Subject: RE: draft-danisch-dns-rr-smtp-02.txt

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 16:03:12 -0700

> What would they set them to? The customers could use any ISP, 
> anywhere.

Not if they are going to use RMX... But that is only an option.

> Certificate based scheme? I must have missed that.

RMX is only the starting point, not the destination.

> The cost of altering the worlds DNS servers is usually 
> considered high.
> THe leverage seems to be non-existant.

This one change adopted by the right 10 ISPs allows something like 25% of
spam to be eliminated between those ISPs (until the spam senders react).

> The Code of conduct was not written to reduce spam.

Why do you think a code of conduct is going to work if it does not provide
an answer to the problems the ISPs legitimately face?

> He didn't have to write about spam. He wrote about 
> communications. 

I have read the paper several times, it does not have the implication you
think it does. Spam is not a covert channel, it is an overt channel.

> This is nothing other than a blacklist scheme.

No, the critical failure of blacklist schemes is that there is no
accountability for the blacklist to any party whatsoever. The people who
demand accountability from others, loudly and with threats refuse to accept
accountability or responsibility themselves.

> > That is not my fault or the fault of Hadmut. It is secure enough to
> > allow a meaningful level of control.
> 
> This has been disproven.  Spoofing UDP DNS replies is 
> significantly easier
> than spoofing TCP connections.

It is pretty easy to detect a DNS spoofing attempt if you are looking for
it. You can then switch to TCP/IP. 

> I would rather not have gratuitous change.

Then propose a better solution or convince people the problem is not
important.

Lack of progress or consensus in this forum is not going to affect
deployment of these ideas.

> It seemed to me at the MIT anti-spam conference that ISPs 
> were working on
> content analysis methods, and agreed that blacklists were not going to
> play a large role in the future.  At the end of the message, 
> as it were, the spammer has to talk about selling something.

Paul Graham's conference held on the MIT campus but not accredited or in any
way endorsed by MIT was about solving spam with content filtering using
Bayesian inference. Papers that proposed other approaches were all rejected
so the lack of other proposals is not indicative of ISP intentions.

> In interesting comment at the conference was from the MSN speaker, who
> indicated that their content filtering was such that MSN approved spam
> mail was being blocked.

At the FTC conference Ryan Hamlin, the general manager of Microsoft's
anti-spam initiatives specifically mentioned RMX by name and use of Reverse
DNS as indicative of the type of proposal they are considering with Yahoo
and AOL.

		Phill 

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