The spammers are winning

[Andrew Mathews]

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David A. Bandel wrote:
| FYI,
|
| For those of you who are interested, the spammers are winning.  Yet
| another RBL is shutting down (blackhole.compu.net).  They are being
| forced to shut down due to massive attacks on their servers by spammers.
|
| Most likely no one on this list falls into this category, but if you
| know anyone who has a company that grosses more than 100 million a year
| and an influential politician in their pocket, they need to start
| lobbying hard to stop spam and push ARIN, APNIC, RIPE, LANIC to revoke
| IP addresses of countries like China and Brasil who only care about spam
| when it concerns their own citizens.
|
| Ciao,
|
| David A. Bandel
|
[...]

As is monkeys.com. From the MIMEDefang mailing list yesterday:

| On Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 01:58 PM, Jon R. Kibler wrote:

| Greetings to all:
|
| I have some really sad news. I just got off the telephone with Ron Guilmette
| who runs the monkeys.com Unsecured Proxies List DNSBL. I hate to say it, but
| monkeys.com has been killed. It has been DDOSed to death.
|
| Ron says that every aspect of his network is undergoing a massive DDOS attack
| from thousands of IPs -- apparently many/all spoofed. He has tried to get law
| enforcement to investigate, but to no avail. He indicated that this is
| probably the end of his service.
|
| This makes two DNSBLs that have been DDOSed to death recently. Which one is
| next? NJABL? ORDB?

So it's now at 15 and counting. Electronic guerilla warfare is evolving.
I almost want to say give up, let the $LUSERs get 250 spam messages per hour,
let it get to the point where it's unusable anymore, and we can all get back to
doing our jobs, rather than fighting self induced fires caused by:
1)Clueless users
("What? My Windows PC is sending out 10,000 emails an hour?")
2)Malicious users
("We're using $LUSERS misconfigured systems to send out 10,00 messages an hour")
3)Indifferent users
("Why should I care if my ISP is harboring spammers? *I'm* not spamming anyone")

As Eric Allman said, "it's going to get very fragmented". You can see it
happening right before your eyes, yet many still fail to realize why. In a
couple of years, email may be totally opt-in because of this. You want to send
me an email? Fill in the form on my website and if I approve it, I'll add your
sender address to the access list, otherwise all email is rejected by default.
We didn't know how good we had it just a year or two ago.
- --
Andrew Mathews
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~ 10:18am  up 5 days,  3:30, 12 users,  load average: 1.34, 1.37, 1.46
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Doctors and lawyers must go to school for years and years, often with
little sleep and with great sacrifice to their first wives.
		-- Roy G. Blount, Jr.
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