--On Saturday, March 29, 2008 8:58 AM +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
However you know that it's a mortal sin when you end up on several blacklists (and rightly so!) for having sent backscatter to innocent bystanders.
Oh, brother! Look up "vigilante", and meditate on the definition until you realize that those are the words of a vigilante.
Is Wikipedia's definition acceptable?
A vigilante is a person who ignores due process of law and enacts his own form of justice when they deem the response of the authorities to be insufficient.
I see nothing wrong with that. Where I live, self-defense is acceptable.
Note that black lists don't block anything. They just report. It's like a web page that lists some group that the author thinks meets some criteria.
Others can then use the black lists they trust to block unwanted traffic. I hardly consider either action to be unreasonable.
[...] blacklisting some poor Ubuntu user, who just installs Mailman and creates a few lists because it says on the homepage that it tries to conform to the RFCs on mailing lists and provides some antispam features, and expects that it will therefore DTRT. [...] may be necessary, there's no way it's right.
Is it wrong for me to choose to not accept his traffic? Does the hypothetical "poor Ubuntu user" have a right to set policy on my server?