It's reached the point where I would consider disconnecting everyone
with a zombied machine an acceptable price; I believe every such person
I would agree with this.
Some percentage of the machines you disconnect will never come back (and each
time they're infected) and eventually nearly _every_ machine will be hit by a
spammer or abuser or virus/worm infection.
Like telephones, the value of having an Internet connection is reduced for
EVERYBODY if fewer people worldwide have Internet connections.
3 - Customer is charged on every mis-labeled message (and server imposes
some limit on amount of messages sent which may yet turn out to be
spam). If your machine became a zombie, it's your lack of responsibility
and you pay for it (but at least you know pretty soon about this!). Same
as if your pet goes biting people...
If the amount of the charge is effective, it must be "reasonable" but nonlethal
to a victim (though it makes them unhappy) while still dissuasive to a spammer,
which might happily pay a thousand dollars for sending a months's worth of wild
spamming.
But again, the fact is that spammers make it a point to NOT pay for their
spams,
but rather to shift ALL those costs to unwilling victims.
I guess you could have a victim's ISP call them to warn them of the spam
situation, but then that increases personnel costs (and dramatically) as they
try to deal with the mess and the resulting fallout.
When outgoing WATS lines were introduced in the 1970s, the argument for them
was
that 95% of the cost of long distance was the cost of billing for it. I think
that would be true in the case of this charging scheme, too. That sounds to me
like it is NOT a good approach.
4 - Customer is charged a `flat fee` which typically will include also
filtering his incoming and outgoind mail for spam, and anti-virus
support (to reduce chance of his machine becoming a zombie). Same as
buying liability insurance...
The ISP is NOT in a good position to do anti-virus filtering, since they do not
have an a priori knowledge of who individual subscribers are, and what their
trust relationship is with each of their subscribers. Thus the ISP is forced
into making arbitrary and capricious judgements which may not be appropriate.
5 - existing model: customer is not formally charged, but pays (in some
way) for each account and accounts are terminated on detecting spamming...
I think it's interesting how many people (clearly from ISPs or at least viewing
things from an ISP perspective) always seem to see the "bill them" approach as
the solution for these problems. Obviously, those of us coming from the
"enlightened end user" perspective don't much like that approach.
Gordon Peterson http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002 Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support free and fair US elections! http://stickers.defend-democracy.org
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they "represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.
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