> From: Paul Vixie <vixie@vix.com> > > In other words, Paul, are you sure you're not calling for an ashcroft? > > completely. i have met the enemy, and i have also met the potential enemy, > and i know that recipient privacy is nowhere on anybody's mind. consider > what would happen if the ITU ever finished its debate about e164.arpa and > there a few hundred million voip-reachable phones (either IP to the station > or IP to the central office and analog to the station). all it would take > a telemarketer is a simple NAPTR/SRV sweep, with SYN-probe, to build a list > of tens of millions of reachable endpoints. ten racks of linux PC's later, > we'd all be getting round the clock robotic calls from some telespamketer > with some viagra to sell. I can't see enough difference between that rhetoric and the doomsday scenarios of anthrax in cropdusting airplanes, "dirty nuclear" bombs, and the rest of the conceivable catastrophes that rationalize locking us up in our homes in front network TV. You can't and shouldn't even try to engineer perfect safety from all conceivable disasters. Before getting excited about such a viagra-VoIP bomb, think the likelihood of the first bombing, whether it could happen a second time after the perpetrators of the first were drawn and quartered, and whether the costs (not just in money) of preventing the first detonation are worthwhile. > i need ibcs to make it possible to keep doing what i used to do in e-mail, > but more importantly i need the "ashcroft" you speak of in order to gain > confidence about SIP callers, or instant messenger or SMS senders. right > ... By an "ashcroft" I mean extremely costly (mostly not in money), insufficiently or entirely unjustified, so called defenses against potential disasters, where the defenses are of dubious or no real use (e.g. the new airplane passenger screening) against the ostensible potential disaster. I don't understand enough of your notions to see whether I think it would work or be worse than spam, but I have dark suspicions that they would turn out like the new and forthcoming "defenses" against "terrorism" (and "drugs," "child porn," etc.) from the U.S. DOD and DOJ. Cassandra was right, but her proscription was only to send one woman home to her lawful husband. So how about turning down the heat a little and being more technically specific about your replacement for the Internet? Since that viagra-VoIP bomb has nothing to do with SMTP, it seems you're talking about a far bigger progject than "merely" replacing SMTP. Vernon Schryver vjs@rhyolite.com