Subject: Re: AD's

From: "A. Wik" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 21:38:40 +0000

Vernon Schryver wrote:
> 
> > A summary would be interesting. (btw, saw Eric Raymond speak last
> > night; he'd give you a major sneezing fit, I suspect. He's impressive
> > as a speaker, though.)
> 
> I've never heard him in person.  He can write well enough, and so might
> well be an entertaining speaker.  Entertaining speakers are one catagory.
> People who have done things are generally in another.
> What code has Eric ever written?

Well, he uses Fetchmail as an example in his famous Cathedral & Bazaar
document.  He also maintains the terminal-type database and is one of
the ncurses maintainers.

> understood) much spam.   In fact, most spam has always come from systems
> with good reverse maps.

And an increasing amount of spam seems to be going via sites like this:
Received: from there by sgu-ns1.sg-u.ac.jp (8.8.8+2.7Wbeta7/3.3W9-NEC)

The sender can choose any "DNS" name he wants ("there" was my test) and
what's really annoying is the lack of an IP address, not to mention the
fact that all complaints to these sites' postmaster and root accounts seem
to be going right to /dev/null.  These TCP wrappers we've heard so much
about do nothing about it since the relay is fully DNS registered.

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From: "A. Wik" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 21:38:40 +0000

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From: "Michael H. Warfield" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 18:12:43 -0500 (EST)

> document.  He also maintains the terminal-type database and is one of

	Eric is at the heart of the Fetchmail project.  It's more than
an example in "The Cathedral & The Bazaar", it's his case study in the
open source development model (I do the SSL patches for fetchmail).  Eric
is one of those unique individuals who is a doer, a creator, and an
articulate speaker.  There have been a few times when I have wanted to
strangle him (when he started an off-topic "Geeks with Guns BOF" thread
on a mailing list prior to the Atlanta Linux Showcase last year) but you
can't help but like him...

> about do nothing about it since the relay is fully DNS registered.

	Mike
-- 
 Michael H. Warfield    |  (770) 985-6132   |  [email-masked]
  (The Mad Wizard)      |  (770) 925-8248   |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
  NIC whois:  MHW9      |  An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471    |  possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

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From: "Michael H. Warfield" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 18:12:43 -0500 (EST)

Mike

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From: Chris Rapier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 23:22:52 -0500

> > about do nothing about it since the relay is fully DNS registered.

The root of the problem with spam is two fold:

1) Lack of incentive/will on the part of administers to put much effort into
the problem. I think that the reasons for this are very understandable. First
it seems like a monolithic problem. When faced with those people are very
likely to just let their eyes slide over it onto something else. Second, the
frequency with which it occurs makes tracking down bogus accounts, forged
paths and so forth far more trouble than its worth (or at least their
perception of worth). 

2) There is a lot of incentive to send spam. Low cost of entry, little chance
of serious backlash and high profitability. Hell, if I had something to sell
and it wasn't so personally loathsome to me I'd do it too.

So, any answer to spam issues should either give admins more incentive to do
something about it, decrease the incentive for the spammers, or preferably
some combination of the two. It seems that the most base (and thus universal)
form of motivation is personal gain and loss (I'd like to say money but that's
kind of limiting unless you simple think of money as a fungible item). The
blunter approaches (black holing domains/networks/the universe) might possibly
turn what is an economic issue into a personal quest. It seems to me that this
would be the last thing that we would actually want... the idea of someone
championing spam as a libertarian blow for freedom seems odd to us but it is
an issue. 

If we change how we look at this issue I think we might find some more
effective ways of reducing the effect of spam without having to destroy the
systems we have in place. Part of the solution is obviously going to be a
technical issue. In fact, at one point I thought that was the *only* feasible
solution. I've since come to believe that a multipronged effort is going to be
required. An effort that make use of the resources of the larger ISPs and the
vigilence of the individual user. I don't know what the shape of that effort
will be or the tools that would be used. however, if the argument can be made
in the right forums I think that we could bring more resources to bear on the
issue. 

Out of curiosity, does anyone have any figures regarding the cost of spam
along each step of the spam's journey? I have a feeling it might be somewhat
staggering. 

Any thoughts about this?

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From: Chris Rapier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 23:22:52 -0500

Any thoughts about this?