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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Schneier: ISPs should bear security burden
[email protected] (Mark Andrews) writes: > By continuing to lump filtered and unfiltered addresses together > you are throwing out the baby with the bath water. the smtp protocol was designed in a time when ~Mbit/sec connections did not yet exist, and ~10Kbit/sec connections cost many thousands of dollars per month, and were used only by people who could prove membership in an established meatspace trust fabric ("i have a gov't research contract") and whose hosts cost hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars, each having dedicated technical staff. expecting the same protocol to be used when ~Mbit/sec connections are held by hundreds of millions of uneducated users with hundred-dollar hosts is absurd. but in spite of enhancements like EHLO and AUTH, most internet e-mail is sent with the same level of authentication/confidence as before. the natural market outcome is to throw a lot of babies out with bathwater. see http://www.isc.org/personalcolo/ for the longer version of this rant, and just know that i reject ~many spams a day by refusing all mail from SBC's DSL blocks, with ~few false positives. that's SBC, alone. if you want different bathwater, it is available. there are still high-rent neighborhoods with high default expectations of the quality of traffic emanating from same. live in one, or at least rent a mailbox in one. asking people to accept e-mail from DSL networks is absurd, since they would have to act against their own best interests, and they ~know it. -- Paul Vixie
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