[Mailman-Developers] Opening up a few can o' worms here...

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 7/16/02 9:22 PM, "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:

>> says some variation of "you are a dead man". Three weeks later, the other
>> guy's house burns down because of arson, and all you have is an archive with
>> no identifying information in it....
> 
> Well, ok... but in a case like that, your mailer logs would likely have
> the appropriate information.  But still, as rare as such a circumstance
> is, I don't see that you have any moral obligation to be *that* prepared.

How many people keep their logs three weeks? How many people long ago
stopped keeping detailed SMTP logs because of their size? And rare as the
circumstance is, if YOUR house was burned down, would you still care that it
was rare? (it's real easy to say "don't care, it's someone else's house...")

> Stipulated.  But I don't believe that the toaster *is* cheap and shoddy
> -- ie: that it's *your* responsibility -- merely because people break
> into your house, and jam oversized bagels into your toaster repeatedly
> until it won't hold toast anymore.

Take a look at the court system. You're so far in the minority it's not
funny (really not funny). Have you ever read the instruction manual for a
toaster? The warning pages in the instruction manual, that say things like
"do not use toaster in shower"? Because fi they DON'T say that, they get
sued because someone does?

> Except that the spam isn't the *problem*.  The *spammers* are.

Sorry. That's like saying "bullets aren't a problem, guns are". If you get
shot, you don't waste time arguing semantics like this. Unless, I guess,
you're a libertarian. But frankly, most of the libertarians I know who HAVE
been shot (instead of arguing about what they'd do if, theoretically, they
were shot) stop arguing semantics, too.

> Even when they get unreasonably strident, and scream for all the wrong
> reasons -- and they so -- I still back the Second Amendment
> absolutists, because history has proven that they *put that amendment
> in there for a reason*.

That would be a fun argument, but I'll spare the list. Pass. (but if you
look at the historical record of the debates over the amendment, it's a lot
more ambiguous what the founding fathers THOUGHT, vs. how it's been
interpreted. But, pass...)

> It is largely because of RMS' intransigience on many points related to
> Free Software that we have most of it, and most particularly Linux --
> I really don't believe it would have happened at all except for the
> developer-protection provided by the GPL.

And off we go into left field, to blame something completely tangential to
the issue at hand. 

Oh, never mind, pass.

> Sometimes a cigar *is* just a cigar.

That's what monica said, too.

> Sometimes, you've got to let junior take the fall.

Why? How very libertarian of you. May you never find someone calling you
junior... (it's easy to say "let them eat cake" when you aren't starving
with them. At least until the wagon arrives....)

> Not at all.  It's not a question of ease.  Undertaking responsibility
> is not easy. 

No, ducking responsibility is easy. Undertaking responsbility, however, is
how things get done.

> Someone has to fix the problem.  It has been proven to my satisfaction
> that the technologists can't: it's not a technology-fix problem (so few
> 'problems' are).  Someone has to get *pissed*.
> 
> That'd be the people with the mailboxes, Bob.

Wrong. It's the people with the skillset. Lots of people have mailboxes. Few
people have the skillsets. But those people, it seems, are willing to let
others rot, because it's easier for them personally. Well, some of them.

Look, if I wanted easy, I wouldn't even be on this list. I'd just download
tarballs and do what I felt like. I'd like to think we're all on this list
because we're better than that.

> Fine. 
> 
> But this isn't procmail, nor SpamAssassin; they're at the other end of
> the hall; third and fifth doors on the right, respectively.
> 
> This is a mailing list program.

This is a tool that users attach trust to, and that trust is that we won't
abuse their mailbox and will send them what we tell them we'll send them. If
they stop trusting the tool, they'll stop using it. So we have a
responsibility (if not to those users, to the TOOL) to do what we can to
protect that trust a user attaches to the program when they agree to
subscribe to a mail list through it.

> Letting spam through likely only gets you yelled at; accidentally
> blocking important stuff gets you burned.

No, actually, both get you yelled at and/or burned, depending on who gets
upset about what. At some level, it's a no-win situation....

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/

Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties
are largely ceremonial.