Once More Round the Bend -Monday, April 26, 2004 -3:58 am-
OK, it's computer education time again. Please read it anyway.
Spam is a problem most people have to deal with because other people are assholes. One of the ways admins have chosen to deal with this is a concept called blacklists. Blacklists are a list of servers on the internet known to send spam. The mailserver will refuse to accept mail from any server on the blacklist. Effectively, the server drops off the face of the earth. All email, spam and letters from grandma, is rejected if it comes from a server on the blacklist. Originally, the idea was employed on a company by company basis with each admin developing their own blacklist. Since lazier is better, someone eventually got the idea to collect all the blacklists into one big list and then let admins around the world download it so that the local admins didn't have to work as hard. In doing this, the local admins gave up control to a set of people they did not know and over whom they have no authority. This, too, worked ok at first. The problem was the spammers caught on and decided to change server addresses faster than the uber-blacklist could keep up. In response to this advance in the arms race the blacklist maintainers began to block classes of addresses. Ooofff, we need a short summary of classes here. When you type in a server name the computer doesn't care about the words it resolves it into an IP address. There's a little bit about that in this previous blog entry. The IP address is four three-digit numbers (if there's leading zeros you can pop them i.e. 065 is 65) in the form 111.222.333.444 For instance, as of this writing the IP of this blog's server was 65.31.10.28 A class is a range of IP addresses. There are three classes of IP addresses that differ in how many addresses they cover. A Class-C is the smallest, it just varies last number of the IP address. So all numbers, for instance, from 192.168.8.0 to 192.168.8.255 (extra points to anyone not Aaron or Owen who knows why it's 0-255). Another way we can write that is 192.168.8.* because the * character means "everything that could go here". A Class-B holds a much bigger number of addresses because the last 2 numbers in the IP address change. In other words a Class-B might be 172.16.*.* Finally, a Class-A is the biggest of all. It holds A LOT of addresses because all but the first number can vary. Or, in our little notation, 10.*.*.* Ok, back to the main point. As spammers got smarter, the began to jump addresses faster than the uber-blacklist could be updated and passed out to mailservers all over the world. So the blacklisters started blocking entire classes of addresses. Let's say a spammer was bouncing around in the Class-C 111.222.333.* so on any given day he could be 111.222.333.444 or 111.222.333.456 or whatever. The entire Class-C gets blacklisted this means the spammer plus 254 other servers are now blacklisted. In response to this spammers started bouncing around Class-Bs which means to blacklist a spammer, you block him and 65,533 other servers. We've now reached the point of blacklisting Class-As which kill 8,257,284 servers at a stroke. Now, obviously, if you blacklist a Class, you're refusing communication from WAY more normal users than spammers. The people who run the uber-blacklists and those that use them will tell you that by hurting innocent bystanders (a.k.a civilians), you put more pressure on the service providers who's networks the spammers (a.k.a. the enemy) ride on to get rid of the spammers. It means that hundreds of thousands of people get denied the ability to communicate to silence a few spammers. In essence, grandma's email becomes collateral damage.
Today, the entire nation of Spain was blacklisted.
There's a term for using the harm of civilians to influence policy to combat your enemy. It's called terrorism.
writebacks...
williaty wrote
Clarification
Well, first of all, at the very least, Aaron is going to spaz because I wasn't perfectly precise in my description of the situation. Suffice it to say, there is more to be said in order to be perfectly exact, but none of you are big enough computer geeks to care.
Second, I'm going to offend many people by calling this terrorism since no one died. I don't give a fuck. No one's dying, but it's most definitly terrorism of the mind. Blacklisters are forcing people to change the way they live in order to suit their own political goals. Fuck them and fuck the people who support them.
And, just so you know, every one of you who gets your interenet access from AOL, TimeWarner, Insight, and any company that rents from any of those companies, I can't send you mail because your ISP uses a blacklist and my Class-B is on it.
Fiona wrote
Because 0-255 is 256 possibilities, which is 2^8, which is a byte. Yeah, extra points for me.
Amazing things happen in the world of computers based on laziness. Blacklisting policies are just one example.
tiggerbone wrote
^_~
I am not a big enough geek to care?
I am hurt, hurt I say!
:P
williaty wrote
Oops
Owen, you're quite a big geek from what I've heard. It's just that Aaron has gone off on me severa^H^H^H^Hmany times about computer things and I've yet to hear from you about such things.
/me hands Fiona her extra points
Sheesh, I am getting to used to vi. I just confused the hell out of myself by using the left arrow key to decrement the cursor beyoned the beginning of a line!
tiggerbone wrote
:-D
Not a problem. Really. Just a bit of teasing. I take no offense at my supposed slighting. ^_^
I have never quite gotten used to vi. I tend to use emacs for a lot of stuff. I like the versatility. Still, I have heard good things about vi as an editor so I really should take the time to learn someday. How do you like it?
You know who wrote
Oh, it's on.
Mmm... vi.... Mmm....
There are more classes of address, to properly define a network you need a number and a netmask Like 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 The A/B/C Classes only work for Masks like that (ones with 255) but you could also have 10.0.0.0/30 which could mask 30 bits of the address or have a mask of 255.255.255.127, which leave the range at one byte or two addresses 10.0.0.0 and 10.0.0.1
Oh, and yeah black listing sucks. Also check your TOS, I doubt you are "allowed" to be sending Mail from your insite server. Anyhow as much as I hate it, blocking people in dynamic ranges is a good idea at times. You ready to pay for an account yet? I have a real IP, or 10.
williaty wrote
I just broke my power adapter
Owen, I like vi a lot. When I was in CIS classes at OSU they had us use emacs and it seemed like a lot of complication for not a whole lot more functionality. vi is obtuse at first, but once you have a reasonable vocabulary of commands it is so fast. It's also nice that even though I use vim not vi, they're close enough to the same thing that when I'm trying to bitchslap a recalcitrant *NIX box, I can use vi (installed on just about everything) to make it do my bidding.
Aaron, jesus christ man, learn how to post! You haven't yet not fucked up leaving a comment here! I fixed the posts your useless ass messed up and catted them down to one entry. Also, I know for a fact that I'm not allowed to be running a server. The nasty email I get whenever I try to send something to a rr.com address reminds me of that.
Oh, and I'm not being randomally abusive to Aaron, he's worse when I ask him a question.
squish wrote
williaty wrote
lost?
But honey, you're right there! Actually, I am lost as to about what you are lost. And you webmail serivice may well be blocked. It's hard to tell these days because the blacklist people are so indescriminantly fucktardrd.
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