Re: Public Policy and Consumer ISP Hygiene(was Comcastpop-ups)

[Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 11:09:06AM +1300, Nick FitzGerald wrote:

[ some excellent commentary on the total pre-failure of DKIM et.al. ]

> The only interesting question in all this is how wilful were the 
> designers of these reputed anti-spam systems in ignoring the above self-
> evident truth when they designed, and more importantly, touted, their 
> worthless (in the big-picture sense -- in the "accruing Internet cred 
> and/or moolah" stakes, quite the opposite) "solutions"?
>
> Oh, and I guess another interesting question is why haven't the few 
> clueful tech-journos picked up on this?

Two points to add to this.

First, "Spam as a technical problem is solved by SPF" is one of the
most appallingly stupid things ever said about spam, and there's been a
lot of competition for that prize.  Yet, to date, I haven't seen anyone
in the press hold the speaker accountable for this completely obvious
act of self-promotion by someone with no track record in the field,
no experience, no credibility, and no clue.

Second, one of the other things that I've never seen in the press is that
Yahoo (DKIM) and MSN/Hotmail (SenderID) are two of the very largest
spam/abuse supporters on the planet.  They send abuse, they host abusers,
they provide endless dropboxes for them, and both their "abuse desks"
are legendary not only for their total failure to take any effective
action whatsoever, but for their inability to recognize THEIR OWN HOSTS
and THEIR OWN NETWORK in incident reports sent to them.  And it's been
this way for many, many years.

Oh, but there's lots of good press about how they're "leading initiatives"
and such, while at the same time their operations are utterly filthy
sewers gushing abuse 24x7.   They're not leaders: they're incompetent,
negligent, irresponsible morons with good PR departments.

---Rsk
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