Attn MCI/UUNet - Massive abuse from your network

Thu Jun 24 03:34:39 UTC 2004

Dr. Jeffrey Race wrote:

> This "endless loop" situation does NOT happen to every ISP, only to those who
> have not emplaced procedures to prevent serial signups of serial abusers.  This is 
> trivially easy to do and your firm's failure to do so and to enforce this rule on your
> contracting parties definitively proves your management's decision to profit from
> spam rather than to stop spam.

I don't think "trivially easy" is the right word in this case. If this 
were someone doing hit and run dialup directly on UUnet I might agree. 
But here he's talking about a customer of a customer. How do you 
retroactively modify your contract to tell all your existing clients 
"don't do business with company X" or we'll terminate you (actually, 
such a contract term would probably run afoul of antitrust regs esp. for 
an entity as large as AS701).

In general, policing the customer of a customer is not an easy thing. We 
were once sued by the French organization for the preservation of the 
name "Champagne". One of our clients was apparently hosting a domain for 
one of their clients named "champ-pagne.com" which was selling bottled 
water for dogs(!). But by the time we were served with the papers, the 
DNS had been moved away from our client. We had to go to court just to 
find out just why they were suing us to begin with since the paperwork 
didn't explicitly mention our client by name or IP.