zombie anti-spammers? fabulous

[rone]

Dear dr_strych9: please supplement my arguments against real-time blackhole lists with this delightful story about a blackhole list that came back to life fifteen months after its death and caused all its subscribers' incoming mail to bounce.

Comments

[jwgh]

I don't have much sympathy these days for services that are put out there on the Internet without any thought given to the fact that the services will be used by dipshits. I have much more sympathy for the random third parties that have to deal with the blowback caused by dipshits using such services. (Technology developed before C&S I am a bit more tolerant of.)

(PS to boutell: I don't actually think that you're a dipshit.)

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

I don't have much sympathy these days for services that are put out there on the Internet without any thought given to the fact that the services will be used by dipshits.

Like NTP servers (http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/)?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I'm not certain just how a dipshit could screw up an NTP server configuration in a way that affects a third party.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Dipshits caused massive DDoS of an NTP server; non-abusive users of the NTP server (and those of assorted networks attached to routers that got in the way, apparently) were thereby affected. Those would be third parties, more or less.

But my point was that dipshit-proofing a service is, for arbitrarily large dipshitness, far from trivial.