Wired mag article on spammers playing traceroute games with trojaned boxes

Thu Oct 9 17:06:51 UTC 2003

Vinny Abello wrote:

> 
> Personally, I think preventing residential broadband customers from 
> hosting servers would limit a lot of that. I'm not saying that IS the 
> solution. Whether or not that's the right thing to do in all 
> circumstances for each ISP is a long standing debate that surfaces here 
> from time to time. Same as allowing people to host mail servers on cable 
> modems or even allowing them to access mail servers other than the ISP's.
> 

The issue comes in defining a server. You can block <1024 access, but 
spammers don't have to reference port 80 in their emails. You can 
mandate NAT, but this breaks commonly used systems (especially for 
broadband) like DirectPlay. One of the selling points for broadband is 
gaming. Yet some gaming systems were designed to make connections both 
ways and dynamic port forwarding doesn't work in all senarios.

-Jack