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Re: Techdirt: Net Neutrality Debate Again Descends Into Shouting, Farce
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 06:54:06 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: k claffy <kc () caida org> Date: June 26, 2007 2:53:44 AM EDT To: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh () hserus net>Cc: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>, Robert Berger <rberger () ibd com>, Gordon Cook <cook () cookreport com> Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Techdirt: Net Neutrality Debate Again Descends Into Shouting, Farce
i'm rolling my eyes at how misquoted i am in this article. i guess that's what i get for speaking at mach 10; reporters just reconstruct words they didn't hear. someday i will learn. i never said 99% of traffic was spam, how silly. i said, as an example, 99% of my email was spam. (i might have said 'probably', i was trying to make a point about how little we understand the nature of the Internet because we have so little data. david moore actually analyzes (opt-in) spam for folks at caida, so we could get rough numbers on my email, but the spam filters don't get everything, and as suresh points out, there is no spam bit.) it's also not clear that we've figured out what units spam is usefully measured in. universities are spending 6+ figures per year dealing w spam, which makes me think the cost of spam, among other even costlier pollution on the network, will come up sooner or later in the broadband debates. as will even more important issues, like copyright. wrt costlier pollution, i'm surprised the thurs morning panel of supernova wasn't covered, where they gave figures on the underground economy, e.g., one panelist said you could buy an entire identity (inc credit card numbers, checking account #, drivers license, social security, etc) online for $14. i have no idea whether that's true, but have to admit it was more quantitative data than anyone offered in the 700Mhz tussle everyone considered so signficant. fwiw, i went on right after john kneuer, and it seemed less like hostility and more like both sides were contributing passion to the debate rather than quantitative empirical data. i did warn the audience not to yell at me like that or i'd leave the stage. :) in all seriousness, some important decisions about our communications fabric will be made in the next few years that will change the rest of the century, 700MHz usage among them. i'm still hopeful we can make them according to the best available empirical data, including international comparisons. k On Sun, Jun 24, 2007 at 07:36:42PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: | | "David Farber" <dave () farber net> wrote: | | >investigator KC Claffy said. || >"We need numbers on spam, but where do you get numbers on spam from -
| >anti-spam vendors. These aren't the people you want to be getting | >numbers from when setting policy," she said. "Let's look at what a | >public network is really used for. We cannot answer that. And the| >carriers are about to ask us to pay for traffic, 99 per cent of which
| >is spam! | | Easier said than done, unfortunately. || There are two problems with what KC asks for. Numbers on spam are going | to differ widely depending on who is doing the measurement, and what the
| target audience being measured is. Oh, it also depends on what is | actually defined as spam and measured. | | Corporate mailboxes that get filtered by antispam vendors? | Large ISP / webmail providers like us, yahoo, aol etc?| IETF members who have the same email for years and get 4K++ spams a day?
| | One set of metrics you could use is the metrics cited by the OECD | antispam task force - | http://www.oecd-antispam.org/article.php3?id_article=244 || MAAWG (http://www.maawg.org) which is an organization that has some of | the largest email providers / ISPs in the world as members (us, yahoo,
| aol, roadrunner, bell canada etc) has been collecting spam metrics| contributed by their member ISPs, and this metrics effort was setup in | response to the OECD antispam task force's call for usable spam metrics.
|| The MAAWG metrics cover a basic set of criteria, evolved after a long
| period of discussion to reach consensus on what should be measured - | number of mailboxes, number of dropped connections & blocked/tagged| emails, number of unaltered - as in, untagged and unfiltered, delivered
| emails. | | http://www.maawg.org/about/EMR has all the reports, and the latest| report has the summarized results of the last 4 surveys (Q4 2005 to Q4
| 2006) | http://www.maawg.org/about/MAAWGMetric_2006_3_4_report.pdf || Of course, this measurement is by very large email providers, and the | combined number of smtp connections those providers handles runs into | the billions .. so these numbers may well vary substantially from the
| numbers other reports show. || Trying to average or otherwise normalize these reports will be rather
| unproductive due to different mail flows, different filtering | methodologies, different measurement criteria etc. || Measurement with statistical rigor applied is something CAIDA is very | good at, and I think this would be an excellent project for them to take
| up. | | regards | srs || ps: 99% of all traffic is spam - not sure, given that smtp doesnt even | register on the radar compared to other traffic (p2p, http, etc). If,
| by spam, kc meant something like "junk traffic", there are lots of | measurements on that try to estimate backscatter levels, traffic to | darknets etc, that'd get factored in .. ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- Re: Techdirt: Net Neutrality Debate Again Descends Into Shouting, Farce David Farber (Jun 24)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Techdirt: Net Neutrality Debate Again Descends Into Shouting, Farce David Farber (Jun 24)
- Re: Techdirt: Net Neutrality Debate Again Descends Into Shouting, Farce David Farber (Jun 24)
- Re: Techdirt: Net Neutrality Debate Again Descends Into Shouting, Farce David Farber (Jun 25)
- Re: Techdirt: Net Neutrality Debate Again Descends Into Shouting, Farce David Farber (Jun 26)
- Re: Techdirt: Net Neutrality Debate Again Descends Into Shouting, Farce David Farber (Jun 26)