On Sat, 18 Jun 2005, Paul Smith wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:55:25 +0100, Keith Moore
<moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> wrote:
I'd even go so far as to say we're going to continue to have massive
amounts of spam as long as Windows is the dominant PC operating system.
I'm sorry, but that's just ridiculous. The only link between Windows and
spam is that lots of people have Windows, and it's relatively easy to use,
You're missing important point. The reason lots of spam is coming from
windows has a lot more to do with fundamental design flows in the OS
that let to it be vulnerable to various forms of compromises and takeover.
The operating system is irrelevant. Don't try to turn this into a
'Gates is a bad guy' argument!.. Whether he is or not is irrelevant
to the spamming issue!
If what you said was right then proportions of non-spammer use of
windows vs linux would be the same or clos to te spammer use. But they
are fundamentally different and for non-spam the majority of email coming
to your mail server comes from unix machines (like 90% from unix/mac)
where as for spam proportions are reversed (i.e. 10% from spammer-setup
unix/mac and 90% from spammer-controlled windows zombies).
That said I disagree with Keith about this being something that we
will "continue to have massive amounts of spam as long as Windows is
the dominant PC operating system". There are ways around the zombie
issue and email architecture can be redesigned so that zombie is not
of much use. We can also setup per-ip policy records that help
distinguish dialup vs static (i.e. MTAMARK or alike).
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net