North American Network Operators Group

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Re: What's going on?

  • From: Lydia Leong
  • Date: Sun Apr 20 17:15:14 1997

On Apr 17, 10:47pm, MARK BORCHERS wrote:

> I don't know that I'd favor an abuse policy that encompasses
> WWW sites, even if they are listed elsewhere in spam mailings,
> but if there's a reasonable policy out there that contemplates
> this type of situation, I'd love to know how it reads.

[ Speaking only for myself. ]

DIGEX's acceptable use policies prohibit customers spamming through
DIGEX connections (whether individual dialup, leased line, or webserver
hosting), _and_ they prohibit customers from advertising services
hosted on DIGEX connections in a manner that violates DIGEX's
no-spam policies or the AUP of another provider. We also explicitly
prohibit customers from advertising in a manner that violates the
Federal Trade Commision's Deception Policy Statement.

This prevents somebody from reaping the benefits of a spam, regardless
of where it originated from. It also means that even if the other
provider doesn't take a responsible attitude towards his customers,
the Internet community still has a second line of defense. It means
that unethical businessmen can't go get throwaway Juno/CompuServe/etc.
accounts, spam from them with the full knowledge that the accounts
are going to be immediately cancelled, and pay nothing for the
privilege.

The policy is at http://www.access.digex.net/~policy/digex-aup.html
for the curious.

I certainly don't advocate hacker attacks on AGIS, if indeed AGIS was
actually the subject of a denial of service attack. But I do think
that AGIS, as a backbone provider, needs to take a more responsible
attitude. When I log into my mail servers in the morning and find that
my mail queue is jammed with fifteen thousand CyberPromo ads and
legitimate customer traffic is slowed or stalled, as far as I'm
concerned, that's something just short of a denial of service attack
originating from AGIS netblocks.

While it's clear that, right now, ISPs aren't really legally
responsible for the behavior of their customers, from the standpoint
of good business relations and the general cooperative attitude of
the Internet, it seems irresponsible for a provider to fail to
terminate customers who are obviously abusive.

I'm currently working on a sendmail hack that will deal with only
accepting relays from certain netblocks, expressed in IP prefix
notation (the current sendmail capability of specifying, say,
204.91.98, is inadequate for me, since we have customers to have less
than /24s). Until then, CyberPromo is my daily headache. Those people
ought to be sued off the earth for theft of service.


+-------------+--------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Lydia Leong | http://www.access.digex.net/~lwl/    | [email protected]     |
| DIGEX, Inc. | Business Internet Connectivity Group | Systems Engineering |
| 800-99DIGEX | Senior Systems Engineer / Postmaster | [email protected]    |
+-------------+--------------------------------------+---------------------+
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