Webnazis R Us

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 01:52:19PM -0500, David A. Bandel wrote:
...
>The above notwithstanding:
>1.  blocking is denying a service, not providing it

Blocking a service that's prohibited in their Terms of Service.

>2.  travelers who go to a hotel often don't know the mail servers of
>whatever service is providing broadband to a hotel, they need to be able
>to connect back to their own mail servers

I've never had any problems connecting back to my mail servers.  I've never
found anybody blocking port 540 (uucp).

>3.  most terms of service prohibit spam (or allowing your systems to be
>used for it). Isn't it time people were made responsible for their own
>messes?  Disconnect them.

Convince the broadband providers of this.  First they need to get working
abuse departments that are willing to deal with their customers instead of
just sending them to Dave Null.  The only thing that will convince these
providers to do this will be if it's more expensive for them to not do it
than to do it.  Their own customers will have to drive that.

It's one thing to deal with actively spamming customers, and an entirely
different problem dealing with their customer's open proxies, open relays,
and generally vulnerable Microsoft viruses.  I think that the vast majority
of abuse going through these broadband networks originates outside their
networks.  There's a thriving market amongst spammers selling lists of
known open proxies and open relays.

>4.  having been on the blocked side of services (24 ports blocked by the
>Gov't of Panama that are used for VoIP), I know that that is worse than
>not blocking ports that may be abused (again, make the system owners
>responsible with fines if necessary).
>
>You know spammers only stay in business because someone pays them to
>spam.  I say fine heavily the folks who pay spammers -- make it hurt
>their busines, make hiring spammers illegal.  If spammers have no one
>paying them to spam they'll have to get real jobs.  ALL spams have a
>link (address/phone/URL) to somewhere that wants to make money.  That's
>the target.  Spam is a byproduct of stupidity and laziness.  Some
>stupid/lazy companies include Norton.  I get spam from them regularly
>about how they can help keep my Windoze systems virus free (didn't know
>X windows had viruses).

I've been getting a lot of spam recently allegedly selling cures for spam!

It's very difficult to get to the spammers even though what they're doing
is illegal (even here in Washington which had one of the first anti-spam
laws in the U.S.).  The U.S. Feds are talking about making laws, even
Chucky Schumer is getting in on the act.  There have even been some
reasonably major wins in the fight, but it's not happening quickly.  People
interested in following the legal issues may want to subscrbe to the
suespammers.org mailing list.

Bill
--
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