On 5/19/02 9:19 PM, "JC Dill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > That's actually a HUGE need. At SpamCon there was a lot of talk about how > ISPs might setup a customer-reputation clearing house (like a credit > bureau) where ISPs could report and share information about bad customers
Effectively being a combination RBL at the account level and PK web of trust? God, wouldn't that have anti-trust issues? If, say, Earthlink, AOL and MSN get together on something like this and MSN black-flags a spammer and AOL refuses to sell him an account, I'll bet that spammer could make a good case of anti-trust here, even if he DID intend to violate AOLs T&C's. This could get ugly. But I digress. > However... there are quite a few known spammers that buy throw-away > accounts (usually using fraudulent identification when signing up) and move > from ISP to ISP as they get nuked, and the ISPs are relatively powerless to And that's the ultimate problem - these databases only work on static data. If the thing you're trying to police is dynamic (which fraudulent ID data is, inherently), it's a moving target, and you're a few steps behind the chase by definition. You're catching stupid people and abandoned Ids. Which means they'd have to base selling accounts on specific user data like SSN or perhaps a drivers license, or some other ID (all of which can be faked, of course), which creates a huge privacy issue into the maelstrom on top of all of the other stuff... And we're basically only talking US here. Globally, life gets even more interesting -- and when it comes to privacy issues, much, much tougher. -- Chuq Von Rospach, Architech [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://www.chuqui.com/ Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
