Re: What's going on?

[Sanjay Dani <sanjay () professionals com>]

> From markb () infi net Thu Apr 17 19:49 PDT 1997

> Tell me about it.  In the course of today's activities, I
> learned that one of our users with a small commercial web site
> on one of our servers spammed the net from an account on 
> another ISP.  The spam contained a pointer to his URL on 
> our server.

The spammer in this case is not misusing any of your
resources. A web provider stands on a very tenuous
ground. I fail to understand those--who would vandalize
your network or incite others to vandalize it--who want
to force that choice on you:

> From: Michael Dillon <michael () memra com>

> I certainly don't condone any attacks on AGIS but I think this should be a
> lesson that Internet users expect a certain standard of behavior from 
> network providers. While there may be no legal imperative to force network
> providers to ehave in a certain way, the will of the people has a way of
> making itself felt and we ignore it at our peril.

                (Internet users != hackers)
                
I understand the will of the people to boycot a certain
company or a product, but breaking into others' property?
Sophistry like above deserves some of the blame for the
break-ins.

> Some of the mail seems to be holding us partially culpable
> for the spam.  I'm happy to report that the other ISP is taking
> action against the spam complaint, but I don't know of any
> interpretation of Netiquette that condemns commercial WWW sites.
> I don't know that I'd favor an abuse policy that encompasses
> WWW sites, even if they are listed elsewhere in spam mailings,

Where does one draw the line? The phone company that gives
phone service to the email spammer, the gazillion dollar
software and hardware companies that sell their pc/email/browser
products to the spammers? Break into them? It is easy to
imagine the company some of the extermist anti-spammers
would be keeping, at this rate.

This issues has relevance to nanog--the veiled encouragement
to break-ins I see here does result into network operational
problems, more than most of the spams do.

Sanjay.

PS. I don't condone spamming, my company disconnect accounts
that spam _from_ our network.

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