applying it to yourself. There is an easier way – use precise language. Don’t say “piracy,” say “infringement.”

[More posts on inaccurate terminology to come.]

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Microsoft Does The Right Thing

August 8, 2002 by

Microsoft has decided not to try using the DMCA to censor a paper by former MIT student Andrew “Bunnie” Huang about security mechanisms in Microsoft’s Xbox videogame console. (See this announcment.) Good for Microsoft! If more companies behave like Microsoft did in this case, the DMCA would do less harm.

Let’s not forget, though, that the DMCA created a situation where Huang essentially had to ask Microsoft’s permission to publish the paper. He had to withhold his paper for a period of time and he had to spend sizable lawyer resources to get what the Constitution is supposed to guarantee him – his right to free speech. The DMCA is still a problem, but Microsoft kept it from being a bigger one.

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Serendipity

August 4, 2002 by

I’ve been reading recently about the history of technology. That history is filled with lessons for policy-makers now. Here is one:

One of the reasons we should be wary about banning technologies is that it’s often very hard to tell what a new technology will be good for. It might take a decade or more for the true significance of a new technology to emerge, and even when we can guess at one application of a technology we’ll probably miss other important ones.

The telegraph is a case in point. When the telegraph was new, it was easy to see how the instantaneous communication it enabled would affect fields such as news gathering and finance. But the telegraph had a surprising number of applications.

Example: The telegraph enabled weather prediction. Previously, all you could do was watch the horizon for storms and wait for old-timers to sniff the wind and say, “Reckon it’ll rain.” With the telegraph, you could find out about current weather conditions in other places, build a weather map, look at the patterns of wind and pressure, and figure out what tomorrow would be like. This had a profound impact on people’s lifestyles, not to mention its benefits for agriculture and for safety.

Every new, general-purpose information technology has unexpected, valuable applications. If we ban such technologies or hamper their development, we’ll never know what we’re missing.

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