Clueless service restrictions (was RE: Anti-spam System Idea)

Wed Feb 18 00:48:03 UTC 2004

--On 17 February 2004 16:19 -0800 Tony Hain <alh-ietf at tndh.net> wrote:

> Where they specifically form a club and agree to preclude the basement
> multi-homed site from participating through prefix length filters. This
> is exactly like the thread comments about preventing consumers from
> running independent servers by forced filtering and routing through the
> ISP server. This is not scaled trust; it is a plain and simple power
> grab. Central censorship is what you are promoting, but you are trying to
> pass it off as spam control through a provider based transitive trust
> structure. Either you are clueless about where you are headed, or you
> think the consumers won't care when you take their rights away. Either
> way this path is not good news for the future Internet.

Now there was me thinking that I was in general agreeing with you. I am not
promoting any sort of censorship, central or otherwise. I believe you have
a perfect right to open a port 25 connection to any server, and I have a
perfect right to accept or deny it. And of course vice-versa. What I am
saying is that I would like, in determining whether to accept or reject
your connection, to know who you are and that you act responsibly, or
failing that, to know someone who is prepared to vouch for you; failing
that, may be I'll accept your email anyway, may be I won't. I do not care
what upstream either you or I have. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not
talking about forcing people to send mail through their upstreams, or even
suggesting that the graph of any web of trust should follow the BGP
topology. Indeed the entire point I made about separating the web of
trust's topology from IP addresses etc. was rather to enable end users to
CHOOSE how they accept/reject mail in a manner that might have nothing to
do with network topology. Personally I would be far more happy accepting
mail from someone who'd been vouched for by (say) someone on this list I
knew, than vouched for by their quite possibly clueless DSL provider. Of
course some people will want to use their "ISP", many won't. Just like Joe
User can use their upstream's DNS service, but doesn't necessarily need to.

Maybe PGP would have been a better analogy as far as the scale bit goes. I
think you are assigning motives to the BGP basement-multihoming problems
where in general the main motive is not getting return on cost of hardware;
however, I don't think the same scale constraints need apply as it is
unnecessary to hold a complete table in-core at once.

Alex