On Thu, 27 Feb 2003 10:48:31 -0700 (MST), Vernon Schryver wrote:
UUNet in particular has demonstrated this sad syndrome. For years,
instead of ejecting its spamming and spam-friendly resellers, it lied.
Then it lied for years about installing port 25 filtering. Finally,
it got port 25 filtering working, and reduced the amount of dial-up
spam it was spewing. All of that was instead of enforcing an anti-spam
AUP and genuinely cracking down on spammers. (By "lies" I mean official
public statements in news.admin.net-abuse.email and to individuals that
the UUnet spokesmen could not possibly have failed to know were false.)
Of course, UUNet is far from the only example. Another good one is
Sprint, which had the audacity to claim to not know how to use ANI to
find spammers running up 5-figure bills on stolen credit numbers or
how to interest law enforcement agencies....this from a telco!
I have to second the comments about UUNet and Sprint from my own
personal experience. I served up a complete case for prosecution
under the Va Computer Crimes Act, including the legal service address
and all logs. The UUNet counsel (Neil Patel) refused to take any
action. He told me this was management policy. The fact is UUNet
profited from spamming. We know from their subsequent collapse that
dishonesty pervaded the firm (maybe still does).
With another carrier, instead with good ethical standards (AT&T), an
incident I document (see <http://www.camblab.com/nugget/spam_03.pdf>)
the problem was negligence, rather than witting enablement of
criminal activity. (The frontline saps didn't even validate the
credit cards until the first billing period, so the users of stolen
cards had a whole month. This went on for about 6 months until
I jerked management's chain; they stopped it as soon as they noticed
it. But management were "too busy" with other things until someone
screamed. I am an AT&T customer. This is the Environmental Polluter
business model.)
I am about to nominate a solution for these problems. Watch this
space. (In the meantime read above PDF file.)
Jeffrey Race