RE: Administrivia and spam rate - OFF TOPIC FOR FW..DEAD ON FOR SECURITY

["Norm McLeod" <normcleod () charter net>]

Dear Sir...and list

You, and most, consider PGP to be the deFacto standard in digital
signatures, and encryption. I of course, agree, except that in my
business experience, PGP is too hard to use for most users, you know,
the ID-10-T syndrome.

AS a matter of course, excluding other digital signatures (such as the
NIST standard), precludes functionality that WILL be implemented in the
near future.
 

I foresee a time where corporate email users will be stopped at the Mail
server IF the email is NOT digitally signed, and in S/MIME format.

I see corporations getting lawyers in on the email virus issue, and
liability placed, whereby, a corporation that does NOT stop the spread
of these script kiddies be held partially accountable. TO implement
this, email would only be accepted if it can be determined where it came
from. Hence digital signatures...... Signed by a 3rd party CA, which
precludes PGP. I personally have stopped using PGP, since the 9-11
incident, so the NSA has less to do. I expect they capture virtually all
PGP encrypted email, and give it the once over. Whereas, the Microsoft
Crypto API (IMHO) has a back door for them to easily look inside. There
is nothing I can think of that I would try to hide from the NSA (as long
as they didn't share it with certain other governmental agencies...lol),
actually not then, except for the fact that IF I want privacy in this
country, I should have it.

OK... Rambling over

As a list administrator, I certainly understand your rules, but to open
up discussion on these issues, I replied.
 

 

 

Norm McLeod

digital signature attached (www.thawte.com) (NOT THIS TIME)

vCard attached for contact information (NOT THIS TIME)

 
-----Original Message-----
From: firewall-wizards-admin () nfr com
[mailto:firewall-wizards-admin () nfr com] On Behalf Of Marcus J. Ranum
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 9:23 AM
To: firewall-wizards () nfr com
Subject: [fw-wiz] Administrivia and spam rate -


I'm not sure what's going on out there but the spam rate has increased
dramatically in the last few weeks. :( Of 35 messages in today's inbox,
all but 3 were spam. :(

Since I've got your attention, let me remind you of some
administrivia:
        - Please do not post in HTML or MIME. I will reject such
        messages with a request to re-post them in plain text. The
        only non-plain text that I'll let through is PGP signatures.
        - If I get something in a character set that I can't read or
        a language I can't read (I read English, French, some German,
        and a bit of Latin) I'll discard the message on the assumption
        that it is spam. A huge amount of incoming spam is from yahoo.kr
        and is unreadable.
        - Please be considerate about trimming included text in replies.
        Try to keep only included text that is relevant to the topic of
        discussion. I won't police this issue carefully, but I may
reject
        messages in the form of:
                <100 lines of included text>
                <one line witty comment>
        - If I get bounces from your mailbox I will unsubscribe you,
        even if it is a transient error. Why? I have no idea if it
        is a transient error and if I wait I'll just have more
        bounces to deal with. If you find yourself no longer getting
        firewall-wizards that's probably what happened. See below...

        - The list interface is at:
        http://list.nfr.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
        and if you want to edit your options or make sure you're
        subscribed there is a form for doing so at the bottom.

mjr.
---
Marcus J. Ranum                 Chief Technology Officer
http://www.ranum.com            NFR Security, Inc.
Woodbine, Maryland              http://www.nfr.com
                                Rockville, Maryland

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