Webnazis R Us

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 12:50:28PM -0500, David A. Bandel wrote:
>On Tue, 1 Jul 2003 09:46:41 -0700
...
>We had a little debate going over Internet Service Deniers on the
>ISP-Linux list.  A number of ISPs supported denying outgoing ports
>(mostly 25).  While I don't like some traffic, denying ports is not the
>way to stop this nonsense.

On the contrary, outgoing port 25 blocking from dialups was the only thing
that put a dent in the spam from major dialup wholesalers like uu.net and
sprint.  The vast majority of an ISP's dialup customers wouldn't have a
clue how to configure their mailer to go to anything except their IPS's
mail servers (and often have a difficult time figuring out how to get that
set up correctly :-).  These same clueless customers are often running
systems which are vulnerable to abuse from outsiders, either via open
proxies, misconfigured or unconfigured MTAs, or just plain having their
machines cracked and taken over.  Customers with a clue can get fixed IP
addresses that are outside the dynamic dialup pools, and aren't blocked.

I have been setting up regional ISPs all over the U.S. since 1994, and in
that time have had perhaps a dozen requests for fixed IPs that weren't
blocked (other than ISP employees who need fixed IPs for access to parts of
the system for admin that aren't allowed to normal customers).

BTW:  The spam levels from the AT&T/Comcast 12.xxx.xxx.xxx IP addresses
have gone up dramatically (orders of magnitude) since ATTBI took over from
@HOME, and I would bet this is because @HOME blocked outgoing traffic on
port 25 while ATTBI/Comcast don't.  One major difference is that the @HOME
abuse desk actually did something about spam and abuse complaints while
they're now totally ignored.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
UUCP:               camco!bill  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
URL: http://www.celestial.com/

``I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my Liberty, would
not when he had me in his Power, take away everything else.''  John Locke