Designed In Advance & The Blocked
by Paul McGoldrick
I received a news release in my in-box today (13 March 2006). Not a
very unusual event, and it came from an automated delivery service in what
was the middle of my night; but rather less usual was a correction that
followed a few hours later modifying the production delivery date:
"The XXXXXX is sampling now and is available in full production quantities in December 2006. It is priced at $9.00 per unit in 1,000-piece quantities and is available in two package options…"
Nine months between sampling and production? That, to me, suggests a complete design cycle for a product in my silicon domain using existing IP -- that the company certainly already has. It left me speechless, as I have never seen this happen from any of the mainstream vendors before. What they are sampling now conjures up a lot more questions for the imagination!
I immediately responded to the issuer of the news release but the company is using Spamcop, which has decided that my IP address is a spammer and refused delivery. I double-checked that this was happening and sent an e-mail to someone else at this large corporation. Same thing, I got rejected. So, I wasn't able to get a reaction to my concerns.
Being treated as a spammer is not something new, as a lot of users of CompuServe and telco ISPs like SBC will tell you. But this is the first time I have been declared black by Spamcop -- though I do wish I could respond to all my e-mails with just one blanket message every day.
Most recently the organization I have been having most trouble with is SORBS (the Spam and Open Relay Blocking System) "conceived as an anti-spam project where a daemon would check 'on-the-fly', all servers from which it received email to determine if that email was sent via various types of proxy and open-relay servers. The daemon was not particularly well written and served as a lesson in programming for its original author, Matthew Sullivan."
The operations of this vitriolic operation and its "administrators" (who are vaguely sinister in the way they are described, and the way the word is used) appear to be based in Australia and have taken over, it seems, the designation of offenders for the Asean market ISPs. analogZONE's correspondent in Hong Kong, for example, has had horrendous trouble with e-mails in the last couple of weeks including mails to his own sister!
The way that SORBS gets user attention is first by blocking e-mails from the IP addresses that it believes are spammers (oh, and dynamic IP addresses, by-the-by). Then if the "problem" is not resolved it increases the range of IP addresses blocked. If that escalation doesn't work they widen it again until some systems operator takes notice of all his users' complaints. It is a nasty in-your-face bullying that is, unfortunately, indicative of the worst that some Australians can give.
And in the delisting of an offender -- who these days is most likely a Trojan operating on some innocent person's PC -- SORBS gets downright unpleasant: "…when the spammer is no longer using the address space … the size of the listing will be reduced down to the originally spamming IP addresses free of charge. The affected IPs (the ones used to send the spam) will only be delisted when US$50 is donated to a SORBS nominated charity or good cause. The charities and good causes SORBS approves will not have any connection with any member of the SORBS administrators, either past or present."
Well it's nice to know that the administrators are not going to benefit
financially but this is called blackmail by most people, though at least
it doesn't take nine months to clear your original listing.
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