What does the moral say about cleaning up content on a browser level, when communities refuse doing it for you?

During a very long period some of us has been waiting for a web browser based plugin, that makes it possible to block/remove unwelcome text and content, on for example Facebook. In the beginning, this was all about tests, chainletters, and stuff that was only irritating, for the people reading it.

Time flies by and requests for other filtering functions have starting to pop up that, instead of stupid chainmail, is about politics that only affects the content and not the user (meaning, only the content are blocked and the friend spreading it is not blocked). Still, the content filter is quite free to control, so this is eventually not a problem as the filtering are completely controlled by the user.

However, another aspect of this flow are currently taking form: Is it morally OK to block material with a political agenda? Should you really allow this kind of propaganda be left alone in silence? Even if you and I as persons choose to remove the information from our timelines/flows, the information will still be left there for others to read (and in that form it will become unstoppable). It is with a bit of caution I touch this area, as it might be a very sensitive matter. Therefore I’m looking for questions and feedback for this case.

The plugin is still planned to be built and the work, even if it hasn’t really started yet, can hopefully close up to a start in short. So as said, some kind of feedback would be very great to get here, since things that is left alone in silence, tend to grow big. And soon, it becomes too big to gain control over again.

We’re working on it…

Currently there’s a few steps left before we can release the new portal system (as shown via the test site at https://www.tornevall.net) and the new portal configurator (Test site located at https://auth.tornevall.com). The old platform for handling DNS Blacklists became deprecated as the development of NetCURL (https://www.netcurl.org) have been highly upgraded to fit other (ecommerce) needs. The behaviour of netcurl is backward compatible, but the DNS blacklist and portal software really needed a facelift anyway.

I’ve been looking for a platform that I can handle easier than the self built, and got stuck into a million of alternatives. However, the forum platform is still there, since there are too many posts and history behind. So those parts can’t be replaced (yet). Besides, if everything goes well, there might be no need of doing so.

So what’s left before a release? Actually, TorneAPI (3.0) is ready to go live and the applications built in the API is also very dynamic. As I proceed more things will be added to it and currently, the big focus is the DNS Blacklist, FraudBL and NETFILTER.

DNSBL Removals might not get any effect

For a few days ago, our old datastore got obsolete in a few hours, so we moved all data to a new server. It became clear during one manual request of removal, that there might be problems with the database version that the API runs against – so currently we’re working on a fix for this, by for now upgrading to a newer version.

Update: Removals works again!

Rebuilding again, for the sake of NETFILTER

As Tornevall Networks is still missing a proper CMS, there will be no forward progress for some highly important internal progress, unless there is another way around this (the lack of time is currently big). Some of the projects (NETFILER, amongst some, that was initially – for a few years ago – written to stop spamming) are way too important to hold back furthermore.

A restructure of those projects is upcoming, since the most important functionality at current, are the ability to authorize users to those applications. When this part is on place, we can actually initiate “some kind of” production for the data shares. There is also a huge need of more people and members, that can join and help making this project great!

Join us through the NETFILTER Project site.

DNSBL & FraudBL rule updates

As of 22 October, we have changed the behaviour of message analyzing.

If a message contains known hosts, discard the message as already listed but reset “deleted”-dates and relist if necessary.

Messages are no longer discarded with a “already listed”. This behaviour was built to save data storage. Data storage is a problem, but we have to live with that even if some cases is automatically solved by our orphan-cleaner (DNSBL-46). So, for each message found as “already listed”, we are incrementing the hostcount. This means that, the more hits from a server the harder rules are applied on the host.

Source: DNSBL-54

Release Notes – DNSBL 5.0.2

It has been alive for a while, but since we’re starting on v5.0.3 today, here’s also the official release notes for DNSBL 5.0.2

Release Notes – Tornevall Networks DNSBL Project – Version EP-DNSBL-5.0.2

Bugs

  • [DNSBL-27] – When extended information is active and deleted items are shown
  • [DNSBL-47] – Undefined indexes in curl removal tests
  • [DNSBL-51] – API removal allows multiple removals on delisted address and adds penalty if more than one request is sent

Task

  • [DNSBL-26] – Removal tool via http
  • [DNSBL-30] – Permanent deletion of local addresses
  • [DNSBL-32] – Need navbar for DNSBL-web
  • [DNSBL-36] – Removal penalties for returning hosts
  • [DNSBL-37] – Penalty timer reset after 180 days
  • [DNSBL-38] – Penalty timer should show up on delisting-homepage
  • [DNSBL-39] – Release of PenaltyBL
  • [DNSBL-44] – Purge host instead of delist in API

DNSBL with FraudBL

dnsbl.tornevall.org v5.0.0 has just been released so we are now fully synched with FraudBL. The docs regarding the API has been updated, which you can read here: http://docs.tornevall.net/x/EYBu.

There is an ongoing project with TorneLIB which has a standalone project for handling our API. It’s not ready for release, but you can review the upcoming script at the dev-site here!

If you recently contacted us about removal and you seem to be relisted, the release of version 5 may be the cause, and the fact that some hosts has not been properly updated in both our databases.

dnsbl@tornevall.org