Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

[Jon Lewis <jlewis () lewis org>]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2010, Rich Kulawiec wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 04:38:27PM -0600, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> > I believe Comcast has made clear their position that they feel content
> > providers should be paying them for access to their customers. I've seen
> > them repeatedly state that they feel networks who send them too much
> > traffic are "abusing their network".
>
> That's rich, given the enormous quantity of spam sourced from Comcast's
> network over the last decade.   (And yes, it's ongoing: 162 unique sources
> in the last hour noted at one small observation point.)

Spam is irrelevant.  In this context, abuse = sending large amounts of 
data to Comcast customers (at their request) without paying at the Comcast 
toll booth.

> Now I realize that SMTP abuse isn't exactly the most bandwidth-chewing
> problem.  However, it's a surface indicator of underlying security issues,
> which in this particular case can be summarized as "one heck of a lot
> of zombies".  Given that those systems are known-hostile and under the
> control of adversaries, it's certain that they're doing all kinds of
> other things that chew up a lot more bandwidth than the spam does.

It might even "improve" their ratios if they stopped those zombies from 
sendig spam, participating in DDoS's, etc.  After all, that's outgoing 
traffic, and the less they send, the worse the ratio gets for networks 
sending data to Comcast.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |
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