Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Using "Report spam" to censor
My computers host a bunch of mailing lists on political topics. I use Mailman to manage the mailing lists, and it uses Postfix to send and receive. Postfix keeps a queue of messages it hasn't been able to send yet, and sometimes I have to figure out why they're stuck.
This morning I noticed America Online was deferring messages from an internal list for discussing press releases before they go out. Postfix shows the whole message to AOL, and AOL thinks for a second and says "try sending that one later." The actual deferral suggests AOL thinks the message might be spam, but meanwhile AOL is accepting other messages from us. I've seen that a lot this year. One of my users has a list about his antiwar activity and it gets deferred by AOL and Yahoo Mail quite a lot. And other folks who run similar lists tell me they're seeing the same thing.
Here's what seems to be going on. These messages contain keywords, especially URLs, that our political adversaries would prefer we be unable to discuss in email. The one that's stuck right now is about the movement resisting the stolen election and other government outrages in Oaxaca. My user group wants to express solidarity with the people there and they're drafting a press release.
Opposition to that kind of activism is well funded and relentless, and unethical. They get on lists that discuss similar things, and hit that "this is spam" button on AOL's email program. When this happens enough times, AOL's enormous content filter starts to think phrases like "solidarity" and "grassroots democracy" and the URLs of the sites that cover this stuff (indymedia, commondreams, even dailykos and moveon...) are "spam sign." Things seen in spam.
This has been going on for a long time. You'll have a hell of a time discussing women's health issues (breast cancer, yeast infections, contraception, access to abortions...) on those big consumer services without setting off their filters. There are people who don't want those issues discussed. They'd prefer the information not be available. They've learned it's not hard to fool filters that were designed to detect erotica.
What seems to be different now is the "spam sign" threshholds are getting lower. If you want to kill an email forum, you don't have to barge in and flood it with invective any more. You can fool AOL (and Yahoo Mail and Hotmail) into killing it for you.
That's censorship by spam filter. And it's been made possible by the onslaught of spam. People are so desperate to keep their mailboxes usable that they are now willing to accept some false positives in spam filtering. At least on the consumer oriented services where it doesn't hurt your business to lose a legitimate message now and then. The spammers are softening us up, preparing us to give up the public email system for a controlled one.
This morning I noticed America Online was deferring messages from an internal list for discussing press releases before they go out. Postfix shows the whole message to AOL, and AOL thinks for a second and says "try sending that one later." The actual deferral suggests AOL thinks the message might be spam, but meanwhile AOL is accepting other messages from us. I've seen that a lot this year. One of my users has a list about his antiwar activity and it gets deferred by AOL and Yahoo Mail quite a lot. And other folks who run similar lists tell me they're seeing the same thing.
Here's what seems to be going on. These messages contain keywords, especially URLs, that our political adversaries would prefer we be unable to discuss in email. The one that's stuck right now is about the movement resisting the stolen election and other government outrages in Oaxaca. My user group wants to express solidarity with the people there and they're drafting a press release.
Opposition to that kind of activism is well funded and relentless, and unethical. They get on lists that discuss similar things, and hit that "this is spam" button on AOL's email program. When this happens enough times, AOL's enormous content filter starts to think phrases like "solidarity" and "grassroots democracy" and the URLs of the sites that cover this stuff (indymedia, commondreams, even dailykos and moveon...) are "spam sign." Things seen in spam.
It doesn't help things any when well meaning idiots forward these messages to their whole address book, thinking their "action alert" is so "important" that the rules about unsolicited broadcasts don't apply. "Well, they should be interested," they rationalize. "Forward this to all your friends!" No, don't. That's a topic for another post.
This has been going on for a long time. You'll have a hell of a time discussing women's health issues (breast cancer, yeast infections, contraception, access to abortions...) on those big consumer services without setting off their filters. There are people who don't want those issues discussed. They'd prefer the information not be available. They've learned it's not hard to fool filters that were designed to detect erotica.
What seems to be different now is the "spam sign" threshholds are getting lower. If you want to kill an email forum, you don't have to barge in and flood it with invective any more. You can fool AOL (and Yahoo Mail and Hotmail) into killing it for you.
That's censorship by spam filter. And it's been made possible by the onslaught of spam. People are so desperate to keep their mailboxes usable that they are now willing to accept some false positives in spam filtering. At least on the consumer oriented services where it doesn't hurt your business to lose a legitimate message now and then. The spammers are softening us up, preparing us to give up the public email system for a controlled one.
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This is good, Cameron. It explains a few things that I have not taken the time to investigate because they seem minor, once in a while, annoyances.
As a fairly active blogger on my own site, I have a filter that, among other things, reject too frequent entries from the same IP address. It trips.
The other side is that comment spam suppression on the blog is sometimes too agressive and I occasionally have someone complain that their legitimate post did not show up. When that person is a writer for a newspaper in the area, it is not good for me to allow that to happen.
Ratio of comment spam to legitimate comments runs about 1000:1
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As a fairly active blogger on my own site, I have a filter that, among other things, reject too frequent entries from the same IP address. It trips.
The other side is that comment spam suppression on the blog is sometimes too agressive and I occasionally have someone complain that their legitimate post did not show up. When that person is a writer for a newspaper in the area, it is not good for me to allow that to happen.
Ratio of comment spam to legitimate comments runs about 1000:1
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