[82069] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: E-Mail authentication fight looming: Microsoft pushing Sender ID
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rich Kulawiec)
Fri Jul 8 15:44:18 2005
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 15:23:26 -0400
From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <42BAAE29.6090205@dcrocker.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
[late followup, sorry]
On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 05:42:17AM -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:
> The real fight is to find ANY techniques that have long-term, global
> benefit in reducing spam.
We've already got them -- we've always had them. What we lack is
the guts to *use* them.
As we've seen over and over again, the one and only technique that has
ever worked (and that I think ever *will* work) is the boycott --
whether enforced via the use of DNSBLs or RHSBLs or local blacklists or
firewalls or whatever mechanism. It works for a simple reason: it makes
the spam problem the problem of the originator(s), not the recipient(s).
It forces them to either fix their broken operation (any network which
persisently emits or supports spam/abuse is broken) or find themselves
running an intranet.
We've known that this works for 20-odd years. It hasn't stopped working;
what's stopped is the willingness to use it en masse, and to endure the
consequences of thereof. And no new technology, however clever, is a
substitute for the will to make this happen when necessary.
I grow rather tired of people whining about the spam (and abuse) problem
on the one hand...while refusing to take simple, well-known, and proven
steps to push the consequences back on those responsible for it. While we
may no longer be in a position to remove particularly egregious networks
from the Internet, we most certainly are in a position to remove the
Internet from them via coordinated group action -- producing an
equivalent result.
It's gonna come down to this sooner or later anyway. We might as well
do it now, rather than waste another decade fiddling around with
clever-but-useless technical proposals and worthless legislation
while the problem continues to proliferate and diversify.
---Rsk
