[Wikipedia-l] Re: URGENT: blocking open proxies

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 6/4/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at 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.