On 2025-10-27 at 11:55, Jeffrey Walton wrote: > On Mon, Oct 27, 2025 at 11:03 AM <tomas@tuxteam.de> wrote: > >> On Mon, Oct 27, 2025 at 05:13:54PM +0300, monodev wrote: >> >> [...] >> >>> A court can check whether this is the case or not, but spam >>> filters can't, so delivery rate suffers for no benefit. >> >> Getting spam under control with SPF/DKIM is (and always has been) >> a fool's errand. The result is that a sizeable part of the spam I >> get these days has correct SPF/DKIM, washed through some throwaway >> account from a Big Provider. >> >> I'm enough of a cynic to think that, for some, this was the plan >> all along: "don't spam us, we spam you". > > In the US, you can thank 47 USC § 230, a/k/a "Section 230", > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230>. It is called the "26 > words that created the internet": > > No provider or user of an interactive computer service > shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any > information provided by another information content > provider. > > It allows the Big Tech bros to send their customer's spam with > impunity. Big Tech bros are almost never responsible or liable for > their subscriber's spam. This is a divergence from existing US law, > where Big Tech would be held accountable or liable in any other > setting. (Careful; this verges very close on political topics which would not be appropriate to discuss here. I've had to delete one paragraph from this reply already because, on reflection, it would have crossed that line.) It also allows Debian to host this mailing list - without needing active review-before-letting-it-be-posted moderation or even requiring being subscribed before being able to post - without having to worry that if someone sends spam or worse through here, Debian could be held liable for sending that. Section 230, or at least the principle underlying it, is critically important. Without the protection it represents, many of the remaining good things about and/or on the Internet would no longer be viable to sustain. I certainly don't support spamming or spammers; I consider spam and its like to be one of the major Reasons Why We Can't Have Nice Things. (And, back toward the thread topic, one of the Nice Things they make it harder for us to have is mailing lists that can just work the way they should, without having to worry about breaking identification/validation/etc. measures such as I understand DKIM and SPF and DMARC and the like to be - since while those might still be *useful* in the absence of the need to filter out spam they would be much less *necessary* in such an environment.) I'd love to have the sort of disruption and harassment such people introduce just go away - but I think that even getting that benefit, in exchange for giving up the good things that Section 230 makes possible, would be a net loss. > The laws in DE may be different. I wish folks from other countries > would start litigating this crap. The only way to effect change > from a corporation is to cost them money. Big Tech won't change > until it affects their bottom line. That is, sadly, true. One of the consequences of capitalism, unfortunately; the culture and mindset which tech came in with helped resist that in a lot of places for a long time, but gradually more and more of them gave in, and some of those have by now gotten so big that they now make up a practical bulk of what tech's culture and mindset now *are*. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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