Hello world,
PS: I see this as an emergency, hence the caps lock on my subject.
A turn of events has gotten me thorougly surprised. It makes me think that the
world economy has gotten so bad that even in those parts of the world where
we wouldn't imagine that these kind of things would happen are no more exempt.
I see some guys in the US have found a brilliant way to extort money from the
Internet.
I am talking about a situation where people now have to pay services like
orbz.org, and such like to have their address(blocks) removed from the blacklist
databases. I am not specifically talking about orbz.org but I only use it as
an example.
The new kid on the block (yes, I hadn't heard about them before) blacklists
a whole IP block just because one client installed M$ Winblows 2000 with
its dreaded SMTPSVC and was used by some geek to relay. Well I am talking
about
http://www.mailabusedatabase.com/ !! I think a bunch of morons are
behind this, hoping that money can be made so easily. I call them morons
because they do not weigh the net effect of their scheme.
I believe I am right in saying that everyone having clients numbering
about 1k will have this open relay problem. What with clients installing
all sorts of OSes with built-in MTA, while not even knowing a thing
about open relaying??
As I speak, I have my 62.8.64.0/24 blacklisted by them just because one
of my clients with M$ 2000 Server was abused. Very short-sighted IMHO.
But now they say I _MUST_ pay them US$ 25 before they can remove the block
from the blacklist. Initially when I got the mail I thought it's a prank
but when I checked their website I found they actually *demand* that I
pay them.
I guess I am ranting but I am imagining a situation where all such services
will be asking admins of blacklisted blocks to pay to be removed from the
blacklist. Of course people (me in particular) will NOT pay.
The end result is a crippled Internet.
What is the world's stand on this???
-Wash
--
Odhiambo Washington <wash@???> "The box said 'Requires
Wananchi Online Ltd. www.wananchi.com Windows 95, NT, or better,'
Tel: 254 2 313985-9 Fax: 254 2 313922 so I installed FreeBSD."
GSM: 254 72 743 223 GSM: 254 733 744 121 This sig is McQ! :-)
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