Reply to Sean Donelan (was: Yet more hijacked space? - deru.net)

Tue May 6 11:35:54 UTC 2003

On Tue, 6 May 2003 Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:

> I think that it is time to tighten up on these requirements even further. 
> The published whois directory should only contain the up-to-date contact 
> information of people responsible for enforcing network AUPs and rooting 
> out network abuse. If an organization is allocated or assigned IP space 
> from their upstream then their info should not be published in the whois 
> directory unless they agree to be directly responsible for AUPs and abuse 
> mitigation.

This has got to be one of the worst ideas you've come up with recently.  
The crack pipe must be pretty warm.  This would make every provider like 
Level3 and Cogent...hosters of spammers camouflaged by a lack of 
publicly available reassignment data.  At least with the current system, 
most providers publish reassignment data, so when you get spammed by 
discountdeals or ultimate savings, or the like, you can usually look up 
their address space and block them.  Too many providers just don't care 
about spam as long as the spammers pay.

> In one fell swoop, this will enable people to block just about every 
> possible source of spam.

I assume you mean it would make blocking bogons and unused blocks easier, 
but I think the net result would be to make it much harder to block most 
sources of spam.

> Of course, none of this will happen unless network operators stop chasing 
> symptoms and start thinking more deeply about the roots of the problem. 
> One of these roots is the lack of a web of accountability for IP address 
> space.

So you want to fix this by making it even harder to find out who's using 
an IP block?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis *jlewis at lewis.org*|  I route
 System Administrator        |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |  
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________