Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 00:01:54 -0400
Trolling for all he's worth, Donovan White wrote:
>>The point Panix was making was that *any* mail from bigprofits.com,
>> businesslink.net, bulk-e-mail.com or bbbiiizzz.com is by definition spam.
>
>Interesting concept. Of course, one man's spam is another man's luncheon
>loaf. But even if it were universally detested, so what?
More than an "interesting concept," it happens to be true. The next
sentence read: "They are rogue sites created specifically to service bulk
emailers." And if you really want the mystery meat, don't use the filters.
>Whatever. It does seem, though, as if Panix set up its own spam service,
>spamming the spammers. To an extremely disinterested third party, it looks
>like a snowball fight.
Jeez, I don't know ... sending a single message to a postmaster
somehow just doesn't seem to fit into the same category as sending out
hundreds of thousands of letters to addresses culled at random from Deja News.
>I'll grant you that there's little that would justify shutting down an ISP,
>but still, the fundamental principle is that when you walk out in traffic,
>you should expect to get hit by a truck. I find fault with Panix for 1.
>Picking a fight when they should have focused on serving their customers.
>and 2. Having provoked a confrontation, failing to anticipate correctly or
>respond adequately to the countermeasures applied against them. Lousy
>business practices, pure and simple.
Wow.
1. They didn't pick a fight. They didn't engage in "counterspam".
They didn't "fight fire with a match". They focussed squarely on serving
their customers, who (to judge from the comments in the local newsgroups)
were very happy with the convenience of both the filter itself and the
opportunity to deliver a "no thank you" message in reply.
It's ridiculous to try to elevate the letter-to-the-postmaster into
a provocative, retaliatory act of counterspam (although it _is_ an artful
way to try to impose a weird kind of moral equality onto might otherwise
just be seen as an outrageous and unwarranted attack on an ISP).
Commercial bulk emailers do not have a right to force delivery of
their spew to people who don't want to receive it. And it defies
comprehension to think that they'd have any justification in shutting down
an ISP that tries to accommodate its customers' desires not to have to
receive it.
2. *No one* could have anticipated the kind of attack that Panix is
now undergoing. The technology involved in source-forged SYN-packet flooding
simply hasn't been seen before in practice, and it's deadly. As for
"responding adequately," most of the Internet security community has been
working for nearly a week on trying to develop a defense against it. It's
under heavy discussion in news.admin.net-abuse.misc and on the inet-access
and firewalls mailing lists.
The fact that there was no immediate defense (although there's been
some ad hoc kernel-modification wizardry performed that has kept them from
total obliteration) is hardly Panix's fault.
==========================================================================
Gordon T. Thompson gordy@nytimes.com
Manager, Internet Services 212 556 1386
The New York Times fax: 212 556 1636
The Times and I have an arrangement: Neither of us speaks for the other.
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