re: is Internet access very far from being a "basic human right"?

As more and more things are becoming you have to do it on-line or they make it as hard as possible if you don't (e.g. applying for jobs, tax etc.) - I'd say it is getting closer to the stage where you require Internet access to function in our society/not be disadvantaged therefore closer to needing to be a "right"

I agree totally

Rights to free speech, movement, freedom from torture etc are basic human rights. The inalienable rights. Those we'd still have if we returned to the trees.

Everything else is merely a benefit of our technological age.

While I agree with you that it isn't at the top of the rights pyramid

Some Governments have put it in as a basic human right. I seem to remember that at least one Scandinavian country has done this.

However, I think they get cold and lonely up there.

Without checking facts...

... which I could perhaps do but since the article is a bit light on details anyway, here goes: Sometimes people, even by virtue of their job supposedly technically savvy people, will claim things like "can't access the internet" when their (users') email gets rejected with a "we don't like spamhaus listees here". That's one. Another is that spamhaus offers a "do not route or peer" list, in addition to their other lists of things to block. If network admins feed that into their routing configurations with a blackhole instruction, then that can cause pretty direct and curious failures beyond email rejections.

And yes, as someone who has on occasion monitored USENET groups like n.a.n-a.e, I can attest that plenty of people who found themselves on blocklists saw fit to "fight" that by mouthfrothing fury-fueled emails. So this nic.lv flunky's reaction doesn't really surprise me. Such a reaction is not a brilliant idea because it easily leads to ending up (forever) on countless private blocklists. Good luck getting off those since you don't know you're listed and don't know who to ask to get off. Unwise, yes, surprising, no.

Those latvians apparently let their contact info decay (sloppy), got bitten (happens), didn't believe it happened to them (oh well), and tried to bully spamhaus (that's gonna work). Now it's tears and complaints of high-handedness (like spamhaus is going to care), which even here in the comments appears to woe a few people who don't know what sort of flood of abuse shops like spamhaus deal with daily. I haven't had to deal with them, thankfully, but from what I've seen they're generally professionally detached and within the rules they put on their website. It's a clean operation in that respect, far more than some others I could mention.

Academics

I'm not any sort of expert on anti-spam measures, but I do know something about academics:

It all depends on which academics were involved. If the university department involved has just been through some radical cuts (and I believe the Baltic states have been very badly hit by the current financial crisis) it's quite possible that the only person who really understood how the thing worked had just been made redundant by those in charge, who really hadn't the slightest idea what the department was doing.

And/or the whole thing was passed on to the newest member of staff, who said they understood it, but didn't.

And/or running this department was a job for 20 working staff and there were only 3 of them - they ignored emails because they needed to sleep.

And/or there's a "who cares anyway?" culture in that department/university/country. "Oh, I never bother with abuse emails - they're more trouble than they're worth and usually just banging on about something we all have to put up with. Golf anyone?"

And/or there's at least one abusive spammer actually in the department/institution who's cleverer than the people who supposedly run the operation, and they just re-direct the email into the "junk" box. Crime pays a lot better than universities.

And/or no one in Latvia sees why this sort of thing merits that sort of response - they may regard spam busting as "Just these Health & Safety Nazis trying to ruin things for small countries in a difficult world."

There's probably a Latvian equivalent of the Daily Mail claiming on the front page that. "EU bureaucrats are trying to block Latvian free access to the Internet" (and yes, I know Spamhaus is not only non-EU, but not an official body of any kind." - and they may know, but why waste good propaganda?) and inside that some poor businessman is overwhelmed by spam and someone should do something about it. Meanwhile they have a centre spread about how Latvian taxpayers are supporting idle academics just to keep some unnecessary geek fiefdom going, and to impose a lot of fancy rules on "the rest of us."

I do not claim that any of these things is actually happening - I have no knowledge of the workings of this ISP in particular or of Latvia in general. But human nature, and the behaviour of human organisations - especially in times of stress - is rather easier to generalise about.

look in the mirror

Before blaming Eastern Europe look at the statistics of the most spamming countries:

http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso

@Allan George Dyer

"Living in Hong Kong I occasionally have to deal with such indiscriminate blocking,"

It's not indiscriminate. It just looks like it from your side of things ... from my side of things, it's kind of like Internet Judo ... "Bad" ISP throws a punch, I side-step it. "Bad" ISP throws another punch, I let it go again, but slap it on the way by. "Bad" ISP throws a third punch, and "bad" ISP finds itself on its arse, unable to communicate with me for the duration.

"and I wish you guys would make things a bit easier..."

And I wish the guys running the systems you're connecting thru' would stop allowing their systems to be a spam/malware sewer.

Again, I'm not spamhaus, nor do I use them, but I do protect my users.

Meta vs. micro, and the spammer mindset ...

"I'm not Spamhaus either, but I don't think they've ever blocked the whole of Hong Kong. Have you?"

Clearly, sir, you are unclear on the concept. I was discussing shielding my networks from IP ranges delivering spam/malware, regardless of country of origin. You, on the other hand, seem to be taking it personally.

"Anyway, if we agree to differ on whether blocking a whole country is indiscriminate"

Where did I write that I was blocking any "whole country"?

"do you have any comments on my three suggestions for improvements:"

Sure! I can comment on anything, if you ask :-)

"specificity;"

My blocklists are very specific ... but then, being IP address ranges they would be, wouldn't they?

"not blackholing;"

Why not? Seriously. When abuse comes from specific IP space, I drop IP packets from that IP space on the floor. I've been doing that since January 1, 1983[1]. I am protecting *my* network resources, which don't exist to make *your* network owners a profit.

"and providing abuse report templates in multiple languages?"

I'd love to. Are you offering to provide this service? Or are you suggesting that I should spend *MY* money to provide it?

[1] Prior to that, I was doing similar things with NCP traffic ...

Jake, Did you read the comment you were replying to?

I even titled my comment, "@David Eddleman and everyone else who indiscriminately block countries", and you took issue with my description of this practice as "indiscriminate".

When I get a problem reported to me, I investigate, sometimes I end up in contact with an admin that admits, "we block everything from Hong Kong/China/Asia because we get so much spam from there and our users don't have any legitimate contacts there". They are wrong - there's at least one legitimate contact, the one with the problem I'm investigating, and their users don't know what they are blocking on their behalf. If an admin (such as yourself) told me, "we blocked a /24 because of a spam source" I'd have strong words with my ISP - if they continued to allow their IP range to be abused by some customers, I'd take my business elsewhere, and publicise why.

Thanks for your answers...

specificity - good, but many other admins are not so discerning.

not blackholing - please refer to my original comment. I was referring to the practice of accepting an SMTP message, then blackholing it, which violates the RFC and prevents legitimate senders knowing their message has not been delivered. However, to extend that into a general principle: we should not respond to abuse of the network with measures that prevent legitimate users knowing that their communications have been disrupted.

multi-language abuse report templates - no, I'm suggesting that each local CERT could do it for the local languages. We're on a global network, so we need better ways to communicate with admins that don't speak the same language.

NCP - I guess you mean Network Control Program, not NetWare Core Protocol

@Allan George Dyer

Not arguing with you ... Just providing additional perspective.

I have dropped two /24s. Twice. They needed killing. You can probably guess who ;-)

Admins who reply to me and act on abuse reports are never blocked ... even if it takes a week's worth of back and forth email to get to the heart of the matter.

That said, dropping received email is not blackholing, and a waste of bandwidth. When you're in my DENY tables, your mail servers can't even see my network. Any & all IP packets from you are dropped on the floor with no reply. THAT is blackholing.

Disagree on multi-language abuse reports. Like it or not, just as Arabic drove early science, Latin (Koin Greek, Aramaic, et al) drove early Christianity, Deutsch drove later science (etc., I won't continue. You are quite welcome), American English is the lingua franca of teh intratubes.

Yes on NCP ... I'm an old fart. I'm surprised you knew it was "Program", not "Protocol".

..and another thing

Since when did where the email address of an upstream abuse contact was have anything to do with the IP blocks of a hosting provider? Is this article just badly written or have Spamhaus not heard of BGP?

Yes, well, no.

It's splitting hairs but fairly important. Spamhaus doesn't decide to act on the things they list, making blaming them for loss of service into blaming them for something they have no control over. In fact, if you'd sue them to force them to unlist you, you'd end up blocklisted in private blocklists with a snarky message telling you to sod off until the heat death of the universe. That's only unfair if you fail to realise that the internet is nothing but the continued co-operation of the operators that run all the internetworks that combine into "the internet". Failing to do the thing the rest of the internetworking world expected of you does that to you. Oh well.

Personally I have *no* spam filter on my email and I get very little spam, but then I'm very careful who I give that email address to. Speaking of failing the community: I do get some spam from a bunch of moreso than usually idiotic recruiters. *Everything* has been sent back through the appropriate contact, which is abuse at uk.uu.net. To no avail. Why am I not surprised?