251–260 of 282 posts
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I figured that might come up, but censorship whether govt. or not is seen as "oppression due to opinion". Over-aggressive TLD spam filtering is just bad logic from infosec employees.
Censorship is not limited to “oppression due to opinion”, it can be done for any reason.
I get that the people here want more control over their devices, but to be fair, anyone posting here is at the extreme end of the tech spectrum when compared to your average phone user. Those phone users want someone else to help them. It's why I have spam assassin crancked super tight on the mail server that my parents use. They would rather miss a few legit emails and texts than get flooded with spam.
The .co.cc discussion was here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733352
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I would say the line has to do with how informed/empowered the user is about the initial content, ongoing changes, and their ability to make their own modifications. The original comment was about text messages, of which there is certainly not a competitive market (the Ma Bell T-1000 has reassembled itself into only 3 remaining pieces), users were surprised at the behavior, and there doesn't seem to be a straightforw…
What if users don't want to be informed, or make their own modifications? What if they just want a click a button and not receive junk mail, albeit also not receiving the occasional non-junk email because it had an unusual address. I'd guess there are far more users like that, which is precisely why there are no major email providers offering the kind of service you talk about. As always comes up in these conversatio…
I've merely put forth a straightforward definition of "censorship" - one where there is a third party censor who controls the content of speech.
To translate your scenario into an earlier time - if most people in a society don't want to hear thoughts that conflict with the teachings of the church, and they appoint someone to an office to approve play manuscripts before they're performed, is that censorship?
If merely labeling centralized user-uninvolved content filtering with the technical term of "censorship" makes you uncomfortable, then perhaps you need to revisit your own assumptions.
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Seconded, having worked in this space I can assure everyone that there are multiple orders of magnitude more (attempted) spam SMS than legitimate SMS.
Very interesting. I definitely get phishing SMS messages from time to time, but I didn't realize these were some of the very few which actually made it through. Any idea how these bad actors are able to send out these massive batches of spam SMS? My naiive guess would be bulk purchasing disposable SIMs but I imagine it's more sophisticated?
Basically there are tons of VOIP companies, with varying levels of give-a-shit and spam detection capabilities.
Generally they are incentivized to let people self-serve on their platform - spin up quickly and start running traffic, or blasting spam, whatever. Especially if you're a small company, you're probably more likely to look the other way for a bit if someone is spending money on your platform, until regulators call, and you can be like "ok we looked into it and shut them down". Also you don't want to be overly aggressive, because what if a great customer comes onto your platform, loves the ease of setup, and starts running legitimate traffic, then you shut them down because they were triggered by whatever crappy spam heuristics your small company came up with, and the customer is gone to another platform where they don't have to deal with that.
Then the company/group running the traffic moves onto other VOIP providers until they get a bad enough name or push the envelope so much that no one will take them.
Then they just create a new "company" that no one recognizes the name of, and start again.
Honestly I think an open sourcing of spam detection heuristics and algorithms would be a massive help, but companies that are good at this obviously see it as a competitive advantage, just like the email space - for example if Twilio is great at keeping spam off their platform (no idea if they are, but they would have the most resources to do so), then all numbers registered with Twilio are less likely to get flagged/blocked downstream - all Twilio customers benefit. Twilio can say "any number you buy with us will be considered clean by downstream parties, no need to worry about getting flagged/blocked, then having to change the numbers you use for your business to communicate with customers, which could be saved in their phone already, etc."
The patterns spam takes vary wildly, often being specific to telecom laws and practices in specific jurisdictions, so it really is a tough problem. If an algorithm flags spam, you often want to then reach out to the customer and try to understand if there's a legitimate reason for the traffic patterns, etc. So there's a layer of customer relations beyond the algorithms that's also tough to scale.
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What if users don't want to be informed, or make their own modifications? What if they just want a click a button and not receive junk mail, albeit also not receiving the occasional non-junk email because it had an unusual address. I'd guess there are far more users like that, which is precisely why there are no major email providers offering the kind of service you talk about. As always comes up in these conversatio…
You say you are "exploring where that line is", but then continue pushing a single sided view by conjuring some perfect user archtype who simultaneously has very strong opinions but also can't be bothered to express them. I know users are unreasonable, but completely discounting their agency does not make for reasonable analysis. I've merely put forth a straightforward definition of "censorship" - one where there is…
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You say you are "exploring where that line is", but then continue pushing a single sided view by conjuring some perfect user archtype who simultaneously has very strong opinions but also can't be bothered to express them. I know users are unreasonable, but completely discounting their agency does not make for reasonable analysis. I've merely put forth a straightforward definition of "censorship" - one where there is…
Have you ever thought you might be wrong? Go and talk to the nearest non-technical person you can find and ask them whether they’d consider it censorship. It seems you’re in for a surprise.
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Related thing from the past.. Gmail once had a bug(?) where if you sent any email containing a URL with the domain starting "0x", it would go straight to spam. I imagine it was a rule hard coded to block the use of hexadecimal long IP URLs, but it also picked regular domains starting 0x. It was fixed a few years ago.
I own a domain starting with 0x and I spent a lot of time talking to people I knew at Google to get that one fixed because my mail would not be delivered.
> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. This is wild to me. Tested it out myself and I couldn't send an SMS with a spot.xyz link to/from Google Voice T-Mobile. And no "failed delivery" notice either, just a silent failure. And yet I still get so many texts that are obviously spam or ph…
A lot of systems block anything by default that isn't standard. For example, if you happen to own a domain to serve as your email that doesn't end in .com, .edu, .gov, then many systems will instantly invalidate you saying you don't have a valid email when in reality you do. A lot of companies or programmers don't seem to realize that its 2021 where we have hundreds of domain extensions to choose from.
Whoa. I use an xyz domain daily. This thread is eye-opening. Here's the reply from a SpamAssassin validator. My domain is almost marked as spam solely on TLD grounds. What's the point of a TLD if it isn't a first-party domain on the internet? SpamAssassin Score: -0.599 Message is NOT marked as spam Points breakdown: -5.0 RCVD_IN_DNSWL_HI RBL: Sender listed at https://www.dnswl.org/, high trust [***.***.***.*** listed…
I think the problem is that xyz was and maybe still is the cheapest TLD so it naturally attracts all the spammers.