Dear EFF: Please Practise What You Preach
The EFF (who I support) have published a new white paper, claiming that anti-spam technologies are a danger to freedom of speech.
It’s a point that they’ve tried to raise before—Their pathetically fuckwitted, tediously illinformed sysadmin created a mad stink in February 2003, claiming that the Razor distributed anti-spam system was being abused to deliberately block MoveOn.org and EFF emails.
As I’ve stated before, spam is very much in the eye of the beholder. That “Unsolicited” at the front of UCE is problematic, since there’s no way for a system to know whether the receiver solicited the mail.
But in the meantime, EFF, can you please fix your mailing list sign-ups to verified opt-in. Currently, it is easy to sign up any email address to their EFFector newsletter, with no notification or validation to the address in question. Just enter an address as you join their Action Center, and voila, unsolicited bulk email will be sent to the recipient of your choice.
EFF: Fix this, become a good member of the mass email community, and perhaps then I’ll take your anti-anti-spam rhetoric seriously.
Update to add: Justin helpfully takes the time to debogusify some of the technical cluelessness of the paper.
On Sunday, November 21, 2004, Matt Sergeant commented:
Haha, the google ads on this post are hilarious.