the Intercage mess

Wed Sep 24 13:37:43 UTC 2008

While it's good to see some community effort going toward slapping
a lid on misbehaving sources, how about a little consistency in
the bigger picture?

Consider this sort of scenario:  An ISP allows its infrastructure
to emit spam and host compromised machines to harbor malware and
facilitate crime and botnets.  Its abuse mailbox is a black hole
that is provably ignored.  All reasonable efforts to get the problem
fixed fail.  Network operators band together and deroute the ISP's
blocks, forcing them to either clean up their act or find something
else to do with their time.  Internet death penalty, simple enough.

If this happened to some of the other major sources of crap that
I'm thinking of, it would make the freaking NATIONAL NEWS.  Where's
the BACKBONE to go after the real high-volume sources, rather than
continuing to kick sand in the face of some podunk little guy who
can no longer defend himself?

_H*