What's going on?

Fri Apr 18 02:03:05 UTC 1997

On Fri, 18 Apr 1997, Dima Volodin wrote:

> AGIS/Net99 (NETBLK-NET99-BLK4)  NET99-BLK4         205.198.0.0 - 205.199.255.0
> Cyber Promotions  Inc (NETBLK-CYBERPROMO-205-199) CYBERPROMO-205-199
>                                                205.199.212.0 - 205.199.212.255
> 
> Nothing comes without a price.
> 
> Dima
> just speculating

If you had been following the traffic in news.admin.net-abuse.email over
the past couple of months, you would not need to speculate, nor would you
be surprised that AGIS has been under attack for several weeks.

I certainly don't condone any attacks on AGIS but I think this should be a
lesson that Internet users expect a certain standard of behavior from 
network providers. While there may be no legal imperative to force network
providers to ehave in a certain way, the will of the people has a way of
making itself felt and we ignore it at our peril.

In the final analysis, there is no money to be made from harboring
customers that abuse the network. The Internet structure is such that it
requires a minimum level of cooperation from providers to even function
and activities which directly or indirectly abuse the infrastructure need
to be curbed. 

Fidonet had an interesting pair of commandments that I think applies to
other networks as well, such as the Internet:

   1) Thou shalt not excessively annoy others.

   2) Thou shalt not be too easily annoyed.

I'll let you ponder the implications of those two statements on your own.
If you are interested in the policy document that stems from these two
principles, have a look at http://www.fidonet.org/fidonet/policy4.txt
BTW, I'm not at all suggesting that the Internet needs anything like this
Fidonet policy, but it does seem to me that network abuse is a social
problem, and that a big part of the solution will be to succintly define
what is good and what is bad in order to more easily communicate this to
others.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com