Re: [Asrg] Thoughts so far

On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 12:20  PM, John Rumpelein wrote:

> Chuq,
> Not bad, but the metaphor doesn't quite hold.  When you catch someone
> stealing your car, they have identifying characteristics (fingerprints,
> appearance, ID) -- also, people don't steal your car several times a 
> day.
Metaphors are quite useful. Where they work, they give us solid 
real-world examples we can build from without a lot of re-inventing. 
And where tehy don't work, they at least give us an idea of the places 
we need to focus on to understand things... So even a failure of a 
metaphor leads to understanding and future success...
> But what can the ISP do?  They have the power to shut the customer off.
> (Most will, out of fear of blacklisting.)  So they shut this guy off, 
> he
> calls another ISP, and is back up and running in a few hours.  What 
> has been
> accomplished, besides wasting everyone's time and causing the spammer a
> minor inconvenience?
which tells me we need to raise the stakes on the spammer and his ISP. 
Criminalizing the act with more serious implications will help. When 
it's cheaper to get a parking ticket once every week or so than pay for 
a parking place, people risk the tickets. the only answer is then make 
tickets expensive enough to make them think twice. Asking them to 
follow the law won't work.
I'm a firm believer in carrots and sticks. And if they won't take the 
carrot, the stick has to be big enough to catch their attention. Right 
now, there are no carrots for NOT doing it, and the stick is a soda 
straw. Replace that stick with a baseball bat, and hand it to one of 
the national ISPs like Earthlink, and watch.
And no, that's also not a perfect solution, but it's a step in the 
right direction.
> And I'm sure you've heard how effective copyright law has been in 
> protecting
> rights in places like China.
As a published author, yes. Only shows how the struggle won't be easy. 
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try the struggle, because we can still make 
inroads, even if we can't stop every piece. I'll take a 20% cut in spam 
over a 0% cut, won't you?
And maybe once we get our own house in order, it makes it easier to 
justify blacklisting a netblock for countries that don't have their act 
together. Maybe force that netblock to MX route through a specific 
forwarding agent only. There are options, once you partition the 
problem and start dealing with it piece by piece.
> We're in agreement here.  Actually what I am doing is arguing for the 
> need
> for strong authentication because I think it will reduce the need for 
> all
> the other stuff people are already doing, which I can tell you from
> experience has limited effectiveness.
yes, we are. Basically, until we can do some kind of return-address 
authentication, the rest is a hack. And authentication doesn't really 
prove anything, other than you can then trust it enough to make 
white-/black-list decisions on that data. The authentication proves 
nothing, other than any decision you make on it has some chance of 
being useful.

--
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui(_at_)plaidworks(_dot_)com -- http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/


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