[33436] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: net.terrorism
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Allen Simpson)
Wed Jan 10 19:01:51 2001
Message-ID: <3A5CF68A.1A52E0AA@greendragon.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 18:56:07 -0500
From: William Allen Simpson <wsimpson@greendragon.com>
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"Timothy J. Salo" wrote:
> Well, it sounds like an operational issue.
>
> As described in the original post, a group is disrupting Internet
> connectivity to some destinations to achieve certain policy objectives.
> This has a number of adverse implications.
>
And goes on to list somewhat irrelevant issues, none of which are
applicable in this case.
Look here -- we are talking about violation of "acceptable-use policy"
(AUP for short). In this matter, we are talking about harm to our
operations (specifically, our mail servers).
Now, last year, we had virus problem(s) -- remember? And that virus
queried a web site for its update -- remember?
I don't know what you folks did, but I had my staff quickly hand code
an addition to the access lists, and apply it to every POP router
in our net. And then, I called my upstreams and asked that they add
a block in front of us.
I'm sure that some users were confused by any badly worded notices
in their MUAs about lack of connectivity. But not as many as would
have complained that mail was down!
And I'd rather that it was pain on irresponsible third parties, than
on my support staff. That costs money.
I'd be willing to bet that site is still blocked in our lists. I've
never checked. And it may not be the sites' fault that irresponsible
users targeted the site for the virus update. But the effect will
last for a long long time.
The ORBS sites were frequently polling my mail servers. It costs
bandwidth and processing time.
WSimpson@UMich.edu
Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32
