Answering questions and defamation (was: RE: The utilitiy of IP is at st

--On Friday, 30 May, 2003 16:01 -0400 Dean Anderson 
<dean(_at_)av8(_dot_)com> wrote:
> I haven't repeatedly (or at all) defamed anyone.
You have repeatedly made public statements about what I don't 
know, what experience I lack, etc.   I have questioned the facts 
you report, but have not made any public claims that you lack 
sufficient background to know what you are talking about.  I 
honestly don't know much about your background and experience, 
and have not claimed otherwise.   You have made repeated claims 
about mine that are not based on any knowledge of my actual 
experience and which several readers of this list know enough to 
refute, at least in particular areas.
> ...
> And I also would like to initiate a formal complaint.
Oh, goodie.   In the interesting of getting resolution, and to 
preserve everyone's sanity in the interim, I'm going to make no 
further postings on these threads until Harald, or someone else, 
indicate how he (or they) intend to sort this out.
> You haven't answered the question.  The answer you gave was
> irrelevant to the question, and doesn't support your wrong
> assertion that open relays allow one to send anonymous email
> without the IP address of the sender.
What I told you, at some length if I recall, in a private note, 
is that
* Only the IP address recorded in a Received field by the SMTP 
server that last accepts the message for delivery to you can 
generally be considered reliable and trustworthy.   Reliance on 
any other IP address in the Received chain requires a chain of 
trust between SMTP servers.   Independent of its utility, 
several of the discussions on this list in the last few days 
have ultimately been about establishing such chains of trust, 
but nothing in either SMTP or generally-accepted Internet 
operational procedures require or provide it today.  Even for 
the delivery MTA, the trust and/or contractual relationship 
between the recipient and the operator may not guarantee the 
integrity of the Received fields it inserts, although they are 
usually accurate.
* Received fields --other than, again, the one that you own 
server inserts-- are routinely faked in some varieties of spam. 
Consequently, the source MTA can often not be identified with 
any reliability if more than one relay (open or otherwise) is 
involved.
* While it is not easy when a multiple-transaction TCP-based 
protocol like SMTP is involved, IP addresses can be faked.
* Obtaining the IP address of a client does not permit 
identifying a specific user, unless the owner/provider of that 
IP address retains sufficient information to identify the user 
and makes that information available upon request.  There is no 
present operational or legal requirement on SMTP server 
operators, or on ISPs, to log that information at all, nor to 
retain the information for any particular length of time if they 
do log it.  So, even if the source IP address is known and 
authentic, the originating user may not be identifiable.   That 
is a fairly good approximation to "anonymous" in my book, but 
perhaps you are using a different definition.
> I think that I am the one being defamed, since you repeated
> question my credibility while avoiding the question.
>
> You should answer the question, and quit complaining that you
> are being put in the spot to answer it.
See above, assuming that was the question -- I have had trouble 
identifying it in the noise.
As indicated above, I'm now out of this discussion until our 
respective complaints can be evaluated.  I encourage you to do 
likewise.
     john