Talk:Spam and Open Relay Blocking System

General

I notice there are several comments that need citations, in particular, the following:

"As of 2006, SORBS has all subnets owned by Cox Cable blacklisted, and is also well-known for blacklisting companies for simply having residential service."

As a Cox Cable user, I find this disturbing, but at the same time, have found no evidence this is true. Would the author please post a citation or some how substantiate this claim--Bill 16:32, 8 June 2006 (UTC)?

Whoever made the comment below affirming the two statements are true, sorry, but you are of no help! Is Cox blacklisted by SORBS? Where does it say that? I note now the original article has removed that statement.--Bill 13:59, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Citations

I can affirm that the two statements are VERY true. I myself just had to go through the "Get Delisted From SORBS" ordeal which, in total took OVER three weeks to complete. And with them KNOWING I was an ISP.

My main complaints with their DNSBL are the following:

1) I was NEVER notified that ANYONE that I was suspected of "spamming" or being a "duhl" block.

2) The first message I got telling me I was on such a list was a mailer-daemon bounce from an ISP who used it.

3) Mailer-daemon messages don't necessarily tell how to get off the DNSBL (Although this would be fixed if they just emailed ISPs/netblock owners they were planning on blacklisting)

4) You cannot get off this list without throwing away your own naming scheme and using THEIR naming scheme.

5) Totally one-sided: You need to set your TTL to at least 43200 seconds. However the TTLs on their servers are set to 3600: dnsstuff.com

6) "We aim to answer all tickets within 48 hours of you requesting help, however due to the incredible load it may take upto 14 days to answer your problem." Note that that is answer your problem, not fix your problem.

A few truths amongst the cr*p

1/ TTLs are only a requirement for delisting of Single IP addresses.

2/ Naming schemes of the ISPs can be given whe the ISP supplies both the static and dynamic identifiers.

3/ Bulk changes (which ignore naimg schemes and TTLs) can only be performed by ISP contacts.

4/ ISP Contacts are those listed in the Whois DB *ONLY*

5/ Delisting requests sent to general Support queues will be ignored/deleted because the people who answer those queues have *NO* access to the listings.

6/ Notification is not performed for *ANY* listing at SORBS (this is documented).

7/ Rejection information provided by SORBS does give links to find out why you are listed - a site not providing this information is not providing the information by their own choice.

8/ Non ISPs (see 4) submitting tickets as an ISP to the ISP Support queue may not receive a reply at all (though usually will).

9/ You get what you pay for.

/ Mat @ SORBS

Whitewashing

I have reverted a couple of the changes made by Matt. Firstly, the change from:

"Some of the controversy arises from SORBS' policy of demanding a USD 50 payment to the Joey McNicol Legal Defense Fund in order to get an IP de-listed from the system."

to:

"Some of the controversy arises from SORBS' policy of demanding a USD 50 payment a Third Party Charity or SORBS approved good cause (eg The Joey McNicol Legal Defense Fund) in order to get an IP de-listed from the system."

Apart from the numerous grammatical errors in Matt's version, this edit seems a bit disingenuous considering that the Joey McNicol Legal Defense Fund is the only SORBS-approved charity you can donate to. It says that SORBS accepts nominations for other charities, but the Joey McNicol Legal Defense Fund has remained the only approved charity for as long as I can remember. If you're reading this Matt, I would like to formally nominate the Wikimedia Foundation as a SORBS-approved charity.

I've also reinserted the sentence stating that SORBS is often compared to an extortion racket, since this has always been the chief point of controversy surrounding the blacklist (and seems to be a pretty widely held view). Kaldari 15:12, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

I re-removed this (see Jun 07 2007 edits section below), mainly because if something is a "widely-held view," it needs to be cited by more than one site, especially if that one site is extremely biased on the subject, otherwise it's an NPOV issue. If you disagree, please discuss or simply add better citations. --koder 01:13, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

NPOV

Ok, an update by 205.158.160.89, I just rv'd it since its hardly NPOV, and I'm not sure of the best way it could be rewritten either. When you start talking about 'common sense and good network resources management', the discussion becomes anything but neutral.Brian 15:14, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Charities.

Kaldari:

You made comment in the 22nd Nov 2006 [1] about the listed charities and removed the part about the Joey McNicol Legal Defense Fund and where some of the money has been donated... What's the deal, too above board for you? ... Anyhow, as per your request in the update comments I know the following charities have received donations, there are lots more and I'm not going to list them all...

The American Red Cross The Australian Red Cross The Australian St John's Ambulance St Vinny's The Salvo's (The Salvation Army) The Royal Childrens Hospital Brisbane (They have had several thousand in donations to my knowledge). Great Ormund Street Hospital (another childrens hospital - London)

... there have been lots more, however they are what I personally have seen, and dealt with, and no I do not keep record of how much goes to each as neither I nor SORBS have anything to do with the money, we only verify the donations have been made.

(and my offer still stands, if Wikipedia is a registered charity, Wikipedia may receive donations as a charity.  If Wikipedia is a non-profit/not for profit organisation, Wikipedia can apply to be listed as one of the SORBS approved good causes, but won't receive any donations until they do.)

Changes from Jun 7, 2007

Bunch of things:

• Changed POV-y phrases like "extortion racket" and "suffer." Also, iadl.org is hardly a neutral critic, as they solely target dsbls and the pages are filled with bias, thus, I added the "staunch anti-blacklist groups" portion.
• Updated delisting policy. Last version made it seem like everyone who was ever listed had to pay the fine, which is incorrect-- only spam database entries need this, and only under certain conditions.
• The t3-v link [2] has issues and links to outdated pages. The favreau.info link [3] is equally problematic, since it says stuff, but doesn't actually link to anything. Consider updating these to more recent/accurate links.
• Neither google, yahoo, nor hotmail are blacklisted since they implement outgoing anti-spam measures. I don't know whether they were listed in the past, as there was no cite for that in the first place, so I reworded it into something that is current and verifiable. Not sure how to cite it, though-- maybe a link to an RBL checker?
• Reworded to "Criticism," added subsections "Removal procedure" and "Aggressiveness," as those seem to be the major two topics that the criticisms address.
• I figure it's safe to add Spamassassin to the "Aggressiveness" criticism, as anecdotally most large ISPs and sysadmins I work with tend to favor the RBL check as a weighted component of spam checking. If you disagree, please let me know.
• The cites need reworking to proper formatting. I'll deal with that later, but as for now, the links are there if anyone needs them.
• I linked to sonic.net, which isn't really scholarly, but it is pertainent to ISPs blocking port 25 as a preventitive measure to drone spam and being blacklisted. If anyone else can find a better, neutral, non-business source for this, or simply more links to other, unrelated ISPs that also implement this policy (there are plenty) that illustrate the point, it would be ideal. I'll look for more later.
• Changed some subject/verb agreement to work with me edits.
• McNicol didn't "win," the case was merely dismissed, as far as I know. Then again, I don't know Australian law. However, since the links referencing it are outdated, someone needs to verify this. I'll also work on this later.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or complaints, please feel free to contact me or discuss them here. Thanks. :) --koder 00:58, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

"An old example" changes

Second time reverting this. In the context of Wikipedia, anything not done within the past few minutes can be considered 'old'. I was told to not phrase things in terms of relative time, but rather as close to exact time as possible. Is there any particular benefit to calling the link 'an old example'? Bri 01:22, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Criticism

We have recently had a single-use IP from Australia (likely a SORBS employee) attempting to remove criticism of SORBS systems from the article. What basis is there for removal of this properly-sourced information? Bulbous (talk) 14:53, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

As I mentioned in my revert change log, I investigated this. I, personally, do not much like SORBS or the way Matthew Sullivan behaves so my initial reaction was to revert the removal of the criticisms. However, after I spent (way too much) time investigating to be sure, I ended up deciding that the deletions were appropriate. I looked and I think it is unlikely that the removal of the criticisms is done by someone related to SORBS, it is more likely someone with cybertrust and I could find no relation between the two organizations. Matthew Sullivan (SORBS) and Al Iverson (dnsbl.com) have been a rather pathetic pissing match for a while now and Al has stopped updating stats on SORBS, therefore it should no longer be used to judge accuracy. The DUHL stuff is not NPoV in my opinion. Nothing backs up the claim that small business owners are "frequently" (vague term) listed. The reference to dnsstuff.com can now be viewed only by paying for a subscription but when I last checked, it didn't give a reason why it should not be used. The article about how some company (mxrate) back in 2005 was listed by SORBS because of backscatter and how they did a tit-for-tat listing on their blacklist seems, well, not very useful. Wrs1864 (talk) 15:33, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. The IP of the remover was assigned to Australia, making it more likely that it was someone related to SORBS. But that is, of course, speculation. The DUHL information is as neutral as can be expected of a criticism. If there were some balancing praise available, that could be listed, too, but the overwhelming opinion is negative. Check back through the history of this article and note that there have been several incarnations of DUHL criticism. However, the sources themselves have largely been blogs and the like. Finding legitmate sources to back up the overwhelming amounts of inadmissable criticism has been the task here. Perhaps the situation would have been better handled with a ((refimprove)) while we locate better sources for the valid criticisms? Bulbous (talk) 17:42, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree about the difficulty of finding reliable sources. I have heard the "extortion" charge many many times, but try finding a reliable source that makes one. The charges are all made in blogs or mailing list postings. I couldn't even find a reliable source that said that lots of people think of SORBS's removal policy as being extortion. And, yes, dial-up/dynamic IP DNSBLs of all sorts tend to generate a large number of similar complaints. In a perverse way, the complaints document how useful the list is because there wouldn't be complaints if no one found the DNSBL useful. I don't think using a {{refimprove}} tag is appropriate if we have looked and can't find an improved reference. Wikipedia is not supposed to be a soapbox, it is supposed to summaries reliable sources. I've looked, I can't find good sources, but I would be happy to see some found. Wrs1864 (talk) 18:29, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't agree that complaints are an indicator that *someone* finds a DUHL useful. In fact, I have yet to find anyone that defends their use of SORBS. In fact, quite the opposite - in my experience, most admins just mindlessly add SORBS to a list of blacklists they use with no clue of the grief it cause for mailservers on small ISPs until someone tells them. I will continue to look for improved references. Based on the number of non-RS references, there has to be some legimate ones out there. Bulbous (talk) 18:51, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Most of this article uses SORBS itself as reference material. This leads to a significant bias. Bulbous (talk) 03:24, 18 January 2009 (UTC)