Re: [Asrg] Re: ISPs and bigger fish

[der Mouse <mouse at Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>]

>> And what's the biggest fish of all?  The companies that run the
>> internet backbones.  Why aren't they hoping mad about the spam
>> problem?
> I have a sad thought about this... it seems to me that there is some
> economic disincentive for these folks to do anything.

It's approximately impossible, in the first place.  There is no way
backbone routers can _possibly_ save enough state to have a prayer of
telling whether a given packet belongs to a spam sending attempt.  They
can barely route the packets, never mind the cycle cost of actually
looking at the contents of them - and then the memory cost of stringing
them together into TCP data streams would promptly blow any current
machine's memory out of the water.  They'd need letter-agency-sized
budgets to be able to design and build machines that could come
anywhere near the task.

> [...] - and finally, since they are only "network" they can
> more-or-less legitimately say that it's not their problem.  Spam is
> an email problem - way above layer 3.

Not just "more-or-less"; that's a totally legitimate point.  I know if
I were a provider, I'd be absolutely *livid* if some backbone tried to
tell me what mail I could or couldn't transfer.

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

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