I’d been putting-off going to startups.cringely.com to finally read all 286 entries so far in this summer’s Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour. But when I finally went to the site, I couldn’t get in. The page timed-out. This was not good. Or maybe it was very good in that the site was so busy. But even that’s not good because I don’t like turning readers away. So which was it — good or not good?
Not good.
Twelve hours later, when I still couldn’t get in I called the CTO at the company that hosts that site — Democrasoft. You haven’t heard about them, believe me, and I’ll explain why below. But they weren’t having any trouble seeing the site. Nor was I having trouble seeing it on my iPhone, or using my Verizon MiFi cellular access point. It seemed to be a problem with my home ISP — Comcast.
Twenty minutes on the phone with Comcast tech support found the problem, though not the solution: the server IP address was blacklisted by an outfit called SORBS (Spam and Open Relay Blocking System) that claims to keep track of mail servers run by spammers or compromised by computer crackers. Of 105 such blacklists available, only one — SORBS — listed this IP address, which wasn’t even for a mail server!
That IP was part of a block of addresses owned by Amazon Web Services, with the entire block listed by SORBS as suspect. So Comcast (only the eastern half of Comcast, I later learned), tending to believe SORBS, blocked the address and Cringely’s (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour from tens of millions of subscribers.
The suspect IP address may have been used previously for another machine that was a mail server or maybe a compromised web server. It has only been startups.cringely.com for a couple weeks, after all.
I’m amazed to learn that as rigorous an outfit as Amazon Web Services doesn’t check its IP addresses for blacklist status before reassigning them. If I were an AWS customer I would be upset. Since I’m freeloading I guess I’m just a little miffed.
We’ll sort this out shortly, I’m sure. The guys at Democrasoft have lodged a protest with SORBS, but I am not very confident that will accomplish anything quickly. Better to make Amazon assign the server a different IP address.
If you are having trouble reaching startups.cringely.com as a result, try it from a computer with a different ISP.
In the meantime, what is this Democrasoft? Well until a moment ago it was called Burst.com, a little company from Santa Rosa, CA that I wrote about years ago over and over when they were fighting Microsoft and then Apple in court, winning both cases. Burst was involved then in the efficient distribution over the Internet of video and audio streams and I suppose they continue to own and license patents in that area today.
A few months ago the folks at Burst called to tell me they were changing direction, creating a new kind of web service designed to help groups explore issues and make decisions. The called it Collaborize.
Startups.cringely.com, if you can get to it, is a custom instance of Collaborize dedicated solely to the nomination, discussion, and evaluation of startup companies. Not even a beta, I’d say my site was alpha software, but I was intrigued by the concept, trusted the people behind it, and who can turn down free service?
Collaborize was formally announced this week at the Demo conference in Palm Desert. I wasn’t there but from what I hear the product was well received with attendees seeing all sorts of interesting ways to use it. Have a look and let me know what you think.
That is if your ISP will let you.
Hi Bob,
We install mail servers (and have done for many years) SORBS has, more than once, been the bane of my life as we have wrestled with them to try and get customers de-listed from their clutches.
They are horrific to deal with and a waste of time trying to.
I wish people would not refer to them, there are a lot more honourable blacklist providers out there.
Regards,
Andrew
You just now finding out about them?
They’ve been at it for years. There is (or was) an Internet Newsgroup dedicated to people begging to get off their list and being soundly rebuffed. I followed it for a few months out of curiosity and was surprised to find that coupled with a bit of hubris on the part of the list maintainers, the reasons for the block were often more valid than would at first be apparent.
The maintainers of the list could often (if you roused their attention long enough) cite why the address (or address range more likely) was on the list, what the spam involved was, how long it persisted, and how the senders of the spam had proclaimed their innocence while at the same time producing tons of the stuff.
One thing that might not be apparent about their operation is that they block ranges of addresses (which as you said might not even include a mail server) in order to annoy end users (like you) so that you complain to your provider (who might in turn need to complain to their provider and so on) ultimately to make all of these organizations sensitive to the need to not tolerate spammers.
If, to use a purely hypothetical example, Amazon allowed even one spammer to continue to operate in that RANGE of IP addresses they could loose 250 or so customers. That gets their attention.
Not defending this technique, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. So complain away!
Oh, and is it just possible that Democrasoft has been careless with their practices in the near past?
Of the email black list servers SORBS (www.sorbs.net) stands out because of the number of legitimate IP address that are inadvertently blocked and the draconian technique one must go through to get off the SORBS list. SORBS was run by Michelle Sullivan (aka Matthew Sullivan). It was sold to GFI late last year. Michelle now works for GFI.
The problem is that SORBS appears far too eager to put IP addresses on their list and when you are on the SORBS list, you cannot send emails to anyone whose email provider is checking against the SORBS list. Furthermore, you are not notified of being on the list. It will only become known when emails to certain domains start to bounce.
To get off the SORBS list you must make a US$50 donation to a ‘charity’. Effectively the only charity available is ‘Joey McNicol Legal Defence Fund’ (from Western Australia). Joey is an anti-spam lawyer. The payment details appear to go straight to Joey’s personal PayPay account. The web site states that there is no association between Michelle/GFI and Joey but in paying Joey you need to provide the IP address that you want delisted. A receipt of this payment is then forwarded onto Michelle/GFI. The nature of this business model implies that there is at least some relationship since Joey needs to contact Michelle/GFI. (To complicate matters you also have to contact SORBS via email with a receipt number from the Paypal payment as well)
(https://www.dnsbl.au.sorbs.net/faq/spamdb.shtml)
You get on the SORBS blacklist via a number of techniques. The most insidious is something they call ‘DUHL’ (Dynamic User and Host List). Since many ISPs assign IP addresses dynamically, a spammer may have different IP addresses on different days. SORBS will therefore check for similarity in IP addresses and block entire ranges of IP addresses effectively sweeping up all possible IP addresses that could be assigned to the spammer but collecting any number of innocent users in the process. This is probably what affected startups.cringely.com.
The SORBS web site is unwieldy, poorly designed, hard to navigate and difficult to understand even for someone in the IT industry. Working out how to become delisted takes a significant amount of time and careful study.
I have previously lodged a complaint with the Australian ACCC but it is not in violation of the Australian Trade Practices Act.
Sorbs was hosted within the University of Queenland but I believe it has recently moved to Sydney.
Attempting to convince ISPs and web hosters not to reference SORBS has been a total waste of time.
Alhtough the company that I work for has not beeen Sorbs listed, several of the companies that we do business with have been. In the end, it has been easier for the other companies to change their IP address then it has been to get off the sorbs list.
Ditto on SORBS and a few other blacklist providers, namely Spam Cannibal, that can’t seem to be bothered with refreshing their data. If Spam Cannibal sees you without an rDNS record, good luck getting off of their list once you do have one. Their form won’t let you submit a request to get off the list because of your failed rDNS check, and they don’t seem to be updating that check with any sort of regularity. We’re on two plus weeks of having set up a new mail server, did some testing for a day before our rDNS record was properly set up, got a hit on Spam Cannibal and it still says we don’t have a proper rDNS. Bollocks!
I’m on Comcast in Chattanooga, TN, and I can reach the site without problems.
Oops. Maybe that’s because I am using Google DNS servers?
That is truly bizarre. As a former web hosting company CEO, I’m very familiar with SORBS and their ridiculous blackmail-like practices. But the real question I have–the one I’m surprised the other commenters haven’t picked up on–is why Comcast would use SORBS to block *HTTP* access to a specific address.
This either seems like a really poorly-implemented firewall (which I wouldn’t put past Comcast), or a “book-trained” tech who types an address into a blacklist checker instead of figuring out the real problem…which could be anything from routing to DNS.
Either way, in no case should an ISP use SORBS to do anything but block mail, and even that’s questionable given SORBS’s history.
I hope to hear from someone at Comcast on this issue. Frank Eliason, where are you?
-Erica
I am a comcast customer, but I haven’t noticed any problems linking up to your site. No delay… everything pops up fine.
Same here, no timeouts etc.
SORBS is the worst blacklist service of all time. I have to admire their spirit in fighting spam, but in the end they are worse than the problem they are trying to solve.
Our ISP’s entire address space is also blocked by SORBS and they refuse to take them off the list without a court order or an act of Congress.
Mark
I used your site last week from Comcast Business OK.
Try this site:
http://dns.comcast.net/dig-tool.php
and back up one level to find your local DNS server’s address.
I think Erica’s probably right about the misguided tech. And Amazon probably refuses to play ball with SORBS because of their immoral ways.
Too bad. Here in the free world we just talk to each other nicely – problems like this are solved in minutes with a few phone-calls.
Dave — if Cringe is bringing it to this level, it means the “nice” way ended in an impasse.
I’m going to second the “blackmail-like practices” comment above.
I’ve dealt with SORBS blocked companies in the past (including a magazine publisher that depended on e-mail in order to communicate with their contributors). Fortunately those situations were resolved quickly thanks to both small ISPs who promptly dropped SORBS as a blacklist source, and small companies who were able to change ISPs.
It absolutely amazes me that this form of scamming is technically legal. Certainly it was clever when the grifters who came up with it put it into play – create a seemingly valid service, use any excuse to add a range of IP addresses to a blacklist, and then make grandma in Lompoc think that the only way to “prove” she’s not a spammer is by paying an extortion fee. The ISP does the blocking, so SORBS isn’t doing anything actionable. The ISP’s defense is that they’re using a service that they believe “improves the customer experience” and that does not cost anything for the ISP to use.
This is pretty much the same as taking the position that “guns don’t kill. Bullets do. We just make guns, and this makes guns cheaper.” It could also be expressed as “don’t ask, don’t tell”.
A savvy ISP manager would see the obvious – “Gee, if I’m not paying for this service, then who is?” It doesn’t take much effort to figure out how SORBS makes money. Sadly, there seem to be plenty of folks managing ISPs who aren’t willing to do a bit of research before making decisions.
Maintaining an up-to-date, accurate, and honest blacklist of spam e-mail addresses is a labor intensive job, one that can only be performed by people. Do you want to be blacklisted because you send out a “recipe of the day” e-mail to ten of your foodie friends? SORBS is happy to do that free of charge (to the ISP, at any rate).
If you’re an ISP and want to improve your “customer experience”, then you’d better accept that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” and be willing to pay for using a *responsible* out-sourced blacklist service.
If you’re a SORBS victim, and your ISP doesn’t immediately cease using their service after you’ve complained, then you need to [a] find a new ISP and [b] try to find out if they’ve been receiving any “donations” from lawyers in Australia.
Until there are laws that recognize and prohibit this sort of two-tier scamming, the only way to keep it at bay is to deny revenue to the ISPs who continue to participate.
Windstream in central Alabama, got you just fine.
And I have had my battles with the same issue, being on a rather inexpensive shared hosting account.
Too many places where our emails die a silent death, and because we’re on a shared box, it’s too hard to prove anything. It’s not like the business model gives any incentive to prune false positives — the list-keepers can brag about how many “potentially rogue” IP addresses they block.
There’s got to be a better way going forward. Why not crowd-source verifications using a distributed Open-Auth system. If ten people you know are willing to vouch for you, that ought to provide an unlock.
I had a few domains blocked by sorbs.
It was impossible to deal with them and their website was intentionally vague and confusing. After a few emails I learned that every time you send an inquiry email, you get bumped to the end of the two-week plus mailing list.
I only had two options.
1 – Wait a few weeks and hope I was delisted, or
2 – Pay what amounted to an extortion fee
My hosting company refused to deal with them (actually I don’t blame them). Ultimately I was forced to change hosting companies.
While Democrasoft’s Collaborize idea might be useful, it reminds me of the
old Yahoo Groups. Same functionality, purpose and goals, BUT, at a very
“premium” price. Most of the features of Collaborize are available elsewhere
for free, albeit with advertising, so the question becomes “Do we want to spend
$29.99, $99.99, $199.99 or more per month to host our email list?” That seems
a bit expensive given the numbers of “active users” per plan (100, 1000, 5000,
unlimited, respectively), and it doesn’t really add any noticeable functionality
that is not already available in other services for less expense.
As for SORBS, perhaps a bit of “turn about is fair play”…send THEIR IP
addresses to a few other blacklist hosts? Just a thought…evil, but a thought!
<{;-)
Why do people still use manual blacklists?
I have run for years a system which looks at syn packets from hosts not known, makes a decision if it’s a bot or not. After a while takes it of the list and checks on the next syn packet again.
Runs without any maintenance, Linux kernel iptables linked to RDBMS (PostgreSQL). I do not run spamassassin anymore, not necessary. The checking programs all run in user space, full reporting capabilities …
Why doesn’t Amazon check out going traffic?
These manual lists are ridicules.
Welcome to the cloud. I block complete ranges of IP’s from Amazon. For me, it is not email spam, but rouge agents. I actually like the arrangement because I can pre-emptively block up and coming agents before they are known. It really reduces content thievery from scrapers.
“Collaborize”? I’m not a grammar purist, but this one makes me want to vomitze.
On Collaborize
Robert Buchminster-Fuller (RIP) described a kind of geometric structure (graph) of collaborators that review and forward information and because of the geometric properties of the graph the process was supposed to work in a esoteric and optimal way… Always wanted to webify that concept
Heinlein discussed that in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. I wonder if he got that from Fuller?
“What you find when you start digging through these various community watch efforts is not that the networks named are entirely or even mostly bad, but that they do tend to have more than their share of neighborhoods that have been overrun by the online equivalent of street gangs. ”
https://www.krebsonsecurity.com/2010/03/naming-and-shaming-bad-isps/
I set up a Collaborize account/site, and it’s working fine.
I can get to the site just fine via OpenDNS.
With them and Google DNS services, who even still uses he default Comcast ones?
Imagine if anyone with a safety vest and a stop sign could shut down a freeway for an indefinite period and there was no way to do anything about it. Or perhaps more appropriate, if just your business was blocked and there was no clear way to get around the blockade. It would be chaos – and there is our internet – no agreement on accountability and no authority to enforce it. It (the global data network) is a wondrous thing, but we need some enforcement standards so it can work along predictable lines. People balk at the control Apple takes with their devices, but the peace of mind in knowing that they simply work is worth any amount of freedom I might retain to tweak and hack. Especially when that freedom also means that spammers, hackers and the uncoordinated and unaccountable measures taken to try to stop them make the whole thing a moving crap shoot.
Cringely, where’s your take on the iPad?
Where’s your take on the HTC patent litigation?
Hopefully there will soon be some Cringely Cogitation on these news items…
According to Google, this is not a news site.
oops… in looking for news I forgot the subject of this post.
Funny you should mention annoying page timeouts. When I tried to pull up this column, it just sat there with the window mostly undrawn (missing the story), with “Connecting to b.scorecardresearch.com…” in my browser’s status bar. I gave up after a minute or two of waiting and blackholed that crappy server in my system’s hosts file.
I *hate* websites that are designed such that if the browser can’t connect to the stupid adserver (ad.doubleclick.net is the most common offender), you don’t get the content (or don’t get it until the ad connection times out).
And to continue my bellyachin’, unless http://www.cringely.com is hosted in Alaska or French Polynesia, the clock doesn’t appear to have been updated for Daylight Saving Time.
Use OpenDNS servers and say goodbye to Comcasts not-so-great DNS servers. Then problems like this may not cause you any grief.
Thanks for the article, Bob.
I had a similar problem with an outfit called SPEWS. I spent days, spread over months trying to extricate myself from this list. I had to finally give up and notify all the major recipients of email from my systems that they would SEE NO MAIL from our servers until they unsubscribed from the list. -The reason I was given was that I had once employed(and since terminated) a guy who had also work for a spammer. – That was it , end of story, you are not getting off this list. These guys insulate themselves by making the only form of communication a post to a forum.
They have since ceased operations, hopefully because they were so tyrannical in their approach. Friggin’ SPAM NAZIS !!!!!
So when ipv4 addresses run out in 2012, and my fridge, with its own ipv6 address, incessantly pings fidgidaire with servicing requirements, does it get permenantly blacklisted? Or does the local grocer send a semi load of black olives?
ipv6
piv6
pvi6
dvi6
6vi6
——
666 in 2012 ?
gives me the ippy-ippy-shakes………
Bob, speaking of difficulty contacting with sites, last night, after writing a brilliant response to your good blog on Adam Smith Money World about M3, when I hit send I was rewarded with a page full of error information, probably trying to tell me why my post went astray. It didn’t get posted, but at least I got my reaction off my chest. And this was from my new hi-zoot laptop with Windows 7, internet explorer 8…I know it couldn’t be my fault, could it? It does make me wonder if some problem with the host is why there are no comments to the outstanding Jan 24 Adam Smith piece.
Bill,
After one of my posts to a blog was swallowed by the Great Unknown, I started writing my posts using Word first. Then I just posted a copy of my text from the Word document. Now I don’t have any more disasters. (The spell checking is handy also.)
Maybe they are waiting for a Christmas card?
http://startups.cringely.com/ doesn’t navigate for me because it uses javascript – which I disable because it is misused so much today.
Oops. Maybe that’s because I am using Google DNS servers?
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I like your site.
I’m twiddling my thumbs as I read this article, hehe. I guess I am really perplexed in the information at hand. Kudos to you for making my head hurt.
nice post! I really like the style of your blog.
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We install mail servers (and have done for many years) SORBS has, more than once, been the bane of my life as we have wrestled with them to try and get customers de-listed from their clutches.
They are horrific to deal with and a waste of time trying to.
I wish people would not refer to them, there are a lot more honourable blacklist providers out there.
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I’m going to write about this same thing on my blog. Thanks!
Welcome to the cloud. I block complete ranges of IP’s from Amazon. For me, it is not email spam, but rouge agents. I actually like the arrangement because I can pre-emptively block up and coming agents before they are known. It really reduces content thievery from scrapers.
I was reading something else about this on another blog. Interesting. Your position on it is diametrically contradicted to what I read earlier. I am still contemplating over the opposite points of view, but I’m tipped heavily toward yours. And no matter, that’s what is so great about modernized democracy and the marketplace of thoughts on-line.good
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I was reading something else about this on another blog. Interesting. Your position on it is diametrically contradicted to what I read earlier..
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[…] might otherwise remain silent in class. This is certainly the experience of Democrasoft, a startup I have written about before that seems to have stumbled on a whole new class of software for […]
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I hadn’t heard of Demacrosoft, interesting….cool article. I hate when pages don’t load, drives me crazy.
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[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Collaborize, Rinse, Repeat – Cringely on technology[…]…
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