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Unplug the Internet

Year of 21 January, 2006

And turn off the lights.


It's getting to the point where the Internet is no longer usable. That sounds like the most redundant statement since Sybil Fawlty's heydays. But it's true - more so today than ever before. Things are rapidly approaching the point where John Walker finds himself now: deciding to just disconnect as so many of his friends already have done.

Electronic mail is the main killer app out there but it's working worse than ever before, and for the first time in the history of both the web and the Internet mail is not getting through.

BellSouth in the US simply drop messages they don't want to send. They don't tell people their mail is rejected - they just eat it up and say nothing.

More and more spam filter systems are doing the unbelievable in trying to stop spam and the unwitting users see the lack of spam in their inboxes and figure things are all right. They never see the hundreds of false positives that are destroyed - they never see the mail they should have received.

More and more spam filters simply destroy Bcc mail. Bcc is a safety measure, meant to safeguard the anonymity of people. Stalkers have used mail addresses to hunt and kill people. Yes they have. Yet this simple safeguard is being thwarted by stupid spam filters and clients have no clue what is going on.

Not long ago Verizon just dumped all mail coming from IPs in eastern European countries. All of it. Several ISPs today are using the horrible Death2Spam system which really takes the cake in terms of stupidity. Mail is being destroyed all over the place and the dumb customers see only that their inboxes are relatively free from spam.

Tests conducted with Death2Spam show that their current algorithms include destroying all mail with a URL - what the URL is doesn't matter: simply putting a URL into a message going through Death2Spam means the message won't arrive.

This is the zenith of stupidity.

[Editor's note: Death2Spam deny their software does any of this but the facts can't be debated: clients setting up filters on outbound traffic are able to silently 'eat' anything they want, thanks to this product. Emitting hot air about 'sophisticated Bayesian filter algorithms' in this context is, if possible, the new zenith of stupidity. And if not, then presuming they can intimidate this site - or anyone - into silence is.]

And what is the cause of all this? Why spam of course. And how does this spam situation get so out of hand? Why Microsoft of course.

Over 90% of all Windows PCs are today infected with trojans that absolutely love to hijack boxes and send out hundreds of thousands of spam messages at their generals' behest. The people running these boxes should be shot. The idiot selling this, Bill Gates himself, should be shot. These people are without redeeming characteristics.

Almost everyone today runs off a DHCP IP. This means their IP every time they connect is going to be different. This means that the dumbass spam filters are going to block entire IP ranges if too much spam comes through over them. But it's not a single user or even specific users - it's just a statistic and it can hit in any area of the planet as well as it can hit in any other.

There's no method to this madness; there are just products to sell and killings to make. Competence is on the same level as the creators of the Sony DRM rootkit. They are idiots altogether, every last one.

You can't block an entire DHCP range for spam. You can't shut down the Internet in an attempt to stop spam. You can however start telling people to abandon Windows.

And you can start whipping them with greasy wet fish until they do something about it.

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