WARNING - READ THIS DISCLAIMER

This is a personally owned and privately operated system. You have no rights here.
Any mail entering this system not intended for a mail list becomes the sole property of Attrition.org or the staff members here. By mailing any member of Attrition.org, you forfeit any claim of copyright. Email, book reviews, movie reviews, music reviews, commentary, and all other submitted work become copyrighted to Attrition.org staff. Email confidentiality agreements and disclaimers are considered invalid for mail coming into this system. By emailing anyone on this system, you agree not to use such bogus disclaimers. Further, you agree not to send email containing HTML content or any executable content. Emailing anyone at Attrition.org denotes your agreement with these rules. Don't agree? Then don't mail us.

We block systems that send us spam. If you are having a problem mailing us and keep getting an insulting error, you are sending mail from a machine or mail relay that has sent us spam in the past. Inactive administration causes these systems to stay blocked. Feel free to mail us if you think this is unfair or would like the block lifted, but don't hold your breath. Please note, many users here run spam filters such as SpamAssassin or Bogofilter, and even an unnamed front-end spam filter that has over a 99% block rate. If you send mail to us and it doesn't get answered in a few days, verify your mail doesn't have characteristics or signatures of spam. For the spam harvest software that doesn't actually read pages, enjoy our harvest page.

We like RFC standards when they suit us.

We will block incoming mail (SMTP) traffic as we see fit. Domains that do not follow RFC guidelines will be blocked. Specifically, not following RFC 2142 (section 4) and RFC 2821 (section 4.5.1) will result in your entire domain being blocked from sending us email. We don't care if you are a national ISP with a few million customers.

We will block incoming web (HTTP) traffic as we see fit. Browsers/clients that spoof user agents or HREF's will also be blocked at our discretion. Specifically, not following RFC 1945 (section 10.13 and 10.15) or RFC 2616 (section 14.36 and 14.43) will result in your domain or client being blocked. We understand that "wget happens", but not throttling page retrieval may adversely affect your ability to access this site via our actions (e.g. iptables --dport 443 -j REJECT).

Significant domains/subnets being blocked from reaching this network:

dsl-verizon.net

The colors on this web site may not be friendly to you, but they can be overridden by your own CSS if you desire. If this is confusing to you, spend time reading up on CSS files instead of mailing us. Section 508 is a relevant statute concerning availability of resources for those affected by the ADA. Note that it covers federal agencies in the U.S., but not does regulate personally owned web sites, which this is. This was further upheld by U.S. District Judge Patricia Seitz who ruled that ADA provisions only apply to physical space, not the Internet.

The mail lists we run and administer are done so on our own free time. We're not doing this to deal with hundreds of emails due to your stupidity. You will be removed from any/all mail lists at our discretion, without warning, as we see fit. Some of the things that can lead to this:

Implementing dumb auto-responders or vacation programs.
Using a mail system with quota problems.
Using systems with DNS more flaky than our own.
Sending insipid comments and replying to every piece of mail.
Using mail forwarding and systems that do not follow RFC guidelines.

Our ISP is not responsible for our content. This has been the case for a long time and upheld in court repeatedly (see below). More recently, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) specifically states in Title II, Sec. 202, 512:

"(a) TRANSITORY DIGITAL NETWORK COMMUNICATIONS -- A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider's transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, or by reason of the intermediate and transient storage of that material in the course of such transmitting, routing, or providing connections, if-
``(1) the transmission of the material was initiated by or at the direction of a person other than the service provider;
``(2) the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider;
``(3) the service provider does not select the recipients of the material except as an automatic response to the request of an- other person;
``(4) no copy of the material made by the service provider in the course of such intermediate or transient storage is main- tained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily acces- sible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and no such copy is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordi- narily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer pe- riod than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections; and
``(5) the material is transmitted through the system or net- work without modification of its content.

For those who didn't read the legalese above, it states that ISPs are NOT liable for customer content. Previous case law further shows this is true:

Prodigy Prevails in Libel Suit
AOL Cleared of Defamation
CDA's ISP Protections Upheld
Blumenthal v America Online and Zeran vs America Online
Batzel vs Cremers/Smith (Jun 9, 2004)

If you try to mail our ISP they will have absolutely NO control over our content. If they threaten to drop our connection, we will move the content to another server outside the US, to a more friendly ISP with backbone or to a server in international waters (outside of any legal jurisdiction). In short, legal threats are NOT a valid tactic against us. We've gone up against bigger companies and government agencies than you, we guarantee it.

Likewise, Attrition.org is not responsible for individual user web page content.
This system may contain language, images, ideas, or philosophies that may be offensive to some, and a turn-on to others. This is your warning. If you do not wish to browse that type of material, hit your back button at least twice. Make sure there is no reference to 'attrition.org' in your location box. If you are unsure what this means, click here.
We really don't care. We don't need your feedback. Your flames, insults, begging and other tripe will potentially be used on our going postal page or sent to anyone we choose. We will include any portion of your mail on that page if we see fit, including full headers and X-Originating-IP if we choose. Let us repeat this so we are clear: WE DO NOT CARE.

If you have a complaint, question, problem, or anything associated with those words, mail us please. In case you are not aware, there is a Chain of Command for that sort of thing. Please address these grievances with us. We do not guarantee we will comply with your wish, but we will give it the due attention we feel it deserves. Polite and valid requests will be complied with quickly and professionally.