On Sat, Sep 06, 2003, burns wrote: ... >The scary thing is no-one voted for these guys, they weren't appointed >by any government agency and they aren't accountable to anyone. These >are just people who are feeding their ego and power-tripping on how they >are 'saving the world.'
More often they're only attempting to protect their networks from abuse. They are accountable to the people who own the systems and pay them. The volume of spam and other network abuse is truly astounding, and the professional spammers aren't stupid. Perhaps I see more of this than the average person on this list because I have been selling and supporting systems for regional ISPs around the U.S. for about ten years. This isn't to say that there aren't kooks and vigilantes out there, but they're certainly not the ones running the abuse and anti-spam departments at any of the major ISPs I've dealt with. The vast majority of spam today is sent through open proxies or insecure Microsoft Windows boxes on broadband networks. It's bad enough that the data on these machines is open to the world, but that's nothing compared to the damage they can do by propagating spam and other network abuse after being taken over. One of the latest tricks is to crack a Windows box, install a server that then connects to an IRC server owned by the abuser, then have the cracked Windows box send spam to lists sent by the spammer. An ISP can take positive steps to protect their own customers from some of the typical attacks on the Microsoft virus, Windows, by blocking incoming connections on dangerous services (e.g. ports 135, 137-139, etc.). The ISP can also minimize abuse by their customers by limiting outgoing SMTP connections to their own servers (unless of course there's an agreement with the customer to allow it). Bill -- INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 URL: http://www.celestial.com/ It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Dijkstra _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
