Networking in Africa...

Tue Dec 3 15:27:49 UTC 2002

>> So what exactly do people do in regards to Web spam?  I block tcp/80 
>> but would like to hear what others are doing.
> 
> Block or rate limit?  I would assume that blocking port 80 in a 
> cybercafe wouldn't really work out in the long run.

One possible solution might be to force all traffic through a proxy, and 
have it cache all outgoing form traffic for several weeks.  This way, if 
someone reports abuse, you can search the cache and find out who is 
doing it.  From there, hopefully you'll have enough information to hand 
it over to law enforcement, or at least ban the customer from the cafe.

I don't know what (if any) legal right of privacy is in Nigeria, but I 
would suspect that a publicly posted policy notice (like "management 
reserves the right to monitor all traffic" and a strict TOS policy) 
should mitigate any legal concerns about doing this.

The only problems I see with this are hard drive space for the cache, 
and the possibility of spammers using secure web sites.  Do any web-mail 
sites use https these days?

-- David