On January 31, 2007 at 21:52 asrg(_at_)johnlevine(_dot_)com (John Levine) wrote:
Some confirmation from respected sources might help.
Well, at this moment, I am sitting in a session at MAAWG where the
FTC's lead spam investigator is telling us about his investigation
process and he and ISP reps are going over issues like whether they
notify customers when they get a subpoena. Also present are the
Canadian competition bureau, analogous to the FTC, and I believe I saw
some guys from DOJ.
Well that's of course great but some publicized thrust and focus from
the IETF couldn't hurt the thinking of the policymakers who have to
actually allocate budgets and other priorities.
Is there any disagreement that if we could just snap our fingers and
make the zombie botnets disappear (or 90% disappear) that "spam" (and
related) wouldn't immediately have all the emotional punch of
"off-topic posting", some odd msg you get and delete?
Put another way, zombie botnets are the enabling technology of spam
(phishing, etc.)
Easier said than done I realize, but it's inherently illegal to create
and operate zombie botnets, and I don't mean just in the US, most
anywhere on the planet.
The law enforcement and regulatory agencies of the planet have a lot
more resources they can muster than we ever could.
Even if we could come up with the FUSSP we'd still probably face
enormous hurdles of deployment.
Vigorous legal pursuit wouldn't preclude technical efforts in parallel
unless of course spam just disappears as a result.
There is no other way we know of to send out on the order of one
billion emails per day for a cost which even approaches the expected
value of those messages and would so successfully evade already
commonplace blocking and filtering methods.
Does anyone disagree with that?
Can't we say that in some very public way? Does anyone doubt that's
true?
Sometimes I think the problem otherwise insightful technical people
have in thinking about spam is wrapping their heads around what it
takes to send out O(billion) messages a day from a handful of base
sources and we keep retreating to imagining spam as being much like
sending this message other than the content and intent.
It's not.
It's as if I could make this message appear in 100 million mailboxes
in the next few hours, despite many efforts to the contrary.
I couldn't. You couldn't.
It takes a zombie botnet.
There are other issues, but I'm focusing on this one as the most
egregious and, I hope, easiest to agree on in terms of contribution to
the problem and legal/moral unambiguity.
--
-Barry Shein
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