comcast blocking smtp25

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Don Levey <lug at the-leveys.us> wrote:
>   Snooping on email?  What makes you think that you're not still
> vulnerable?  They still own the hardware, up to the point it connects
> to your house.  They could, if they want, capture all the packets
> that enter/leave your home.  Sending encrypted email might help - with
> both situations.

It's perhaps worthwhile to note that there's another reason that ISPs
have blocked ports 25 and 80: Ownership of the files. There have been
numerous discussions of this on music-related lists for example.

The prime case was a couple of years ago,  when  msn.com  was  caught
extracting things (mostly images) from customers' web sites and using
them in ads.  When this got publicised and  customers  got  outraged,
msn's  reply  was to point to the fine print in their contract, which
said that any files stored on their servers became  the  property  of
msn.

It  really  hit  the  fan  when this got publicised, and msn publicly
backed down. However, people have pointed out that their rewording of
the   contract  mostly  had  the  result  of  obfuscating  the  legal
situation.  Lawyers have said that they  are  likely  still  claiming
copyright  on  any files on their servers, but now it'll take a court
case to settle the issue due to the legal language used.

The effect of this is that there's a  high  likelyhood  that  if  you
store  anything, even "in transit", on an ISP's servers, you may very
well have assigned the copyright to them.  This is an obvious  threat
to musicians who are putting their music online.  It also potentially
affects anyone  whose  livelyhood  depends  somehow  on  "publishing"
anything.   Writers,  journalists, researchers, and so on.  There's a
good  chance  that  if  something  you  make   becomes   commercially
successful,  your  ISP can come along and sue you for violating their
copyright on the fragments that you stored on their servers.

They probably couldn't make a copyright  claim  on  the  contents  of
single IP packets. But if any of your files are financially valuable,
you may want to think twice before  allowing  them  to  reside,  even
temporarily, on your ISP's servers.