Filter-based routing table management (was: Re: minimum IPv6 announcement size)

Sun Sep 29 03:49:43 UTC 2013

Yes, I was lazy in most of the adaptation, but I think it serves a
good starting point for market based suggestions to the route slot
problem.

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam^H^H^H^H route deaggregation. Your idea will
not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may
apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used
to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) End Users will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for routing
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP^H^H^H^H BGP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP^H^H^H^H BGP to attack
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(X) SMTP headers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Routing should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

-Blake

On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Steven Bellovin <smb at cs.columbia.edu>wrote:

>
> On Sep 26, 2013, at 11:07 AM, John Curran <jcurran at istaff.org> wrote:
>
> > On Sep 26, 2013, at 4:52 AM, bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
> >
> >> sounds just like folks in 1985, talking about IPv4...
> >
> > If there were ever were a need for an market/settlement model, it is
> with respect
> > to routing table slots.
>
> https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/piara/index.html, from 1997.
>
> We even had a BoF at an IETF, but you can imagine the reaction it got.
>
>                 --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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