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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: SPEWS?
On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, Andy Johnson wrote: > Doesn't anyone see the irony here? Fighting abuse with abuse is somewhat > counter-productive. *Spamming* or launching a DoS attack in response to spam is definitely abusive. I understand your point here. I don't think it's an invalid one. I do believe that whether escalations are abusive is a question that is open to debate. Indeed, I believe the question *should* be debated. > This all boils down to more or less the user missing/not receiving an > important email. So by blacklisting a netblock which originated SPAM, and > more importantly, its neighbors (or in SPEWS case, the entire AS and > netblocks announced from it), you are preventing valid emails from being > delivered. So SPEWS is just as guilty of depriving people of their mail as > spammers are IMO. Which is more important? The right to express yourself or the right for a property owner to protect his property? I've always claimed that property rights trump free-speech rights, and where spam is concerned, the courts have agreed with me (e.g. the AOL case and the CompuServe case against Sanford Wallace back in the mid-1990's). Now, the big question with blocking is whether or not your users are aware of the blocking happening. In a service-provider environment, a good network admin will make his customers aware of the blockage and either have them agree to it or allow them to turn it off. But that is not a moral or ethical issue. That's a contractual issue. If the provider is arbitraily blocking stuff without telling his customers, yes, that can be said to be a moral or ethical issue, but I make the assumption, for the sake of this particular thread, that the customers know what's going on. As to whether it's counter-productive, again, whether or not it is is based in large part on whether or not the customers have agreed to it. My opinion is that the end-users *must* always have final say over what is blocked or not blocked. > Regarding your last comment, when tracking down and filtering a DoS, do > you filter just the offending IP space, or ALL netblocks announced by that > AS? Neither; I don't run any devices that need to speak BGP. If I did, I'd start by filtering the offending IPs only. If I still saw attacks coming from elsewhere in the ISP's netspace I would broaden the range of the blocks. -- Steve Sobol, CTO JustThe.net LLC, Mentor On The Lake, OH 888.480.4NET - I do my best work with one of my cockatiels sitting on each shoulder - 6/4/02:A USA TODAY poll found that 80% of Catholics advocated a zero-tolerance stance towards abusive priests. The fact that 20% didn't, scares me...
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