Saturday, October 8, 2011

This is getting under my skin

The protests on Wall street and around the country are all over the news right now. people are angry and I understand why, I even agree with them a bit being left leaning myself. And in all honesty regardless of whether or not I agree with the group it does make me a bit happy to be an American when I see people exorcising their rights in such a way. The fear I had for my generation is that nothing would ever really shatter the apathy most of us seem to have to the point that we could not contain it any more. And second was that even if people were moved enough to actually do something, all they would know how to do is post on Facebook and twitter about how angry they were, at best maybe produce a blog post. Over all the protests have been nonviolent, ordered, and productive, its true there have been some incidents ( the pepper spraying of protesters in New York comes to mind) but to date there have been no riots, no  rubber bullets, and no one has had a fire hose turned on them.

And then I heard something from a few weeks back that just didn't sit right with me, it appeared that Yahoo mail was blocking e-mails that contained the OccupyWallst.org address. the first place I read about it was here on Slashdot, which I visit because there are sometimes interesting tidbits, its not a reputable news outlet though. I followed the links to two websites that though I might agree with their obvious bias, I did not consider to be trustworthy news sources. So I did a little research and found This which contained the official explanation and apology from yahoo.

The whole thing appears a little fish to me in honesty, Yahoo's explanation of the event was missing any real details of what happened, and I don't buy the excuse that the spam filter was turned up too high. To the best of my knowledge no one else reported having their e-mails blocked, I could be wrong though. Maybe Yahoo did just mess up, if that's the case in the end no harm done, but if they intentionally dropped traffic like that, people should be angry. I for one am deleting my Yahoo account.

5 comments:

  1. But, where will I send all my 'exorcised' email if I delete my yahoo account?

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  2. But that would mean signing up for an account. And I swore I'd never do that again after that one night...

    ReplyDelete
  3. So since I recently switched to supporting people on the domain registration front I have a certain degree of insight. Aol, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, & Comcast all have this habit in the recent year to block entire mail servers rather than just a particular site itself if there is too much spam coming from a particular server to them. We have a batch of Mail Servers that keep getting blocked by these companies and have to continually request server removal from them which takes about 3 days before customers emails get through.

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Darkkender I do see your point and that may have been what was going on. though the only reports seem to indicate that it was the body of the message not where it was being sent was the issue. Also if other messages had been dropped I would be less concerned, if no one had been able to e-mail a link during that time then I would be more likely to take what yahoo says at face value. Either way there hasn't been an explanation beyond "our spam filter was too sensitive" and that is what really bothers me. Either they are being unintentional vague, or they are hiding behind a slightly technical sounding answer.

    ReplyDelete