nanog mailing list archives
RE: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else]
From: <michael.dillon () bt com>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:33:29 +0100
Instead of they suck, it might be more useful to highlight providers of similar scale which you think do a good job which others could emulate.
How about some smarter statistics. Instead of counting the spam emails from Network X, count the spam sources and divide that by the number of end user customers (or hosts) in Network X. By doing this you get a clearer picture of who is cleaning their house, and who is letting it slide. Think of a messy house. You say that there were 8 dirty plates in the living room, on the floor, the sofa the coffee table. Horrible, right? Not if there are 8 people living in the house. In that case it represents one evening of laziness, going to bed without cleaning up first. But if only one person lives in the house and there are no guests, then the 8 dirty plates represent a big mess. Whenever you scale up anything, small nits also grow in absolute magnitude. The small scale operator who ignores the nits is following the same practices as the large scale operator who ignores the nits. If there are lots of nits, I want to know if the large scale operator should be criticised for not adjusting their processes to deal with scaling up, or whether somebody really is being incompetent. There are different remedies to the two situations. Scaling issues can be solved by paying attention, education, installing tools/products/services. But incompetence generally requires replacing people, especially management who allow the incompetence to thrive.
Unlesss accept all those messages from those addresses and check them, you really don't know the false positive rate. You only know the self-reported complaint rate; which is usually a fraction of the actual false positive rate.
Yes. It is tempting to take numbers at their face value, but I find that whenever somebody has an axe to grind, their numbers are based on flawed reasoning or measuring the wrong things. --Michael Dillon
Current thread:
- Re: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Stephen Satchell (Sep 12)
- RE: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Jason J. W. Williams (Sep 12)
- Re: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Andrew Sullivan (Sep 12)
- Re: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Steven Champeon (Sep 12)
- RE: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Jason J. W. Williams (Sep 12)
- RE: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Sean Donelan (Sep 12)
- Re: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Rich Kulawiec (Sep 18)
- Re: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Sean Donelan (Sep 18)
- RE: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] michael.dillon (Sep 19)
- Re: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Rich Kulawiec (Sep 19)
- Re: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Sean Donelan (Sep 20)
- Re: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Rich Kulawiec (Sep 22)
- RE: Criminals, The Network, and You [Was: Something Else] Jason J. W. Williams (Sep 12)