EC2 and GAE means end of ip address reputation industry? (Re: Intrustion attempts from Amazon EC2 IPs)

Sun Jun 22 16:43:10 UTC 2008

At 4:17 PM +0000 6/22/08, Paul Vixie wrote:
>with EC2, it's game-over for the IP reputation industry, other than
>possibly lists of dynamic IP blocks (modems, DSL, etc) from which SMTP
>ought not come.  but for the wider IP address space, we now return to
>content based filtering, and i predict a mighty increase in the number of
>pink contracts in colo rooms.  (the silver lining is, this could reduce
>pressure on BGP piracy/injection.)
>
>as randy bush often says, "it's just business."  amazon has solid business
>reasons for creating EC2 and there's no way it could be profitable if they
>can't scale the user base, and there's no way to scale the user base if
>they have to police it at the application or "intent" level.  so, i'm not
>whining, just pointing out that this is a sea change, the end of an era.

I agree that it's going to be difficult to deal with this on an IP
reputation basis (at least using IPv4 :-), but not certain that
means that a total lack of policing will stand long-term.  The
litmus test will likely be subsequent to the first large scale P2P
service appearing in the EC2 cloud and distributing quantities
of copyright material...

/John