A message here from Robert Bonomi was, IMO, so full of controversy and error, I just felt I have to reply to it as a separate message. My replies are interspersed below his as it goes along. Periodically, his conversation with Lisa Hancock is included, and she responds on her own in the message following this one.
From: snipped-for-privacy@host122.r-b > Robert B >> Nope. it's because it is, quite simply, *NOT* ICANN's job to do so.
I don't see why not. ICANN has taken almost total control of the registrars and the rules, i.e. ICANN can revoke your domain name anytime they want in a dispute over copyright/patent infringement. All the registrars have to do what ICANN wants. Yes, I would say ICANN is a good candidate for helping to in general 'clean up' and reform the net.
They do if the 'content of packets' involves child p*rn, or invades the copyright/patent authority of someone else. Why not when the 'content of the packets' includes spam, phish, scam or false IP addresses?
When you figure out what the Internet is, you'll understand the answer to that question.
She knows, as I know and as you know the Internet _used to be an anarchy_, or 'informally governed' to put it, but that can no longer be the case.
The Internet is a _voluntary_ co-operative effort of *private* network operators. *nobody* 'owns' it. *nobody* 'controls' it. Everybody makes _their_own_rules_ for *THEIR*OWN* network.
Indeed, but just as Independence has its own laws and Chicago, Illinois has its own laws, and when you come here you obey our laws and if I should ever again choose to go to Chicago I would follow your laws, to get from Independence to Chicago we do not travel on a 'voluntary cooperative' of highways.
Why are you confusing what someone does with their own property versus how they behave on common property?
Unfortunately, "their" rules do not apply to someone who is _not_ on their network. When someone chooses to allow people "_not_ on their network" to access resources "on their network", they are 'extending trust' to those people to voluntarily obey their _unenforceable_ rules. The *only* 'enforcement' option available is to deny those 'scofflaws' access to the resources on their network.
Again, you are getting confused between the private property of a network operator and the public property which belongs to all.
If you "don't like" the way YOUR NETWORK OPERATOR is extending trust (or not revoking it) to those who abuse that trust, either (a) find a different network operator, (b) bitch at your existing operator to get them to change _their_ operation, or (c) disconnect yourself.
And if I do not like the way Chicago, Illinois operates, the politics and the general decay I see everywhere west of Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive which the tour busses always overlook, I can move away which is what I did. But to get from Chicago to Independence, I had to travel on common property _and behave myself the entire trip_ by displaying my chauffer's license plate, asking him to stay within the speed limit, and not drive through other people's yards on the way. Yes, I suppose I could have gotten off the bus in St. Louis or somewhere since the chauffer refused to follow my instructions.
I said before, this is _pure propoganda_ no more, no less, which had its beginnings in the days when home computers and networks and such were something special. We _all_ wanted that freedom at one time, the freedom to do our own thing, but now that the Commons has turned into a barnyard with cows and pigs s*****ng everywhere; no longer any place we can go for respite, that simply is no longer true.
You persist in telling that _bald face lie_ about what people on the 'net want and do not want as if _you_ were the expert on the subject.
Lisa Hancock interjected: > I don't know about that.
Neither do I Lisa. Like yourself, I am getting just damn sick and tired of having to step in shit everywhere I walk these days.
Try to find anybody who wants restrictions on what _they_ can do/say/etc. On the Internet. Even among those who favor restrictions on what "other people" can do/say/etc. on the Internet.
No one is suggesting restrictions on what you say and do on your own network. Again, a bald face lie! Only about what you and I and everyone can say or do on the public network we call the Internet, the collection of highways from Independence to Chicago.
If 'officialdom' can proscribe sending one kind of message, they can proscribe sending _any_other_ kind of message.
Not so! We prohibit 'them' from doing so; that's what constitutions and Bill of Rights are for.
Lisa says:> I see the net as a great POTENTIAL tool, but one that is fraught > with risk and problems.
Yeah. So? If you're not prepared to deal with the risks, "don't play in the street." applies.
The street is not something to play in to start with, except you can play in the street in your town and I in mine. But Interstate 70 or US Highway 66 is not a place to play. It is a way to get from one point to another.
If the benefits for you don't outweigh the risks then *UNPLUG*THE*COMPUTER*. Problem _solved_.
What a brilliant deduction, Robert! Many people have done just that, or worse perhaps, they leave the computer 'idling in the driveway' where other passersby have ugly thoughts about it. Why should _we_ have to stay at home just so you can have your joyride, like a bat out of hell?
Lisa comments more: > Between hackers, spammers, perverts, and thieves, I are extremely > hesitant to do much of anything on the Internet. The newspapers > have articles constantly about how people have been fleeced from > Internet troubles -- either stolen identity, "phishing sites", > or fraudulent sites. Don't count of the authorities to go > after anyone unless it's a very major deal. (Let me know > IF any of the principals in the Norvergence collapse are > called to task -- under oath -- to account in detail for that. > I am not holding my breath.) At present, there is no > deterrent.
That's what he is claiming, Lisa.
(Robert again) If you use "good quality" software, for reading mail -- as opposed to the cr*p that Microsoft as foisted off on the world, most of those "problems" simply disappear.
That's right ... blame the mess on everyone except your good and precious netizen friends. And the 'good quality software' you espouse would cure nothing except that _you_ would not see the mess that others see.
As for the 'getting fleeced' issue, there is *NOTHING*NEW* about that.
"Ponzi schemes" have been around (by _that_ name) since the 1920s. The 'Spanish prisoner' con goes back even further.
Yeah, you are right, they do go back that far. More within the range of my memory were the (written on paper, handled via the postal service) 'chain letters' people used to recieve and pass on. But, we could appeal to the postmaster to get those stopped, and often times did accomplish something.
Lisa: > When Pat T. brought up these problems, I noticed that almost > all responses were for things _Pat_ should do. In other > words, he has to make considerable effort to protect himself > from malicious efforts from others.
HOW? The -bad guy- *owns* the "source". He has -zero- interest in "stopping" his own activities.
All he owns is his own network. You live in Chicago area, where there is zero interest in stopping the corruption and crime which make up a big part of daily life there. I presume you may possibly own some property there. All well and good. But if you decide to migrate here to a small town in Kansas as I chose to do, you _will_, by God, obey the rules when flying or bussing or driving to get here. I do not care how many scams and spams you want to pull off in your town. You won't be permitted to carry on that way when you get here, nor should you be allowed to carry on that way on the bus ride here.
Shall we impose 'licensing' on every computer that gets connected to the internet? Including a requirement that the operating system and all applications be secure and un-exploitable?
(Maybe that's not a bad idea -- it would get rid of *all* those d*mn virus-infected (and potentially infected) MS-Windows boxes.
Ah, so now the anarchist, the dude who claims to speak for 'everyone on the net' agrees the idea of a license plate for your machine might not be a bad idea.
But, how many readers of Telecom Digest or the newsgroup would be left _that_ was done? )
I don't know and do not care. It is so typical, so common in these discussions, to get _personal_ isn't it Robert? Why did you have to name c.d.t. as your choice? Did you presume that I, in my own sense of self-preservation would likely see and agree with your (let's face it) bald faced propoganda to self-preserve the internet in the way you want it to go? Hell, for all I know, the readership count might go up if _everyone_ behaved themselves on the public roads. I could run the newsgroup on robo-mod (without hoops to jump through to get posted) and have messages out almost immediatly on their being written.
Lisa: > Why is it that most people just wring their hands and say > "nothing can be done".
Because it is, quite simply, a _fact_. There will *always* be 'bad guys' out there. And, as long as they can control the 'sending' system, there is, bluntly, no way to force them to play by the rules. Want to require certain kinds of headers in e-mail? The bad guy sender can _forge_ those headers, just as easily as the good guy can put the right info in them.
When _everybody_ is their own publisher/source ...
More of the same bald faced lies and propoganda the 'old crowd' around here is so good at. The bad guys can do as they please, play in the streets, rip off other folks, produce and distribute pictures of naked little boys, etc. _As soon as they get on the highway (or non-highway as Paul Vader is bold to say) then they become the business of the rest of us.
Lisa: > If we can put a man on the moon using 1950 based computer > technology, we can make the Internet safe.
Bullshit. Sorry, but its a fact, nonetheless.. We can't even make the _streets_ safe, and we've been trying to do that for what, 80+ year. something like 50,000+ people/year are killed in auto accidents in the U.S. alone.
Because there are always people who throw up objections everywhere.
Lisa: > So de-issue them.
"So sorry. *You* have been kicked off the Internet. Your addresses are in an address-block assigned to ARIN that has been reclaimed by ICANN, because some other user in that block misbehaved."
Why do I think that that concept is doomed to failure in the real world.
It is doomed to fail because the technology of addresses in an 'address block' is obsolete. I told you here before about the instances of People's Gas in Chicago being forced to cut off a paying customer because they were served by branch line on the gas feed and gas company wanted to cut one non-payer and had to cut everyone else behind him. I told you about WUTCO having the same problems with deliquent customers of their clock service. One clock line into a twenty story building, the delinquent guy would not let them in to remove the instrument, they had to cut everyone with a 'load' on the line that stopped all the pendulums, then remove the load after everything was stopped and restart everyone else _except_ for the deadbeat.
If an address block gets cut because of someone's misbehavior (or should I call it his liberal or non-understanding of malicious' behavior') then the supervisors (let's call then ICANN) apologizes to the good persons who got cut and works with that person's ISP to get their service restored _on a different address block_ ASAP. And let that be a lesson to the technical people: ASAP when it is technically possible, addresses resolved down the final couple of digits. Don't skip your lunch hour or your days off to work on it, but be mindful that as soon as possible everyone needs to have their own fully resolved address. Get rid of the 'branch lines'. In the good old days, it never occurred to gas company nor to WUTCO that some of their customers would not only be deadbeats but bull-headed ones at that; they thought *they* could skimp on plumbing pipes and such by doing stuff as 'branch lines'. Not so these days.
Not to mention that, _by_charter_, ICANN and the RIRs, e.g. ARIN, are _voluntary-participation_ *technical* coordination agencies only. Nobody *has* to go to a RIR to get IP addresses. As long as 'whomever' you buy connectivity from will "route" packets to those addresses to you, it doesn't matter _what_ the RIRs, etc. say. The only "good news" is that the "rest of the internet' _does_, in general, limit how _they_ will route traffic to the address-spaces that ICANN and the RIRs _have_ "authorized".
Robert, you like to talk out of both sides of your mouth at once. First you (and others of your ilk) are fond of telling us about this great anarchy and how _no one_ on the net wants it any different, and how we dasn't impose with rules and regulations on packets, etc.
Then, although you acknowledge 'license plates' might not be a bad idea (mainly I think you said that in your never-ending quest to throw mud all over Microsoft), you now talk about contract law and how the contracts are written in stone, non-revokable, etc.
Because, for starters, there is no 'universal agreement' on what constitutes "malicious behavior".
Oh? What can't you or anyone understand about identity pilfering, spamming, virus writing, etc in the context of the internet?
There are multiple layers of contracts involved.
ICANN, or some other TLD "issuing authority", enters into contracts with "approved registrars". Those registrars, subsequently, enter into contracts with "registrants" of a domain name.
Ah, so the old system of anarchy, which we all enjoyed at one time while we could afford that luxury is in fact starting to melt away.
The 'issuer-registrar' contract specifies certain "minimum requirements" that the registrar-registrant contract must contain. The 'issuer' is *not* a party to the registrar-registrant contract, and, thus, _cannot_ act directly against the registrant -- they have 'licensed' the registrar to do certain things, and as a result of that licensing the 'issuer' *is* _legally_bound_ to certain performance, by the actions of the (licensed) registrar.
_This_ is the point at which new contracts need to be written. And don't kid yourself on contracts being good forever and never changeable and all that bulljive. Judges have been known to void out one-sided contracts which were oppressive. Can you say 'Norvergence' and 'finance company'? All those fools who had Norvergence equipment and the bigger fools who insisted that by telling people to put a freeze on their accounts payable, "I [ptownson] was going to cause them to get sued." Nothing you can do but pay up and shut up, they claimed.
And now you, Robert, insist there is nothing people can do for spam except buy newer and better spam appliances, and hope to God that as spam continues to increase computer CPU cycles will also grow in their ability to keep up with it. What absolute nonsense does the man speak!
Registrars *are* free to impose 'more restrictive' terms than those 'minimum requirements' in *their* contract with the registrant. There _are_ at least two 'significant' registrars who *do* include terms in their registrar-registrant contract that forbids using the registered domain-name for certain kinds of "abusive" actions -- notably sending junk e-mail. *AND*, they actually enforce those added terms, although the quality of the enforcement is somewhat spotty at times.
There's a "real world" difficulty with this, however. When there is "more than one" registrar (as _is_ the case, today) then anybody who _does_ write more restrictive terms into their contract is at a "competitive disadvantage" to those who have only the 'required minimums' in _their_ contract.
No problem here -IF- new contracts are written which write in such little things as no malicious behavior using some commonly understood phrases as to what 'malicious' behavior is. Then the only people who would not be able to understand what was expected _when you entered upon the public way_ would be someone like yourself possibly and the other die-hard anarchists, who if they understood anything at all about anything would have realized long ago that a bunch of sheep, cows and horses left in the commons are soon going to eat all the grass and shit everywhere in its stead.
If you're a "bad guy", _which_ kind of a registrar are you going to choose?
New, properly written contracts would not give the "bad guys' much choice in where to go. You may choose the registrar who is the cheapest, gives the best service, etc. But no registrar, per their new contract with ICANN will be able to turn a blind eye to your 'malicious behavior'.
AND, obviously, the "quality" of the totality is only as high as the standards of the _lowest_quality_ operator.
As to "who writes these contracts?", well, the registrar-registrant contracts are written by the registrars. The 'issuing authority' generally provides a "sample" registrar-registrant contract -- one that satisfies the "minimum requirements' of the issuer-registrar contract.
*MANY* registrars adopt that sample boilerplate *without* making any changes/additions.Oh, bore me to death, would you please? Judges cancel out unconscienable contracts all the time, again, see Norvergence as the best, most recent example.
Lisa: > Again -- change the contracts!
The word for that is "impossible". The existing contracts are *self-renewing* _at_the_same_terms_ (although in the case of one TLD, with an escalating fee schedule), as long as both parties fulfil their required acts. This is _expressly_ stated in the contracts.
Changing such a contract requires either: a material breach of the *existing* contract by one party, allowing the other to exit it, *or* the _agreement_ of both parties to the changes.
For someone who prides himself (actually deludes himself) on the 'anarchy of the net' you certainly seem to know a lot about contract law. Well, listen up: judges have been known to blow all those things out of the water when they review them and understand the context under which they were asked to get involved.
Oh, but you may be right! ICANN (I am _not_ speaking generically in this case, but about the real organization) DOES-NOT-WANT to change the contracts so the small, individual webmasters, netters, etc have any chance for survival short of your system for survival. They (ICANN) like things the way they are:
Their motto should be, "If they won't accept our propoganda about the operation of the net and just go away or otherwise behave themselves by our standards, then we will through neglect and omission drive them away."n
Are you really so naive as to think that the bad guys *will* "agree" to a contract change -- which provides *no* benefit to _them_ -- and that would allow the opposite party to harm them (the bad guy) at will.
No, I am not that naive, and I doubt Lisa Hancock is either. But I know one thing, which she may just be starting to learn: Just as ICANN could if it chose turn the screws on the bad guys, they are choosing not to do so, to use the bad guys as a tool on the rest of the net, to get us out of here, or in total submission. **ICANN likes things the way they are now**. After all, they are taking in money on all those licenses we had to sign to get to drive our machines on the public way; money they use (with additional help from MCI via Vint Cerf) to go on elegant vacation/convention trips three or four times per year to esoteric out of the way resorts. The Bad Guys never like it when police are called to their location to answer your last statement.
I take that back, 'naive' is inappropriate here. "What color is the sky on _your_ planet?" is more accurate.
No, what would be more appropriate would be for you to excuse yourself for a few minutes while you went privately to have a badly needed bowel movement. Try and get that stuff out of your system.
Something's going wrong then with the way ICANN is set up, but they don't think so. I really would not expect much more of Esther Dyson, she is such a total goofus anyway. But Vint Cerf, that is the shocker. That's why many of us refer to him as a traitor. _He_ is an old line netter from the 1960's. He knows how things are here. I don't really expect a has-been real estate agent from San Francisco to know better, but Vint Cerf, I do.
Lisa: > Sounds like there's a lot that could be done.
If you ignore the realities of contract law, the difficulties of cross-border enforcement, and some other basic facts of life,
and the fact that far too many old time netters like Robert are going to muddy the water and make things as difficult as they can.
Whoops, here we go again, which is it Robert, anarchy or a limited amount of contract law which you have insisted in your discussions of what the various involved parties can and cannot do ? You contradict yourself left and right in your presentation.
Lisa: > Did it ever occur to anyone that this 'anarchy' is a very costly and > inefficient policy? How much does malicious efforts and protections > against that cost companies? How much traffic is flooding the > system, requiring increased servers and lines to accomodate > malicious traffic?
Hell yes, it's occurred to people. _Life_ is dangerous. "Mortality rate: 100%" Nobody _requires_ you to use the Internet. Yeah, it'd be "nice" if the various defenses were not necessary. But, in the 'real world' they _are_. Just like locks on your doors.
But when we lock our doors often enough and long enough then it sometimes occurs to us to get rid of the elements in the community which makes such extreme measures necessary, so we have prisons and hand out nine-year sentences.
Using the Internet is a _voluntary_ thing, but you do have to "take it as it is". If it's "too much trouble", then the decision is simple -- *don't* use it. There _are_ people/businesses who have made that decision.
I don't fly any longer for that reason. What _used to be_ fun to do has turned into a gigantic pain in my ass as they dump all my possessions out on the floor, make me walk barefoot through an ex-ray machine and in general treat me as an interuption to their fun rather than the reason they have a job at all; then get impatient with me on account of my partial paralysis as I struggle to pick up all my stuff dumped out everywhere and stuff it back in my suitcase. And that's supposed to be fun? Yeah, and so is the internet; just ask Robert.
[Oh, and an aside: remember after 9-11 how they were saying private security firms were no good, and they wanted all government employees to do the 'screening'? Now the other day in the Monitor I read where they are saying private security firms do a better job than government employees. They can't make up their mind either, but I can tell you for sure they are going to keep on milking 9-11 for all the politics they can get out of it.]Lisa: > MCI, being part of a bankrupt empire (resulting from IIRC corrupt > accounting practices) has little sympathy from me. Perhaps it'd > better for everyone to dump MCI altogether.
A fair number of those who can _afford_ to do so, *have* done so. For many, it is simply =not= a viable option.
Like it or not, commercial business operations pay for most of the cost of of operating the Internet. A commercial business does not have the "luxury" of a blanket write-off of 40% of their potential customers. If they attempt it, they *will* lose that business to their competition who does not do it.
Even if many of those customers are the electronic equivilent of deadbeats? A smart commercial business cuts off its cancerous spots before the cancer overtakes them completely.
Better check your facts. Comparatively little spam actually _comes_from_ MCI address-space. MCI is actually fairly good about stomping actual spam origination. What they _are_ excoriated for -- and *DESERVEDLY*SO* -- is continuing to provide *other* services -- be it web-server, _incoming_ mail, etc. -- to parties which are well-known for spamming. It's "the abuse didn't come _through_ *our* network, so we don't care" mind-set.
I have checked my facts! Spamhaus presents good facts. Maybe I should insert here their web site with a list of the top offenders. And if you want to play games by talking about spam originating in house versus spam throughput from elsewhere, be my guest. Why isn't MCI stomping on it all? Your attitude on this is amazing.
For what it's worth: I just ran some statistics from my logs -- of the last 2137 unsuccessful delivery attempts, a whopping _41_ were from anywhere in MCI address-space. (BTW, more than 2/3 of look to be from "zombie" PCs; also more than half had forged AOL/YAHOO/HOTMAIL "from" addresses, making detection/rejection, 'trivial').
I get 80% of that number of messages from *ONE* ISP in Germany. I get almost 85% of that number of message that come directly from Nigeria. I get more messages than that from zombie PC's in Brazil. I get more messages than that from mainland china -- mostly in English, so I presume they're "U.S. based" spammers with off-shore servers. I get more than that number of messages from "above.net" address-space. I get nearly twice that number were from Verizon address-space. I get about twice that MCI number from 'LEVEL3" address-space. I get more than twice that many from Verio address-space I get more than five times that number were from AT&T address-space. I get more than _twelve_times_ that number were from a _single_ spammer getting connectivity from xo.com (He sends from his own server, always the the same machine, registered in his own name, so it 's *really* easy to block the "property.com" domain. One of these days, I am, however, going to file a lawsuit against him, for repeated attempted theft of services.)
Oh, you are going to file a lawsuit against a man who is using his property to send messes over the non-highway to pester you, when you instead could improve your 'sophistication' (and I use that word very loosely) to built better defenses in your software instead, or as a last ditch effort you could take your own advice to Lisa and myself and others of us and just turn off your computer totally? My, aren't we consistent in our advice to the unwashed masses ....
This isn't to say that blocking all of MCI is a bad idea if it fits your political agenda, just _don't_ expect it to make any significant near-term difference in the amount of spam in your inbox.
Obviously _your political agenda_ does not allow for it, but then, a real man is always able to adjust a mail server to do his bidding, isn't he?
And no, I do not delude myself into thinking that blocking MCI is going to matter one whit to them, and it will hurt me a little in the short run. But I am trying to set an example here, and I hope that others will follow my example.
[[.. munch ..]]PAT replied to Lisa:
Some people have tried such things. There have been attempts at setting up "alternative" root nameservers. with other (non-ICANN recognized) top-level domains. Of course, for anybody to be able to _reach_ one of those alternate domains, they have to use a nameserver "resolver" that kicks the query 'upstairs' to that 'alternative root' _instead_ of the standard one. This means that -- for the 'alternative domains' to be universally accessible, *everybody* has to reconfigure their nameserver away from the default configuration.
For some strange reason, *every* such attempt over the last 10+ years has fizzled into oblivion. One could say that "the masses" _have_ made their wishes known on the subject.
More than likely it means greed got in the way with some of the cooperating big players; it was nothing or little to do with the masses of netters speaking their mind. The masses don't really care _who_ resolves their request for service, just that it gets done. When I ask for a URL I don't ask "I wonder who is resolving me?", do you?
In the event someone establishes an alternate root for people to use, there will be some confusion at first, but I would say if the new alternate root was unable to resolve something, then _it_, the alternate root, would go and ask the other traditional root if it had any idea what to do . If traditional root did not want to ask _our_ root for anything, then so be it; their loss, not ours. Short term confusion, yes, but malicious behavior on the net, even it not specifically encouraged by the 'other' guys we would not have.
And do you recall discussions here recently about Internet2, which was a reaction by many in .edu to get some blessed peace and quiet after years of this abuse? Internet2 was designed for just that reason was it not?
PAT