Webnazis R Us

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 09:28:44AM -0700, Condon Thomas A KPWA wrote:
>James McDonald wrote:
>> Address blocks are more popular/easier to apply policies on than
>> single addresses. So the tendency is for us to get tarred with the
>> same brush as a spammer on the same network as us.
>
>I'll second that.  There are Australian sites I can't visit from work
>because they are in the same IP block as SE Asia, which is blocked from the
>Navy computers for security reasons.

On the other hand, there are serious problems with open relays and open
proxies on major cable providers such as Comcast, Road Runner, et al caused
by clueless folks who just plug in their Windows viruses directly.  The
``Code Red'' and ``Nimda'' worms propagated through open IIS servers, and a
huge percentage of these I saw in our logs were from these same broadband
cable networks.

Some responsible cable companies blocked port 80 to their customer's sites
in response to the ``Code Red'' attacks which cut the volume down
dramatically.

Whether you like it or not, the cable company's residential contracts
prohibit servers in any case so you're not going to get any sympathy from
them when you tell them your mail server's not working and that their
servers suck rocks.

Our solution for this has been to set up our customers who're on cable
connections with their own domains or subdomains off of our networks, and
route all their e-mail traffic through our servers using uucp over tcp.  I
haven't found a cable company yet that's blocking port 440 on their
networks.  We've been providing uucp connections for members of the Seattle
Unix Group off the seaslug.org domain since the mid '80s, and even still
have about a dozen dialup uucp mail connections.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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