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Re: Reminder of L3GO meeting a week from today.

On Thu, Feb 12, 2026 at 08:22:44PM -0500, Matthew Charette via sigs-l3go wrote:
> No, it ain't benign. I was just young enough to score this email address as
> a beta tester. F me? Lol :)
> 
> RGB et all, what trust in the chain is being violated? You shouldn't have
> any problems with a mailing list and as arrogant as this sounds, I can
> probably wrestle the giants into submission -- but I don't have anonymized
> logs to work with. I currently have the attention of my MPP etc. RGB, et
> all, good sirs, what the heck is going on with email? It must be a cert
> chain that gets invalidated from one of the megacorps who don't do any due
> diligence, unless I'm way off base.

The issue that mailing lists run into are the random bounces at time of
SMTP delivery.  The megacorps think their spam filters are better than
everything else.  Sometimes it's a bounce because the From: line comes
from a Linux developer in China.  Sometimes it's a regex matches against
something in the body of the message that's impossible to discern, even
thought it's blatantly obvious that the body of the email is a patch
against the Linux kernel.

Regardless, there is no way to report false positives and no way to get a
false positive delivered to the subscriber once this occurs.  The end
result is that the spam filter is not acting in the user's best interest
as the user has no control over it.  User's don't get to see the content
that has been blocked at that stage; it's not their choice.

Meanwhile, the megacorps are allowed to send out spam without recourse.
There have been ongoing issues of spam being relayed through google for at
last 6 months where it gets relayed through their own SMTP servers because
of inadequate filtering of bounces and other subtle relay attacks.
Postfix makes it pretty much impossible to use the same SMTP server for
ingress and relay because of configuration limitations and the fact that
signatures are done via milters rather than being natively baked into
postfix.  Email is a mess after decades of band-aids.

Naturally all the spam I receive has valid SPF, DKIM and whatever the
current flavour of the weak attempt at sender validation has been blessed
by the megacorps.  Or it is signed by Google's own mail servers.

The complete and total lack of regulation of online ads are an even bigger
issue for me personally.  There is no accountability for ads for scams.
Once upon a time broadcasters self regulated through organizations like
the Advertising Standards Council.  Google and Facebook will show any ad
to any person you want to target so long as you pay a few fractions of a
penny for the privileged, and they'll target it so that only vulnerable
seniors in a house will see it because that's the kind of parameters can
be controlled in an "advertising campaign".

Users should have control over the systems they own / use (which applies
to devices like John Deer tractors, too!).  If they want to only see ads
online approved by the Advertising Standards Council, the user should be
able to tell Google or Facebook to do that.  If they want to see videos or
social media posts only in chronological order, the user should be able to
do so.  Users should be making the choice for what they want, not the
choice that maximizes whatever parameter best meets the current priority
of the biggest corporations in the world.  None of this is hard to do!

Cory Doctorow made a number of good points for the direction that Canada
should take in his recent Disenshittification Nation posting at
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-29-post-american-canada-ottawa-0a9df32d23f7
.  It's worth a read.

Cheers,

		-ben
-- 
"Thought is the essence of where you are now."
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