Jerry Johnson wrote:
> It is not a denial of service attack. Although it has the same effect.

Flooding a server with request with the intention to make that server 
unreachable is not a denial of service attack?


> It is perfectly legitimate communication (requests to be removed)
> which the emails themselves advertise and encourage.

As if Joe-Jobs and vigilantism don't cause enough trouble yet.


> I think it is a good idea (although I don't thikn it will do any 
> good)

I have a better idea: create a notice & takedown procedure and disconnect spam 
zombies, botnets etc. on sight and mandate ISPs to follow that procedure.

There are people sufficiently high in the internet foodchain that can within a 
few hours generate a list of a 100.000 or more IP addresses that have a trojan 
horse installed, are part of a botnet or a spam zombie. It is a SMOP to turn 
that into a few million emails to abuse departments worldwide. And if you 
follow a standard protocol like IODEF abuse departments can have these mails 
processed automagically and disconnect their users within seconds.
That would work. That would kill over 80% of spam overnight.

But with an estimated infection rate of over 1% that would mean that a large 
ISP would have to disconnect over 100.000 systems overnight. Which would result 
in over 100.000 calls to the helpdesk. And we can safely assume that the vast 
majority of the users have no idea they are part of the problem or how to 
resolve the problem. And while legally speaking all ISPs have the right to do 
this, commercially speaking this is suicide unless they all do it. And that is 
the fundamental issue that prevents a solution: large parts of the internet are 
financially dependent on those that keep the problem alive.

The only way this is going to happen is if there is legislation (same notice & 
takedown procedure as the DMCA), or if Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, GMX etc. team up, 
create a Honeynet and coerce ISPs into following this model by refusing to 
accept any email from ISPs that do not disconnect at sight.

Jochem

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