C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Sure you can cut off UUNET the same way
> you can cut of MCI. Just do it ... call their bluff ... let _them_
> deal with their legitimate customers who are no longer able to get
> through. Yes, they both have lots of legitimate customers, but in any
> kind of serious medical procedure, for example, we don't think about
> how long the patient will be in the operating room or how long they
> will be in intensive care recovering. We concern ourselves with what
> their life will be like when they are fully recovered and back to
> normal. And our net has some very serious, I suspect deadly cancerous
> growths that have been going of for years. So what if cutting off
> UUNET and MCI leaves a shambles of email and the net _for a few days_.
> Things are pretty much a shambles now anyway, aren't they? Oh, I know
> that MCI (and probably Vint Cerf) will scream and carry on about it,
> as will UUNET and others similarly situated. But it is time _we_ took
> the net back over, and my belief is it would not take too many days
> of simply refusing to handle _any_ of their traffic until things began
> to change for the better. Just cut them, and be done with it, and hope
> they are back with us sometime soon under more reasonable terms. PAT]
I've said the very same thing many times but in a slightly different perspective. Instead of cutting off anything coming from UUNET registered address ranges, why not just disconnect China, North Korea, etc. from the net in its entirety.
Better yet -- every piece of spam tries to sell something. Just follow the money trail and arrest and imprison the seller. Suddenly it won't be as attractive to market via spam when you're facing a 15 year sentence.
But those companies that produce the products have a cozy relationship with our legislators, and he who writes the biggest check wins. Until we first hold our legislators fully accountable we won't get anywhere.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Yeah, and we also have these guys who claim they speak for the entire net and 'nobody' would go for that. Just cut off MCI and UUNET totally for a few days and see if it makes any difference, as I think it will. PAT]