On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Matt Hess wrote:

I'm curious as to what people feel is pro-active for the internet community as far as an available and active abuse desk goes.. As of late I run into more and more automated groups who I personally think are very wrong for forcing reports to come in via e-mail or web submission only.

Quite obvious I am the expert of nothing so here is my take on abuse desks. Most of the times abuse desk work has been delegated to systems engineers/admins who often have too much *work* to fully address abuse work. Sort of understandable when you take a look at say AOL's moronic "Click here to report abuse" functions where people often click the wrong button often overwhelming innocent (and not so innocent) networks. This is a waste of money for any company so I could see where companies would be reluctant to hire someone dedicated to explaining to cluebies what the heck a spoofed email is, and why they just happened to send themselves a message. Which reminds me, being the admin of my own machines I just received a message notifying me that my admin was suspending my account. Woe is me.

The argument I have been presented is that those ISP's should not have to offer an actual human being on an abuse desk for non-customers as they make no money on it.

ISP's, heck any company for that matter is likely to shoot the task of that sort of work to their systems teams, and or have their netops teams CC'd with messages of this sort. I can't think of any network outside of spamming INSERT_NICER_WORD_FOR_SCUMBAGS_HERE that would not take abuse mail serious considering no one would really want their networks blocked.

My take is that this is an inherent expense to having customers.. that expense is part of being involved with the internet and should be expected of a provider who wishes to be taken seriously in the internet community.

I hope this message was out of boredom sort of like my response. I can't think of anyone who wouldn't take abuse serious. Yet I can't think of any specific reason why someone should be paid to do something that would normally fall under the task of a system/network administrator. That is sort of akin to having a carburetor mechanic to work along with your engine mechanic no?

*dons flame retardant.. well, everything*

I'm with you on that and I raise your flame retardant to bulletproofing. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ J. Oquendo GPG Key ID 0x51F9D78D Fingerprint 2A48 BA18 1851 4C99 CA22 0619 DB63 F2F7 51F9 D78D http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x51F9D78D sil @ politrix . org http://www.politrix.org sil @ infiltrated . net http://www.infiltrated.net "How a man plays the game shows something of his character - how he loses shows all" - Mr. Luckey