[conspire] stupid filters / security outsourcing

[Michael Paoli]

> Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2016 09:58:06 -0700
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: [conspire] (forw) SCUMWARE.org: report about your site has
> 	been removed (#6800)
>
> 'We are not responsible for marking files as harmful because anti-virus
> software does it.'  As I said, outsourced security is _really stupid_.

Yes, I find such nanny-gate proxies/filters mostly just generally highly
annoying.  And they really don't work very well anyway.  Really highly
stupid how many of them are.  E.g. in various work environments, I
often find such stupidity.  Makes no practical sense.  Some typical
semi-random examples ... go to http://www.sf-lug.org/ ... one such
crud "security" system blocks the main .jpg image on the site!  Why?
Anything harmful there?  No, not at all.  It's just once-upon-a-time,
a really stupid operating system had a stupid security bug, where having
the web browser load .jpg images, if the image was malicious ... total
system compromise.  So, ... dumb security filter filters out all .jpg images
from all non-witelisted sites ... even though that particular stupid bug
in that particular stupid operating system had been corrected more than a
decade earlier.
Other typical example - I go searching out technical information, answers
to something quite relevant and work related, ... and about 1/3 of the
highly relevant web pages are blocked ... because, oh my gosh, the
sites aren't whitelisted, ... or, heaven forbid, they do or did once
upon a time contain the string "hack" somewhere in their text, or,
oh my, "mafia" in the domain name.  Really?  How stupid can they
get? ... maybe I ought not ask, as I'm sure some of 'em will get
more stupid.  <sigh>

Ah, thanks, ... good to know there's a nice list of such stupidity,
thanks for including the link!

> I now have 'Malware Check' on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Web/ linking to a
> bestiary of all the main bot-driven moronic places on the Web that
> catalog 'potentially malicious Web sites'.  (And yes, I worked through