-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Barry Shein Sent: Friday, April 11, 2008 5:04 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Problems sending mail to yahoo?
The lesson one should get from all this is that the ultimate harm of spammers et al is that they are succeeding in corrupting the idea of a standards-based internet.
Sites invent policies to try to survive in a deluge of spam and implement those policies in software.
Usually they're loathe to even speak about how any of it works either for fear that disclosure will help spammers get around the software or fear that someone, maybe a customer maybe a litigious marketeer who feels unfairly excluded, will hold their feet to the fire.
So it's a vast sea of security by obscurity and standards be damned.
It's a real and serious failure of the IETF et al.
Has anyone ever figured out what percentage of a connection to the internet is now overhead i.e. spam, scan, viruses, etc? More than 5%? If we put everyone behind 4to6 gateways would the spam crush the gateways or would the gateways stop the spam? Would we add code to these transitional gateways to make them do more than act like protocol converters and then end up making them permanent because of "benefit"? Perhaps there's more to transitioning to a new technology after all? Maybe we could get rid of some of the cruft and right a few wrongs while we're at it?
P.S. Anyone else getting hit by sales calls for DDoS appliances and other salespeople as a result of this thread?
This fishing in NANOG waters by salespeople is irritating and a good reason not to do business with these companies.
I don't take my time to post on NANOG to invite a deluge of sales calls.
<nanog admin> If we catch them, we'll act. We added some language related to that to the new AUP and have been able to act on it as a result. </nanog admin> -- Martin Hannigan http://www.verneglobal.com/ Verne Global Datacenters e: hannigan@verneglobal.com Keflavik, Iceland p: +16178216079