ietf-asrg
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Re: [Asrg] This research group will fail

2003-03-19 14:58:08
Hi,

Hadmut Danisch a écrit:
> I meanwhile came to the conclusion that this
> working/research group's will certainly fail.

If we get focalized on the technical aspects of the spam problem, the trafic will lower and the signal/noise ratio will get higher. Moderation ?

Anti-spam efforts are welcome as long as they strengthen the
public awareness of spam and make people purchase
anti-spam-solutions.

I don't agree :
Outside the mail-abuse.org blacklists, most are free blacklists. How do you explain it ? The Spamassassin content filter is free. TMDA(tmda.net) is free. And so on.

But a solution which effectively prevents spam at zero costs is deprecated. Zero costs means zero revenue.

It means we will all stop loosing our time handling spam and do something more constructive with the time it helped us free.

Why are so many people strictly against anything what could prevent
spam at the sender side? Because the sender wouldn't pay for a
solution.

There is a customer-provider relation that makes it difficult for ISP to unilateraly redefine the rules. They fear too much loosing their customers in case their AUP gets too restrictive or the sending process got too much complicated compared to other ISPs.

Why do so many people insist on the freedom of the sender
to send whatever the sender wishes to send with a sender address the
sender can randomly choose?

With the RMX proposal you made, the sender will be limited to his domain (easy to stop him from spamming then) or to the others customers of their ISP domains (easy to complain to them too).

Which means a domain owner can/will complain to his ISP in case his domain gets abused by spammers also customers of the same ISP.

This will put the financial pressure back on the ISP side (customer complaining about another customer), and I am quite enthusiastic with such a scheme.

Spam doesn't sell significant numbers of penis enlargement devices.
Spam sells Anti-Spam-software. That's the business.

Don't give spammers such ideas ;-)

I wouldn't be surprised at all if most of the spammers turned out
to be the same people selling anti-spam-software and services, and
trying to put through recipient-only solutions.

Maybe. Who knows. The solution is to use free software anti-spam solutions only (maybe talking for my church here), so you will avoid to feed the spammers anyway.

And maybe that's why the mailing list is flooded with so much rubbish and babble. That's some kind of denial of service attack.

That's what I though at first when I subscribed.
But I think the problem is different.

I think people are too much sensitive about spam, and they need to talk about it, like when you talk with the psychiatric people because you want to punch your neighbour making too much noise and you cannot get him to lower the volume politely.

I must admit I am a little bit like that, too, after having suffered from the spam cancer for years like most people.

Most subscribers seem to seek the holy grail, a global mean to stop spam.

They have already though a lot about what could be done, eventually tried to develop some personnal-crafted solutions that didn't work or not efficiently enough.

I suggest that this group gets moderated for a few weeks/monthes, so we can get on track to the real work efficiently.

For my part, I will vote for the moderation if someone propose it.


This working/research group lacks at least a FAQ containing what concern it and what does not. Until we get that, and subscribed people to respect it, we will go nowhere : the topic is too hot and too broad, and even good willing people will have difficulties to help things advance without any guidance.

I propose to consider inadequate the following topics to begin with :

* country laws related to spam topics
We are designing a technical system, and due to the differences of the spam laws among countries, it is useless to discuss that here. If we get a reasonably efficient system to stop spam, it would be up the the users/administrators to check if they can apply it safely in their country and keep legal or if they need to change the country laws first.

* content filtering systems topics (aka spamassassin and the like)
The basis of those systems is to evolve and mutate to accomodate the mutation of the spams. This contradicts completely a RFC-like standardization process like the asrg list intends to do. Not to say that standard content filters are not interesting, but it should be handled on a separate list.

* hacking topics
The fact that protocol implementations like the DNS ones or others are currenctly hackable are not our problem. If hardening of protocols are needed, it has to be handled at the protocol layer by the related protocol working group.

* "we will completely broke the smtp protocol to begin with" topics
The Internet is a big beast and cannot move like that. Proposals must be able to cope with a running internet during several years at least, and people thinking about redesigning it to the ground should create a separate list to discuss about their own ideas on this topic, and come back when they get something at least a bit realistic.

Frank de Lange said :
> To paraphrase Churchill, 'we shall go on to the end... we shall
> fight them... we shall never surrender...'


Pierre
--
          PARALLINE          ///        Parallelism & GNU/Linux
                            ///
71,av des Vosges Phone:+33 388 141 740
F-67000 STRASBOURG Fax:+33 388 141 741 http://www.paralline.com
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