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Bagby

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Everything posted by Bagby

  1. make that "AS logically and morally unsound.")
  2. (Haven't visited here in a while since happily disabling the IP blocker.) Are you the good guys, or not? if you believe in evenhanded treatment, fairness, and the like, then you must publish the list of who you're blocking so that those who are innocent and wrongly blocked can find out about it and try to get off your list. If that tells the bad guys, then it tells the bad guys and so what? They will take steps to circumvent it? If you're doing this even halfway right, you're policing that list a couple of times a day anyway, and you've got at least one person assigned full-time to maintaining it. You have an absolute duty to assure than any address on it currently belongs on it. You should be several steps ahead of the black hats anyway. What shocks me is that if one of the black hats DOES move on, the old IP he used to use is still being blocked, now without any justification at all. If you aren't reviewing the list semi-daily, how often ARE you reviewing it? How long WILL it take before that innocent IP gets removed? Will it ever, if nobody finds out you're blocking it and complains to you? Melodramatic, a couple of you have called the complaint? It may not be dramatic enough. Once you're on MBAM's list, you're guilty until proven innocent, and you can't even find out that you're on the list -- MBAM's not forthright enough to say, "We're blocking you because we think you're a malware site". No, you just get blocked without notice. It may take you months to find that out, and to straighten out the error with MBAM. (It is the basic idea, not just implementations of it like Blackhole, that is at fault. Blackholing did not WORK, as well as being wrongheaded. Bayesian filtering is far more effective and at least has the potential to learn and to be far more accurate. And the implementation itself is horrendous: If you're guilty, you just move on. You were probably planning to do that anyway; but if you're innocent, you get undeservedly punished until you figure it out and get it fixed. The innocent are treated worse than the guilty.) How does MBAM propose to make a screwup right? You've blocked someone innocent for months, you were dead wrong about it, and you lacked the fortitude to reveal what you're doing so they could at least find out and try to talk to you about it. You've repeatedly called that IP a malicious site when it never was.You've diverted a chunk of their traffic wrongfully for a long time. That may well have been the difference between success or failure of an innocent web site. And this could easily be for something as simple as a typo or a transposition. How are you going to make that right? Nevermind legalities, though in a better world they could and should sue your asses off for libel. Let's talk about fundamental fairness, something in the general direction of justice. How are you going to undo the damage, the wrong, the harm you've done to the innocent? Please don't tell me that you think the end justifies the means. MBAM should abandon the IP blocklist forthwith, and logically and morally unsound.
  3. I think there's more than that to be done. Much more. Here in the USA, we've saddled ourselves with this evil thing called a "no-fly list". Nobody knows who is responsible for this list, or how you get on it, nor how you can get off it, or who you can sue for being put on it by mistake. The list has included young (like, too young to walk) children, politicians, and many completely innocent people. But if you're on this list, you're not allowed to board an airplane. And you can't get off the list. MAMB hos this secret no-fly list equivalent in their IP blocker. It needs to become completely transparent, with editable whitelists and blacklists, opt-out features and an explanation of why default blacklist sites are there. Years ago, a misguided organization called "blackhole" was created with the idea of isolating malicious sites. It was extended to email. Unfortunately it wasn't policed adequately, and addresses could be added in direct violation of its stated policies. To some users, "spam" included any email they didn't want now, even if they had signed up for it in the first place. To others, if they had any trouble removing themselves from a list they'd signed up for, well, that was now spam too. Using that list meant that other members of those lists, who did want that email, found it blocked. Things like job listings from HotJobs (then a viable organization) were being blocked because somebody somewhere was too clueless to figure out how to resign from the list, so decided to report it as spam to get it blocked. The list allowed this. HotJobs had to regularly demonstrate, AGAIN, that they weren't spammers and in the meantime people weren't seeing job listings. A blocklist is a weapon. If you can get a competitor's site onto the list, they can be badly hurt by it. Sure, you can say you're sorry and take them off of it after enough complaints, but the damage is done and you can't undo it or make it right again. A blocklist can all too easily become an instrument of oppression whether you intended it that way or not. You need to be terribly careful with a blocklist. You need to make it as open and as transparent as you possibly can, and you need to police it regularly, more often than daily. You need to make absolutely certain that every site on it belongs there, and you need to stand up for your mistakes when you make them instead of hiding behind anonymity. It's a full time job for more than one person, just to manage such a list adequately. Many have tried this and failed miserably. Anyone can already get most of this blocking functionality in the freeware PeerGuardian2. Anyone who wants it should install that. (I don't recommend it, I think this, like email blacklists, is a dead-end approach and have long ago uninstalled PG2 myself.) Malwarebytes should give this up, not try to go head-to-head with Bluetack/PG2 et al., in their area of specialization, and go back to malware. Malwarebytes doesn't have the time or the people to do this right, and it's better not done at all than done poorly. Thankfully, there's the registry edit so I can completely disable IP blocking in MAMB, but I think Malwarebytes should pull the IP blocking feature out of all future releases. This isn't their arena and they aren't equipped to compete in it.
  4. Version 1.41 has come and been installed, and I still get these completely pointless balloons about blocked IP addresses popping up, after every reboot, until I tell it to shut up again. I reboot frequently. This has become an enormous pain in the ass. I've already got far too many balloons popping up as it is. You said this was going to be fixed with 1.41. Since it wasn't, when will it be fixed? I'd like a special release for just this one problem. Drop everything, fix this. The product obviously wasn't adequately tested, and never should have been released this way. Since it was anyway, what with all of the other complaints about it on this forum, the issue should have been a top priority to be fixed in 1.41. Since it still hasn't been, it's now an emergency. I didn't want this, didn't ask for it, can't even go back to a previous version where it's not a problem because I get forcibly upgraded whether I want it or not. I waited patiently for three weeks (you told me it would be one week) for 1.41 (you told me this would be fixed there), only to find it still has not been cleaned up. Frankly, I'm out of patience. If I don't get a fix for this immediately, I'll be uninstalling the product and badmouthing it appropriately. Color me very unhappy.
  5. I can turn IP protection off, but it turns itself back on at every reboot. It's little notifications are really annoying. I'd rather go back to version 1.39 where this wasn't an issue. Where can I get previous versions of the software? The download page seems to point only to the latest version, on CNET. Is there an archive somewhere?
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