North American Network Operators Group
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Re: amazonaws.com?

  • From: Peter Beckman
  • Date: Thu May 29 12:04:20 2008
On Thu, 29 May 2008, Dorn Hetzel wrote:

There is a really huge difference in the ease with which payment from a
credit card can be reversed if fraudulent, and the amount of effort
necessary to reverse a wire transfer. A mere "court subpoena" wouldn't
even be remotely sufficient. The person wanting their money back would
pretty much have to sue for it and win.

So, yeah, there would be some customers for whom the couple of business
hours it take their wire to go through would be longer than they would
want to wait for their port 25 or other "risky" service to be enabled,
but really, how many is that going to be.


 In the end, all you've done with these "extra" AUP and risk charges is
 line YOUR (generally, not directed at you Dorn) pockets while the rest of
 us suffer under the deluge of spam sent from your systems.  Which still
 sucks for the rest of the 'net.

 I suspect that for Amazon, it is easier and cheaper for them to screw us
 and allow spam to flow out port 25 unhindered (which costs US money and
 time) than it is to implement something that makes them a good Internet
 citizen (which costs AMAZON money and time).  Maybe they'll change their
 stance, but I suspect it is a business decision to not block port 25 and
 hang out on blacklists, not a good Internet citizen decision.

 My position from the beginning of this thread is that you cannot AUP this
 problem away, nor can you just "charge more" and hope THAT will stop it,
 nor can you simply improve and perfect anti-fraud systems so spammers and
 fraudsters cannot gain access to your services.

 It's free to do nothing, and there is a cost of doing something.  There
 are no laws that say what Amazon is doing is illegal, either.  You have
 choices: null route them, blacklist them, get a group together (NANOG?)
 and group null route Amazon's EC2 IP blocks until they bow to your
 demands.  Being on the 'net means spam, DOS attacks, being slashdotted,
 dealing with bad Internet citizens, etc.  Either you accept those facts,
 or you should give up and go unplug your connection.

With a backhoe, preferably. Much more fun.

Beckman
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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
[email protected]                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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