[67558] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: [IP] VeriSign prepares to relaunch "Site Finder" -- calls
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (JC Dill)
Thu Feb 12 12:34:13 2004
Reply-To: JC Dill <nanog@vo.cnchost.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 08:23:47 -0800
To: North American Noise and Off-topic Gripes <nanog@merit.edu>
From: JC Dill <nanog@vo.cnchost.com>
In-Reply-To: <g3n07qqx7m.fsf@sa.vix.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
At 04:25 PM 2/10/2004, Paul Vixie wrote:
>nanog@vo.cnchost.com (JC Dill) writes:
>
> > Just as Canter and Siegel's green card spam was a novel way to (ab)use
> > SMTP for Canter and Siegel's profit, ten years later Verisign develops
> > Sitefinder [1] - a novel way to (ab)use DNS requests for Verisign's
> > profit. ...
>
>while i won't fault your analogy on structural grounds, i challenge it
>on factual grounds. the c&s green card imbroglio came from nntp, not smtp.
Yes, the Green Card spam of 4/94 was on usenet, my bad.
But in early 1994 *email* spam also became a problem. I've found various
references that say email spam started becoming a problem in January 1994
(starting with the "Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming" spam to usenet,
followed by email spam), and in April 1994 (starting with C&S's Green Card
spam to usenet, followed by email spam). I can't pin down an exact date or
email for the first unsolicited bulk/commercial email spam spew of 1994 - I
keep on finding cites to the "first spam" referring back to the DEC spam on
ARPANET in 1978.
<http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html>
<http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html>
In any event, UCE/UBE email spam was clearly a big problem by July 1994
when it was the topic of a Time Magazine article:
"Battle for the Soul of the Internet", by Philip Elmer-Dewitt
TIME Domestic, July 25, 1994 Volume 144, No. 4
It is 2004 now, and we have not accomplished a single thing to actually
stop the exponentially increasing spew of spam.
> > I believe that there is no good "operational" way to solve either problem.
>
>and yet, the place to discuss non-operational solutions is not nanog@. i
>suspect that you will find plenty of places to make your proposals, wherein
>many other people will also make their own proposals, with nobody reading
>anybody else's proposals. sort of like here, except politics not operations.
Are you REALLY saying that:
A) When someone proposes something that will break the operation of the
Internet as we know it; and
B) There is no immediately apparent or obvious "operational" solution
besides playing Whack-A-Mole with the abuser(s);
C) We shouldn't discuss it here - to attempt to keep it from being
implemented or to see if someone discovers a true "operational" solution?
How can we consider the pros and cons of various (operational/social/legal)
solutions to network operations problems if we can't discuss and consider
*all* possible solutions?
jc
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