Holy shit. I have Comcast email, and I will four about five more seconds.

:O

Is there no end?

~A!

Hmm. Legal action to follow? Why not? All these bozos understand is the after tax (which ain't much, these days) profit. Start making it expensive for them to try to screw around with us and maybe they'll get the hint: we're smarter than you, we're more technically hip than you, and anything you can do we can do better. Get used to it.

Why does this not surprise me? I already killed my cable conenction. I suggest that anyone who doesn't like being censored do the same.

And no, these things are not "automatic". Someone has to access the server and put this information in. If they were automatic you would have to assume that nobody would get mail about free drugs or diplomas anymore.

Just another piece of evidence that those who support Bush do NOT respect or have any concern for what the U.S. Constitution says and represents. Just like Bush and all of his cronies whose real g_d is the dollar.
New motto for the Republican Party: 'It isn't fascism when we do it'.

I am so sorry to post off-topic but I am so blown away by what I've just seen that I have to get it posted somewhere. I was just watching CNN (Friday 7/15 approx 6:30pm). Lou Dobbs was introducing a piece on Karl Rove. He said [paraphrased] "Rove said that he was NOT the source of Plame's name but that he was given this information by Novak. Betty Soandso has the report:" Then in the silence between the intro and the videotapeed story beginning you can CLEARLY hear a quiet "That's Bullshit"!!!

Hahahahahahah!!! Oh man, I rewound the Tivo 3 times before I could believe it was true. I've got it recorded now on a DVD-R. I've watched it many times now and there is absolutely no doubt that this went out live over CNN!!!!!!! At least, no matter how much CNN is trying to emulate FoxNews lately, someone there is apparently living in the reality-based community.

Walrus, please contact via Email so we can see about getting that posted.

Check out the DIVERSITY statement.

What Comcast did is illegal. Comcast should be prosecuted, and BRAD BLOG should investigate who made this decision at Comcast, and do a story on that person. And the story should include the reasons this person did this, and BRAD BLOG should link this story to how Corporate America is beholden to the Republicans.

This is big, and it's a huge discovery, and I salute whoever detected this. They think they can get away with anything! Then they tell us not to compare the Bush Administration to Hitler's ministry of propoganda. This Comcast travesty falls under the Bush Administration fake news reports, etc.......which draws a valid comparison to Hitler's & Goebbels ministry of propoganda. Who said we can't make this comparision? It's a valid comparision!

Is the email containing the "www.afterdowningstreet.org" string being straight-out deleted by Comcast? or is it just flagged as SPAM and put in the SPAM folder?

BRAD: Please post how many customers Comcast has...

Just a quick point of order:
"... "company policy" dictated he "can't engage with the press in any manner," but that he would ask the Comcast PR Department to get back to us."

This is true. As a former employee of Comcast, I can confirm that it is absolute corporate policy to refer to that particular market's PR department for all matters involving the press. What you will likely see is the local PR department refer back to the corporate PR department for guidance on how to respond to things. I don't know how responsive the PR department is at Corporate in Philly, but my contacts in Philly were pretty slow at getting back to me.

As for there being political motivation at being added to a spam filter, its plausible, but more likely it is an automatic process. Comcast has wrestled with overprotective spam blocking software before. They've had a few unsuccessful rollouts of Home Spam blocking software.

Here's the work around until the courts take care of the matter:

Go to dyndns.org
Create a URL reflector with a different name, use one of the dyndns's domain name. (i.e. afterdsm.homedns.dyndns.org) or some name thereabouts.

Change the address on the signature file and resend the emails.

Whaa-laa! A big middle finger at the company that is causing the problems. The filtering company will have a harder time filtering the stuff since dyndns.org is also used by alot of home users. Also if several random reflectors are created one can bypass the software logic.

P.S. there are several other URL reflectors out there as well and anybody who can get a hold of a DNS server can create a reflector as well.

I'm only suggesting dyndns.org because I use them.

I just posted on Americablog but will put here also. I sent three emails from my aol account to my comcast account.

The first email had the full name of the downingstreet website in the body of the email, but with a "d" in street. Spelling error.

The second email had the correct full name of the downingstreet website in the body of the email.

The third email had the ing removed from Downing when I typed the address in the body of the email.

The third email is the only one of the three that I have received. The website was not shown in the header of the email.

Dear Brad Blog,

It appears your site may be a target of this censorship, too. I attemted to send this info directly to my husband from your page, not ADS, and it did not get to him. Only after copying the link by itself, and sending it with a subject that had nothing to do with any of this, did it get to him.

Check it out. This is outrageous. As we speak, I am in the process of canceling my Comcast e-mail. Just want to make sure this gets to you, first.

T

SYSADMIN - The email is not reaching recipients at all.

BIG DAN - I don't currently have the number of customers of Comcast, but obviously it's millions.

Unfortunately, must prepare tomorrow's Radio Show right now, so may not be able to dig much more this evening...We will be having David Swanson on the show tomorrow night, however.

I have Comcast services. I will threaten cancellation if they don't get their shit together. At the very least, I could switch to DSL for internet services. I'll buy a new fucking modem if I have to. Although I'd have to be pushed pretty hard to get rid of cable TV, I might use that as my "nuclear option".

Anyhow,

Haven't waded through the whole Bradblog article, but this looks like Brad hit one straight out of the park with the frayed husk of the baseball shell lying in a smoking pile somewhere in the outfield.

Ho-lee crap. This is OUT rageous. I have Comcast cable. Time to switch to satellite.

Take of the tinfoil hats folks..

It's a spam filter and my guess is that too many people have been sending out similar messages to too many people that have reported it as SPAM.

http://www.BradBlog.com/...ages/emoticons/angry.gif

Bright Mail program... Symatec package...
Contract... No control, hmmmm...
Sounds like a 'plausible deniability' backdoor.
Wise guys, eh?

Dump your ComCast account and see how fast they can get 'control' over their contract and the Bright Mail program.
Geeze, bottom line is all these guys ever respond to.
Make it hurt, dear 6 or 7...

I just sent myself an email with www.afterdowningstreet.org in the body at my Comcast address and it went through just fine. Am I missing something, am I lucky, have they fixed it, or is there really a problem at all?

I just tested it to and from my comcast address after leaving an angry message at the number above. I also wrote to the Brightmail address and threatened a lawsuit for violation of interstate commerce. However, all my emails seemed to go through with no problem.

Maybe someone over there realized the shit was about to hit the fan and stopped their foolishness.

John (#19) should open his eyes and stop making excuses for Comcast ... unless John is doing PR for Comcast in which he should open his eyes and stop making excuses.

Winter Patriot, we aren't Republicans here. We don't need to slam someone just because they have a different take on things.

Brad, a Suggestion!

Comcast repays A.D.S. with free TV ads! How about when we call Comcast to bitch them out, we urge them to repay AfterDowningStreet with FREE ADVERTISING ON TV.

A.D.S. was a website serving a rapidly growing political movement, and by Comcast's blunder, the website's growth was stunted, and at the worst possible of times, as shit is hitting fans everywhere with the related story of Rovegate. Since Comcast is a huge media company, how about Comcast give A.D.S. some free TV ads to reach new people, so that the stunted growth may be corrected.

I don't know if this is a corny idea or not, but if you like it, and you endorse it, 6 or 7 of us might include that idea in our phone correspondence with Comcast.

Well, John,

You seem like a bright kid.
But probably more a propeller beenie kind-a-guy.
Let me if I can grasp your spam-angle, kay?
So a bunch of concern citizens sent a bunch of other people email with the ADS url in it - and this second bunch of some 46,000 people registered SPAM complaints cause the first group had pestered them with Downing Street Document information, kicking off the Bright Mail zapper.
That about right?

afterdowningstreet has an update thanking Symantec for fixing the problem. And I want to add my thanks to Symantec as well, because without this story I might not have discovered afterdowningstreet's excellent site!:

AfterDowningStreet.org Co-Founder and Democrats.com President Bob Fertik contacted a number of people this evening in the corporate communications office of Symantec, and they fixed the problem. Fertik issued this statement:

"I want to thank the Symantec Corporation for responding in real time upon being notified that their Bright Mail product was the source of the problem."

Personally, I'm a bit sensitive to the "tinfoil hat" moniker since it is derisive and used as a way of steering people from the truth. Did Bushco rig the election? All facts seem to indicate so. Yet the righties smeared and belittled the truthtellers by labeling them conspiracy theorists.

So if it's a spam filter issue, fine. But we've all seen Bushco wield its axe to squash dissent, so it's not a stretch at all to think it could be deliberate.

In fact, at this point, I am automatically suspicious of every single thing those liars say and do. I'm also starting to doubt the official 9-11 story. Did Bushco stage 9-11 themselves to fulfill the prophecy of the PNAC manifesto, which indicated they needed "new Pearl Harbor"? Or did they simply allow it to unfold by turning an intentional deaf ear? Either way, it's clear these people will stop at nothing.

So the tinfoil hat stays on.

Wow, I have comcast cable, and email. I wonder what else they are keeping from me. My Website
www.thehollywoodliberal.com gets hundreds of visitors, yet I get virtually NO email at all, (except for a bunch of spam, when I first started I was getting a decent amount of email to the site, despite having only a small fraction of the traffic.
There prices are the highest in town too. Thats it I'm done with those bastards

Just a thought... if you switch to satellite... Don't switch to Direct TV. It's owned by Murdock (same as Faux). Also no progressive news. DISH satellite has progressive news/public interest show. I am in the process right now of ridding my self of Direct TV and switchinto to DISH.

Control of the Internet. Guess it wasn't progressing quickly enough. Kiddie porn wasn't sufficient justification, so time to roll out the big guns.
Taking the London bombing story at face value for a moment: It's so difficult to change the system legally and politically, you can understand the frustration and temptation for a more direct approach.
London bombings: Randon thoughts
Doubt if a backpack will be such a hot fashion item for the immediate future.
At least you'll be able to get a seat on the Tube in rush hour.
One of Blair's worries (besides being rumbled and lynched) must be race riots. Because Britain to Muslims is like China to dogs: You've got to watch your back all the time.
"It's got all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda" BBC endlessly tells us. But the type of explosive has changed at least four times. Embarassaing for a network when the spooks can't get their story together. It's had as much to do with al-Qaeda as Whittard's Gunpowder Green Tea has to do with Guy Fawkes.
Can't even get consistency on transliteration spelling of al-Qaeda.

Comcast fixed the problem in 1 hr and 42 minutes. Looks like we have some clout.

Pay no attention to ANYTHING Comcast says about how this thing got filtered. I have Comcast...and I got (till I changed email addresses) dozens of obvious spam every day. I mean, with words like "Sexually explicit" in the subject header! Spelled correctly!

I wrote the them and got an automated reply telling me how to turn the spam filter on (which, of course, it was). I replied back and got the same reply. I did this four or five times until the replies stopped.

Some spam is caught, but LOTS of it isn't, so for ADS to be in the filter, they must have focused on it. Unless they want to claim that ADS sent out more spam than "Sexually Explicit".

I just sent 2 emails to a Repub friend. If he doesn't get either one of them, we'll know.

to: ...jIM cIRILE..... I'm with you. I've had my foil hat on now for a while. And all evidence does point to bushco. complicity in 911 and much else. So why not comcast. It would only take one person to enter the name into the spam filter. One POS neocon.

Just did a test with http://afterdowningstreet.org in subject and the body from & to my multiple email addresses, comcast.net, .mac, yahoo, hotmail and they came in... finally.
Maybe comcast 'got the message'.

Yep that's it.

The VRWC strikes again, another perfect Rovian storm.

The people using media blaster and the blogs are mass mailing (SPAMING) and it's getting reported. Next time think before mailing stuff to a bunch of people who may NOT want to hear about what you're mailing.

Hey did ya hear about that moon landing hoax?

According to the ADS site, Bright Mail was the source of the problem, and it has now been fixed.

That's confirmed RE. Please see the update I just posted to this item.

Thanks to all who made noise!

My email to Comcast ;
Dear Sirs,
I understand that your company (Symantec) thinks it is acceptable to block emails to me from afterdowningstreet.org. Unless you are able to prove that they are responsible for spamming in a court of law, I suggest you cease and desist from violating the lawful communications between two private parties. In addition, I am removing the link to your website from our ISPs suggested software page. Such actions are truly despicable and are indicative of a policy that is both abusive and illegal. Needless to say, such actions reflect poorly on your company.

--
Sincerely,
Robert McLendon
robertXXXXXX@comcast.net
VelocityOnline

We should be prepared for a total lockdown of the internet. Some other organised method of communication will have to be established. It is apparent(with few exceptions) that the US media is essentially at war with the people and we should be fighting back. How about a 24/7 protest vigil outside of the Fox building in New York?
A while ago, I read how the Carlysle(sp?) Group was buying up as many phone companies as they can. This is a dangerous cabal.
What we saw with Comcast is probably a test. I will be cancelling my Comcast on monday.

Since this was a Brightmail problem, then I guess us Earthlink customers would have been affected also. However with Earthlink if it was tagged as spam, the email goes into a "spam" box. Furthermore, I could have whitelisted the offending address and thus when it came to me it would have come straight through as regular email because it wouldn't be flagged as spam.

Doesn't Comcast allow its customers to access their spam box? Just a thought.

btw my email is separate from my internet access, as I have changed the hosts from time to time - but the email always remains the same.

RDW #30 -

Not so, RDW. I have DirecTV and it hosts Link TV, which carries DemocracyNow!, Mosaic, and lots of wonderful progressive programming - all viewer-funded, BTW.

If it is true that comcast is blocking emails why don't they move theri company to china where they would better fit in with the censorship there. For myself and my house we will use another email address and be clod=sing service with comcast.

If others boycot the comcast service thats up to them. We feel our constitutional rights to free speech should be defended vigorously. As a Veteran it is my opinion that this sort of thing serves our country badly and the democratic republic we all are loyal to.

I guess since the government wrote the 1946 administrative procedures act making persons(not people as in 'we the people') courts, businesses, churches and schools all vessels in law or corporation entities and not people(as in living souls) - we all became slaves.

The government rules by executive orders because of this

Protecting someone because of business only adds to the u.s.'s world problems.

We will go elsewhere for our internet service.

Rick a loyal American for people

May god bless you all for this site

Tim #41, trying to get people riled up to protest Fox in NY ain't gonna do jack, sadly. A handful of protestors against a multinational cabal? BUT we do have the 9-24 march on DC organized by ImpeachBush.org, and if we can get a million people to THAT, the media will be forced to cover it. Maybe. Go to www.impeachbush.org.

The reason people aren't taking to the streets? Because there's no draft. That's the difference between now and '68, and the Bushies know it, and that's why they will never reinstitute the draft.

But 571,000 people so far have signed the Downing Street Minutes letter. This is a good rallying point. This along with a slightly reawakened MSM means a possible chink in the neocon armor (until they shut down the internet, as Tim scarily predicts...)

Go here for the truth

http://judicial-inc.biz/London_bus.htm

Does this mean virtually the whole country is tuned in to the "afterdowningstreet" Bush liars' fiasco????
and following the issue???? so much so, the subject was automatically classified as spam?????

Hey, this is good news!!!!!

Now that Comcast has "corrected" itself, it should be monitored so that it remains "corrected"; and, hey, maybe Comcast will come to understand that the whole country is sick to death with the lying, corrupt Bush administration!!!!

I doubt that this was intentional. For those of you who are skeptical about automatic spam filtering, it's done all the time and frankly works better than most methods of filtering.

See the link on my name for a page on automatic spam filtering. In my experience (system admin), emails which are sent to large numbers of people seem more likely to run into trouble getting marked as spam. This is true of totally apolitical email lists, too. That's true where I work, and both the mail admins are lefties.

Does this mean you shouldn't complain? Of course not. Legitimate emounts of email get tagged as spam all the time--just hopefully very small amounts of it. Totally apolitical mail (especially when it's sent to lots of people) will have trouble, too.

I have some thoughts on this. [ More . . . ]

Is this why Congressman Conyers-blog didn't get requests to be added to the blog during registration?

A good eg of net censorship I think that this should e followed up., perhaps with some legal action, to let the company know their action is objectionable.However, even better is to learn why this censorship was carried out? Who did it> and Does Comcast have any links to the GOP?
Brian

The most relevant comment so far is #41.

"We should be prepared for a total lockdown of the internet. Some other organised method of communication will have to be established."

Any serious geeks know the answer to that one? Is there a way to establish a peer-to-peer network without needing the U.S. DNS servers? Something like a dial-up network connection to a server with a modem bank, so that instantaneous (and secure) communication could be maintained outside the government's corporate control?

Christ, I hope someone at the DNC is thinking about this...

Tinfoil hat territory? Sure. Better safe than sorry.

"One if by land..."

JF

Yep.. It's called FidoNet, and we used to use it back in the 1980s with modems and dialup.

you used to be able to upload your message base to other bbs systems so that national conversations could take place at the local level.

All we need is a modem, a hard drive, and a RS232 port...

Ah, FidoNet

Look up PowerBBS and you'll learn even more about me, MBA

Hmmm. Yes. I remember the old BBS systems. Archaic and slow. And who controls the phone lines?

Is there a way to use wireless 802.11x peer-to-peer, and leapfrog/relay over large distances? You'd have to use 192.168.xxx.xxx or 10.xxx.xxx.xxx networks, and figure out some way to resolve DHCP. Is that a do-able proposition?

Oh, and PGP, too. None of this DES crap.

JF

A different SPAM story.

Last year I made the mistake of sending an e-mail to Ann Coulter's website. Ooops. My bad.

I didn't use any foul words, but just made a few observations...and made a joke...really. I gave my liberal take on the relationship of Jesus Christ to the conservatives of his day, and mentioned that if Playboy magazine ever has a Women of the Republican Party photo spread, that Ann should apply to participate.

Anyway, I got an e-mail back from Tom, her sties' (no typo) webmaster, who told me that I had been reported to Spam Busters, to which Ann and he subscribed. Never heard of them. Thought nothing of it. Until a couple of weeks later when I communicated with one of the reporters at Rocky Mountain News concerning an article he'd written about the Swift Boat Liars' "Rovian" smear campaign last year. He replied. And sent my original e-mail back to me in the process.

Wow. Right there at the beginning of my subject line were the words "Possible Spam" in parentheses. I knew I hadn't put it there, so some shadowy intermediary must have. Spam Busters? One of the internet servers in cahoots with Spam Busters? Anyway, by changing my e-mail address, I think the problem was solved.

And yet, just as in the case of Comcast, how many other people or organizations have been tagged as Spammers when all they are doing is communicating one-to-one with someone else or with their members? Maybe all it takes to be labelled a Spammer nowadays is to send an e-mail with a political message or observation that someone else finds offensive relative to their own political position? So much for the sanctity of the First Amendment.

I agree with the observation of some of the posters above...we are rapidly becoming, by all appearances and practices, a Communist-like or Taliban-like country. I'm certain the enemies of our democracy and our freedom-loving society would be proud of these so-called loyal American citizens who are pulling this nefarious stunt.

Anyway, that is my story about my rude encounter with Ann Coulter, or at least her protective love-bunny Tom.

The Oracle -

Thanks for the story. We are all in dread of its realization.

On another subject: I used to work in the central offices of U.S. West/Qwest as an equipment installer. (Mostly DSL) You wouldn't believe how easy it is for the employees to listen in on private phone conversations. I seen people doing it all the time. I'm sure it's just as easy to read personal emails. YOU CAN'T TRUST ANYBODY!