Subject: Re: [Asrg] Point of information...

From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:30:48 -0400

At 11:05 PM 6/19/2003 -0400, Barry Shein wrote:

>On June 19, 2003 at 17:42 [email-masked] (Eric Brunner-Williams in 
>Portland Maine) wrote:
>  > Barry,
>  >
>  > I sent a similar note to the nanog two days ago, with no response.
>  >
>  > I've no idea why this is of so little interest to so many people,
>  > I think its actually rather cool, and getting the terminating
>  > condition to converge to "soon" is worth working on.
>
>There are two major causes of spam at this point in time:
>
>1. Lawlessness and lack of enforcement of existing laws.
>
>I'll admit that I'd sympathize with anyone in law enforcement saddled
>with this problem; where does one start?
>
>Well, first of all, where we have caught and investigated spammers
>like Carmack and Ralsky it shouldn't be that hard to take logs of spam
>they sent and show that they illegally used others' computers to send
>it (assuming they did.)  Either they had rights to the IPs it spewed
>from, or they didn't. That should be a chargeable offense.
>
>Second, I'd honeypot them with the SWAT teams ready to go. They scan
>for these infected hosts (or the hosts report to them when the
>infection self-installs.) This can all be simulated with only modest
>effort and arrests made.
>
>But the interesting part of that is not the honeypotting, it's the
>prosecution. One needs the backing of a competent prosecuting body or
>else it's all just an academic exercise.
>
>2. Microsoft operating systems which continue to be flawed and
>vulnerable to viruses.
>
>Now that viruses have emerged (Jeem, Proxy-Guzu, sobig.a) which can
>make a computer (or, more to the point, millions of computers) an
>unwitting weapon against the entire net this problem has to be taken
>more seriously by Microsoft.

Are any of these problems solvable by technical means? Going over and over 
the illegality of spam does not help things, our group cannot make any 
legal impact anyway - we are working on technical solutions.  

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---

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 09:01:54 -0700

>   Most of them are followed.  However, some aren't.  Netscape started
> the HTML-email garbage, and MS followed.

Actually Nathaniel Bornstein started the idea of richtext email before
the Web and when the Web appeared it made a lot of sense to move from
the richtext idea to HTML.

Netscape started the Javascript security nightmare and added a lot of
the unsafe features unilaterally.

> > Hmm, why are we here? What do you imagine the product of this group
> > likely to be?
> 
>   One or more RFCs that are hopefully followed/enforced.  That
> qualification is the sticking point.

This is a research group, not a standards group. The degree to which
any recommendation is followed will depend on the way it is presented
and the extent to which people agree with them.

That in turn depends on the extent that a group can achieve industry
buy-in for any proposals it makes.

Attacking HTML is tilting at windmills.

		Phill