The RISKS to this approach to spam-filtering should be obvious. If a reporter wishes to subscribe to a mailing list but not have all the participants know he or she is there, that anonymity can be violated through a dumb dirty word filter that auto-responds. Perhaps we'll see anyone worried about a reporter from Tribune Media (http://www.tms.tribune.com/aboutus.html) lurking send foul language to a list and wait for the autoreplies to arrive. :) Previous Politech message: "Newspapers filter out 'bad words' from email to their reporters" http://www.politechbot.com/p-03129.html -Declan --- To: declanat_private Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 16:36:38 -0500 Subject: Defective SPAM filter, or corporate censorware weirdness? Also, Tribune censorware defects Message-ID: <20021106.163640.-127975531.6.terry.sat_private> I tried sending my brother a scan of my maternal family tree for 6 generations, found in our mother's files of deteriorating paper copies. This came back: <username>@kodak.com>: 192.232.121.249 failed after I sent the message. Remote host said: 550 5.5.0 Mail refused - Banned word found in Subject line --- Below this line is a copy of the message. Return-Path: <terry.sat_private> To: <username>@kodak.com Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 13:55:07 -0500 Subject: Sxxxxxrg family tree, etc. So, what's the banned word above? Is it a defective SPAM filter, or a super secret content based censorship list of banned ideas that constitute hate speech and masked defamation of those thinking or expressing the secret banned thoughts? A month ago, I got some nastygrams from a mailserver at Tribune Media in Chicago. Apparently, they censor mail their reporters receive at local owned newspapers around the country, via central corporate policies. One of their reporters subscribed to a listserver run by a Virginia pagan campground and religious retreat center (notably right between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell's home bases), though he didn't post to become visible as present. He subscribed because of issues related to Eure porta potty rental's owner deciding pagans shouldn't poop in his pots, which the campground had been renting. Eure also has government and government contractor construction business in the area, for which such a business policy would likely be illegal. This led to a mix of serious ethical and legal discussion, with jokes and even a song ("God Says") which received radio airplay on both coasts after AP carried the story. When some of the jokes included "shit" in the subject line, Tribune's corporate censorware started sending bounce messages to persons posting, who had no way of knowing why they'd receive mail about messages sent by a list bot, not by them, to the silently subscribed reporter. I wrote Tribune management about how they were engaging in hate speech contrary to their own posted online user agreements, depriving their reporters of the ability to work professionally, and in effect SPAMming third party list subscribers directly who at best could guess or ask a list owner questions about what was going on. The Tribune responded as if they were clueless about how their mail could be unsolicited when sent to posters to a list who'd never directly contacted one of their employees, as well as being clueless about how religiously prejudiced and intolerantly hateful their content based blacklist was among people who outwardly reject christian concepts of "indecency". Were I a Trib employee, I'd be concerned that such practices, beyond being unethical and disrupting professional communications, amount to criminal and civil religious discrimination, which in the guise of protecting the tender sensitivities of some workers actively defame core beliefs and values of others. In both of these cases of large corporations, I'd bet the root problem is predatory management attitudes and people without adequate clues making corporate policy, which underlings are reluctant to effectively challenge. Terry ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ Recent CNET News.com articles: http://news.search.com/search?q=declan -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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