[ppml] black hole lists

[Ed Allen Smith]

In message <20050421025917.065F713E4A at sa.vix.com> (on 21 April 2005 02:59:17
+0000), paul at vix.com (Paul Vixie) wrote:
>in today's meeting, william(at)elan mentioned some stuff about what he
>called "blacklists".  as the original inventor, and as someone who's
>spent a lot of time listening to lawyers, i ask you all to please call
>them "black hole lists".

Why? If it's because it sounds non-PC to juries, that's an answer I can
accept, BTW. How about "blocklists"? I also have to wonder what an
OK-sounding-to-juries name would be for "whitelists"...

>i still don't.  as long as there is abuse, there will be black hole
>lists.  and my closing comment today was "but if you want to kill
>black hole lists once and for all time, all you have to do is fund
>your abuse desks."  someone asked me about this afterward and i told
>him "if abuse desks were properly staffed and trained and empowered
>to disco customers without lengthy approval processes, then the risk
>of subscribing to a black hole list would begin to outweigh the risk
>of not subscribing to any, and black hole lists would start to die off."

Depends on how you mean it. Not all reasons for
blacklists/blocklists/whatever are for abuse - some of it is more like a
shared version of a USENET killfile. (Some lists can perhaps be described as
mixtures - some annoying behaviors such as lack of RFC compliance in various
ways (http://www.rfc-ignorant.org) are correlated with abuse or other
behaviors which are harmful but _sometimes_ not deliberately so.) But yes,
the uses of more significance for this list's topic are indeed anti-abuse in
orientation.

       -Allen

-- 
Allen Smith			http://cesario.rutgers.edu/easmith/
September 11, 2001		A Day That Shall Live In Infamy II
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin