On 6/4/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Brion regularly sends complaint letters to apparently relevant parties. The success rate is not very confidence-inspiring.
A significant number of providers *just don't care*.
This cuts both ways. Mindspillage and I edit from a roadrunner cable modem a lot of the time, and a few months ago we received an IP listed in one of the openproxy lists.
This kept me from logging into a couple of IRC networks from home, but it wasn't a huge inconvenience to me because I could just ssh into something elsewhere on the internet.
It had been listed almost a year before we'd received the address, and of course we are not running an open proxy. The requirement from the open proxy list to be delisted was for someone authoritative for the netblock to contact them, so they ignored all contact from me. Even after I ran into an engineer from my upstream at NANOG I was unable to get them to send a darn email. ... Eventually we got a new IP and the problem was gone.
Had we been joe random, unable to just come from another IP, and had wikipedia been using that open relay list you very likely would have lost a contributor.
I think we must ultimately accept that blocking can not exclude someone from our community, and that is it not desirable to use it as a punitive measure, and only somewhat effective as a technical measure. Jumping through huge hoops to close every loophole will, ultimately, be as futile as a vandal trying to keep his bad edits in... and likely to cause lots of harm to others.