[94694] in North American Network Operators' Group
internet idealism (Re: what the heck do i do now?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Vixie)
Thu Feb 1 15:37:32 2007
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Paul Vixie <vixie@vix.com>
Date: 01 Feb 2007 20:31:25 +0000
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0701312016440.4020@evccyr>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
brian@meganet.net (Brian Wallingford) writes:
> Ultimately, the problem is that the idealism which was more or less the
> rule a decade ago has taken a backseat to commercialism ...
i dunno about that. i see a lot of idealism still. volunteers at spamhaus,
and within the da/mwp community, and at cymru, are still going quite strong.
and in an odd twist of fate's knife, i still hold the "cix.net" domain which
was very quiet until COX went into the internet business a few years back.
since "i" and "o" are adjacent in qwertyland, i get a whole lotta misdirected
e-mail, including a lot of 1x1 correspondance from folks who mistyped their
source-email-address in their e-mail reader and then proceeded to correspond.
rather than bounce it all, i answer it with the following template:
there is no such person here at cix.net.
try cox.net.
re:
and then i include-all the mail they sent to me by mistake. eventually i
got tired of explaining to the senders why "paul@vix.com" was answering their
e-mail, and so i started forging the source of my response to be the cix.net
address they were trying to reach. i've got it all down to a couple of MH-E
keystrokes and macros and e-lisp functions now. i just don't like the idea
of bouncing the stuff outright, since a lot of the senders will never guess
what went wrong. (i also appreciate the extra spam, for robot-training use.)
it's only a dozen messages a day, on average, and thus: idealism isn't dead.
--
Paul Vixie
