Re: mitigating botnet C&Cs has become useless

[Barry Shein <bzs () world std com>]

On July 31, 2006 at 08:51 surfer () mauigateway com (Scott Weeks) wrote:
> That's all fine and dandy until you consider the
> international base of these things.  I'd like to see
> "...jackbooted [US is implied in the text] government
> thugs...kicking in a door somewhere and confiscating every
    ...

This is a common fallacy which goes back to practically day 1 of The
Spam Crisis (tm). I remember being invited to a meeting at the
Massachussets state house probably around 1998 and being shouted down
by this reasoning for a few minutes.

Believe it or not spam is not the only internationalized problem on
this planet. There's drug trade, actual high-seas piracy, slave trade,
phone fraud, investment fraud, and on and on.

So the usual snappy response is: And look how well we do with all that!

Well, yes, you can make the best the enemy of the good. But there's a
logical fallacy involved in trying to extrapolate that to "so
therefore we should do nothing".

Pressure can be put onto countries which are either spam-friendly or,
more likely, spam agnostic (it's just not on their list of
priorities.)

Spam crime is of only limited value to those countries, one just has
to find that value and the right buttons to push.

> powered device and every living person in the building" in
> China, an African country, Russia, or <insert country of
> choice here>.  These things span continents and countries
> and every time you cutoff the current head, it immediately
> spawns another and not always in a country that cares.
>
> scott

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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