[ale] Speedfactory now requires mail contents to be readable

[Jerald Sheets]

I seem to recall something of that nature back in the Prodigy suit.   
(wanna see my "old-fart" card?)

Unfortunately, liability meets that of being declared a "publisher"  
and culpable for what your users say as well as being a good  
policeman on your network and being responsible also for what your  
users do.

I would offer that the liabilities are such that they are taking  
steps to control what they *can* control by any means they have  
available to them.

Jerald M. Sheets jr.
Sr. UNIX Systems Administrator
The Weather Channel Interactive
404.293.8762



On Dec 28, 2005, at 1:18 PM, Robert Story wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Dec 2005 11:06:27 -0500 Jerald wrote:
> JS>  It is in Speedfactory's best interest to do
> JS> this type of automated scanning, so as to escape culpability in  
> the
> JS> spread of viruses and trojans, as well as staying off various
> JS> blacklists hither and yon.
>
> I don't know about that. Once they start inspecting content,  
> doesn't that make
> them *more* culpable? What's next, rejecting mail with dirty words  
> that might
> offend someone? Or PGP encrypted messages?  If I were a  
> speedfactory customer,
> I'd be screaming bloody murder, and checking my terms of service.
>
> It's one thing for a company to have a policy to reject or quarantine
> reception of encrypted zip files, but another thing entirely for an  
> ISP to
> block sending them.
>
> All this will do is teach people to rename the file to '.txt', with
> instructions to rename the file back to '.zip' to get to it. Once  
> this becomes
> the SOP, it won't be long before the virii employ the same methods  
> to lure the
> clueless into their trap.