Subject: RE: IAB policy on anti-spam mechanisms?

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2003 19:46:51 -0800

> I also don't want want to insult anyone by stating the obvious fact
> that almost no users, whether they are employed by ISPs and have titles
> like "super senior network operator guru" or are end users like my Aunt
> Millie, have any real idea what "internet transparency" might be.  They
> certainly have no clue that it might be as valuable and that it might
> be what has made their mailboxes both useful and full of spam.

SPAM is pretty high in the list of things people complain about, but lack of transparency is actually one of the top reasons for calling the support line. Granted, the average user does not complain that "there is a lack of transparency"; it is more in the line of "my favorite application does not work" -- where the favorite application is network game, voice over IP, e-mail, you name it. And the root cause of the problem, more often than not, will be some stupid filtering policy implemented by some obscure corner of the network.
 
That being said, whining about lack of transparency is not going to change the behavior of the operators. The IETF should rather do something useful, e.g. make sure that IPSEC is easy to deploy...
 
-- Christian Huitema

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2003 21:47:36 -0700 (MST)

> From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>

> ...
> SPAM is pretty high in the list of things people complain about,
> but lack of transparency is actually one of the top reasons for
> calling the support line. Granted, the average user does not complain
> that "there is a lack of transparency"; it is more in the line of
> "my favorite application does not work" -- where the favorite
> application is network game, voice over IP, e-mail, you name it.
> And the root cause of the problem, more often than not, will be
> some stupid filtering policy implemented by some obscure corner of
> the network.

Yes, but my point is that RFCs proclaiming "Transparency is Vital"
will always be ignored.  You can't even say "Stupid Filtering is
Stupid."  You must spell it out by saying "Filtering of type X that
does Y is bad because it breaks application Z."

The implications of "Transparency is Vital," "The End-to-End Principal
is Triumphant," and "Be liberal in what you accept but concervative in
what you you send" are obvious to you, but opaque to users who don't
care about general cases.  Proof of that are the "anti-spam" DNS
blacklists of outfits that violate minor details of random RFCs that
seem vaguely related to SMTP, including the merely Informational.  It's
impossible to convince people that those lists violate "Be liberal..."

> That being said, whining about lack of transparency is not going to
> change the behavior of the operators. The IETF should rather do
> something useful, e.g. make sure that IPSEC is easy to deploy...

I'd settle for "practical in more than private (V)LANs and other
trivial cases."  However, IPSEC is irrelevant to spam filtering or
spam fighting except that it might slow down some bad filters such as
redirection proxies.  IPSEC will not help or hurt any DNS blacklists
including those based on "DSL" or "dial" substrings of PTR RRs.

The IETF has always had a tendancy to piously proclaim generalities
whose connections to reality are left as exercises for students.  That
users are not and cannot be students whizzes right over the heads of
the would be teachers.  Running code and explicit recipies for code
matter more than transparency talk outside the IRTF...and also inside
the IRTF.

There's a lot of "spam filtering" out there today.  That some of the
filters listed in http://www.google.com/search?q=%22spam+filter%22
finds is from some of the worst spammers is a symptom and proof of
the power of running code over obvious principles and common sense.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]