RE: [Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions

["Hannigan, Martin" <hannigan at verisign.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asrg-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:asrg-bounces at ietf.org]On Behalf Of
> Barry Shein
> Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2004 5:01 PM
> To: laird at lbreyer.com
> Cc: asrg at ietf.org
> Subject: Re: [Asrg] Spam, defined, and permissions
> 
> 
> 
> On December 28, 2004 at 16:32 laird at lbreyer.com (Laird Breyer) wrote:
>  > I don't think that ISPs put up with zombies willingly. 
> It's just part
>  > of the massively decentralized internet.
> 
> Apparently they do put up with zombies willingly since there are
> somewhere between (by various estimates) 1M and 10M at any given
> moment.

Barry - correct. The solution in practice is 80/20. Get the
controllers, pray the bots die with it. Snatch and Grab on the
controllers is usually temporary though since they move around
with anchor domains that can't be touched once paid for i.e.
 .i0wnj00z.com and use freedns providers to complete a host name
portion for reverse resolutions hard coded in the trojans.

Most of the ISP's do care, but they'd be overwhelmed in the 20% 
response side of the equation.


> Unless you include in "willingly" the unwillingness to spend money
> (particularly staff resources) on combatting the problem.

> 
> I'd say that sums up most of it, along with a cavalier DGAS (d=don't
> g=give...)  attitude, a belief that their revenues lie in expending
> focus elsewhere. And general cluelessness which is closely tied to
> unwillingness to spend money. And just bad management; whatever the
> intent no one in the chain of command has the authority to do whatever
> needs to be done, such as shut a zombie down. That's pretty common in
> my experience, plenty of staff, a few clueful, quite a few clueful
> enough for this, none with the authority to actually do anything that
> would shut down or interfere with a customer except billing (non-pay.)

Yep. 

> 
> That's another good reason for trying to figure out some sort of
> excess charging scheme: It moves it into the realm of billing. We
> didn't shut you off because we don't like the e-mail you send etc etc
> etc, we shut you off because you've exceeded your credit threshold or
> haven't paid your bill or whatever. Ask any corporate lawyer which
> s/he'd prefer, shutoffs for content or volume or complaint policies,
> or for non-payment (or you can guess.)
> 
>  > I'd like to speculate that in yet another future, ISPs 
> will be faced
>  > with new mail transports which bypass metered SMTP. In 
> such a future,
>  > mail is indistinguishable from binary data, and charged as 
> part of the
>  > flat monthly fee. 
> 
> Yeah well any anti-spam proposal which springs from the assumption
> that the entire e-mail infrastructure will be rebuilt from scratch
> tends to be shunned. Not sure why the same wouldn't apply to your
> comment.

I'm trying to stay off my billing system kick so I'll generalize.
It's far cheaper to integrate this into billing systems than it is
to rewrite or rewire the global mail delivery system or continue to
over complicate it.

> Funny how people who are too clueless to run an anti-virus program are
> now suddenly clever enough to deploy open source messaging stealthware
> to bypass widespread policy.

Yeah, go figure. All those dumb people would be criminal felons vs.
civil targets.

> Any port in a storm I suppose.

Sounds like we're ripe for a port 25 love child here on ASRG. 

-M<


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