When you cannot trust people like Paul Vixie and Bill Manning to terminate sites that are engaging in plainly obvious and egregious defamation and harrassment claiming that IP address space is hijacked when a quick check of the registry indicates that it isn't, then you also can't trust them to be in charge of a trust system. They are people who have asked others to trust them. They are people who have said that trust is important. They are people who have said ISP's should have AUP's, and should enforce them against abusive users. The world certainly has its hooks into them. Yet, we find that they are associated with court-proven liars and other disreputable people, who have their own spiteful agenda, and they aren't even embarrassed by that finding. We find them misleading their subscribers, for example by blocking companies outside of their criteria, or just completely falsely for spite. This type of thing hasn't happened just once, but many times, by many blacklist operators. Quite obviously, we can't have a trust based system, because the anti-spammers are even less trustworthy than the spammers. --Dean On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Vernon Schryver wrote: > > From: Paul Vixie > > > ... > > identities without history will be a dime a dozen, or cheaper. spammers > > with no history could trample your privacy all day long if you allowed it. > > > > accepting incoming communication from someone the world has no hooks into > > is off the table. allowing the world to have its hooks in someone whose > > identity you don't know (and could never find out) has to continue to work, > > but anonymity and homelessness are not the same thing. > > Stated that way, but perhaps with an unintended interpretation, I agree. > Every mail sender is "hooked" by an entity that the mail receiver knows > and that has its own reputation that can be checked today. The ISPs > that own the IP addresses in every IP packet that Ralsky sends "have > their hooks" in Ralsky. You can decide whether the implicit no-spam > guarantee from that "hooking" agency is sufficient by checking your own > blacklist or the blacklists of others via DNS or BGP. > > All of the possible good and bad aspects of any possible "trust" or > "reputation" system are already present in the current system. > > - If you say that you can't trust ISPs to check that a new customer > is not Al Ralsky in disguise or one of his proxies, then you must > say the same about any other organization. > > - If you say that ISPs cannot check the reputation of new customers > for a $30/month account, then you must say the same about any other > organization. > > - If you say that you cannot trust ISPs to terminate the accounts of > spammers, then you must say that you cannot trust any other outfit > to revoke the PKI cert or other assurance for spammers. > > - If you trust some of those other outfits to revoke their virtual > letters of introduction and recommendation, than you must be > willing to trust some ISPs to do the same and terminate accounts. > > - If you say that third party organization could assure you that a > mail sender is not a spammer, then you must agree that an ISP > could check with that organization before adding a password to a > RADIUS server or or turn on a DSLAM, and that an ISP could terminate > an account when that third party revokes is assurance. > > - You can be anonymous on the Internet only if your ISP protects you. > No one is homeless on the Internet. The SYN-ACK for your SYN to > port 25 must get back to your source IP address home at your ISP. > > The connection between you, the spam or mail target, and the ISP that > has its hooks in the mail sender is better than any PKI or crypto > related system could possibly be. It is not only much cheaper than > anything Microsoft/Yahoo/AOL/Verisign would sell, but technically more > reliable. IP address spoofing was practically impossible for spam > even before RFC 1948 and related defenses, because it was too hard and > unreliable if you need to make 10,000,000 successfully spoofed ISN > predicted TCP connections per day. On the other hand, we all knew > even before the bogus "Microsoft Corporation" certs or the discovery > that those bogus certs could not be revoked that commercial PKI is eyewash. > > If you believe that "reputation" or "trust" systems might help the > spam problem, then the only room for improvement is in the trust query > protocol. DNS is a screw driver being used as a hammer in DNS blacklists. > However, this is merely a matter of optimization or elegance. > > > Vernon Schryver vjs@xxxxxxxxxxxx > >