Re: amazonaws.com?

* Barry Shein · * Mon May 26 03:19:41 2008

On May 25, 2008 at 22:11 [email protected] (Peter Beckman) wrote:
 > On Sat, 24 May 2008, Barry Shein wrote:
 > 
 > > Since this comment applies equally to every single credit card payment on
 > > the internet etc I suppose you've just proven that credit cards can't
 > > possibly work and even Amazon itself is an impossibility. Perhaps we can
 > > move on to why bumble bees can't fly?
 > 
 >   It's clear to me that people believe it is easy, cheap and inexpensive to
 >   prevent credit card fraud.  You think this until you yourself run a small
 >   business, and an entire months profits go into the toilet because you
 >   missed someone who got through what you thought were thorough checks for
 >   fraud.

Hello, let me introduce myself to you. I'm Barry Shein, president of
The World, the oldest public access internet service provider on the
planet, since 1989 (see rfc 2235). We have always taken credit cards.

But thank you for the lecture on doing business with credit cards and
the potential pitfalls.

Anyhow, let me reiterate, making Amazon's business models work, or
ensuring that their customers can get the service they want when they
want it, is none of my concern.

What is my concern is if they're running their resources so
irresponsibly that it permits criminals to use them to damage my
business.

Personally I don't really care if their compute cloud service succeeds
or fails, except on general principles (I always like to wish people
well.)

But if their business model is designed so poorly that it enables
criminality to be directed at my business then, for me, that's a
problem.

So I'm not particularly interested in how hard it would be for Amazon
to make a buck on cloud services if they had to stop damaging
me. 'kay?

This thread started when I found my mail servers being pounded by
their cloud machines for a day or so.

It's since stopped, thank you, but a few here indicated, and I don't
know if they speak with any authority, that Amazon seems to believe
that so long as their cloud machines are in blacklists then they
shouldn't have to feel any responsibilty to exercise any control over
them vis a vis spammers et al. It should just be up to the rest of us
to buy sufficient firewalls and bandwidth and staff to manage it all.

That sounds so outlandish that I am suspicious of its origin.

But others indicated "they're in the blacklists so what's your beef?"
and I responded that there's a problem with large computing resources
(their clouds) pounding on my mail servers even if we can dodge seeing
the content with blacklist entries.

 > > Declining a legitimate charge can be a criminal fraud.
 > 
 >   In what world do you live in?  I can decline to take anyone's money and
 >   decline to provide them service, for any reason.  If I don't like your

I'm sorry, you're having trouble with the english language, let me
help you out here:

  That comment was in response to a reference to a credit card
  customer declining a legitimate charge for goods and/or services
  s/he received.

  Ya know, you buy a laptop over the net on a credit card, the laptop
  comes, and then you try to decline the charge? Got it?

That can be a criminal fraud.

Whatever the relevance that's what that comment was referring to.

 >   tone, I don't take your money, you don't get my service.  Criminal fraud,
 >   ha.  Where exactly do you live?  Maybe I assume to much, because in the
 >   US, I get to decide who's money I take.

(key in twilight zone music)

You've been hurt before, haven't you? (whoo boy, angry man alert...)

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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