Please note the reply-to on this message and respect it. Someone has gone to the trouble and expense of creating a new mailing list just for the rbl discussion; we should use it. If you reply to other messages on this thread within nanog, please do the same "reply-to" thing I'm doing in the headers of this message.
Noone is treading on your rights, and what Paul is doing is not the act of a vigilante. Paul has not forced anyone to subscribe to his service. Paul could charge for this service. The fact that he chooses to provide this service for free (at significant personal expense, I might add) is testament to his community-mindedness. A vigilante is someone who takes the law into their own hands without consent of the effected parties.
It's not so much a testament to my community-mindedness as it is a testament to my unwillingness to manage another business. Once MAPS, LLC (yes, we did incorporate it recently) gets an executive director (applications welcome!) we will start charging fees to recover the costs of that person's salary and also the costs of full time people to track down spammers, write a web-based database (with deeper access allowed for paying subscribers than for lurkers), and answer the endless stream of telephone calls from people who want to get off of the list. And of course we need to buy some insurance. Again, please note, respect, and emulate the reply-to of this message. -- Paul Vixie <paul@vix.com>