North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games withtrojaned boxes

  • From: Jack Bates
  • Date: Thu Oct 09 13:36:39 2003 
Vinny Abello wrote:

Personally, I think preventing residential broadband customers from hosting servers would limit a lot of that. I'm not saying that IS the solution. Whether or not that's the right thing to do in all circumstances for each ISP is a long standing debate that surfaces here from time to time. Same as allowing people to host mail servers on cable modems or even allowing them to access mail servers other than the ISP's.

The issue comes in defining a server. You can block <1024 access, but spammers don't have to reference port 80 in their emails. You can mandate NAT, but this breaks commonly used systems (especially for broadband) like DirectPlay. One of the selling points for broadband is gaming. Yet some gaming systems were designed to make connections both ways and dynamic port forwarding doesn't work in all senarios.

-Jack