Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 15:27:33 -0400
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At 12:12 PM 9/12/96 -0400, Vin Crosbie wrote:
>I agree with your point that users should be the ones who decide what they
>receive. However, I doubt that for years we'll see technology offer anything
>but a choice of either all unsolicited email or no unsolicited email.
Actually there's a developing story now under way that may bear on
this point.
Panix, a large and well-established ISP in New York with 6,000+
subscribers, announced recently that its staff would maintain global
procmail and filter rules containing the names of "troubled" Internet sites
-- sites known to be dedicated to the generation of bulk email spam.
Scripts are available for users to automatically filter their
incoming mail and throw away mail from those sites before it reaches their
in-boxes. As an option, Panix will even send mail to
postmaster@offending_site informing them that a Panix user (without
providing the user's email address) was automatically discarding all mail
from their site.
Users are invited to suggest sites for filtering and the staff adds
them after confirming that they're "troubled"; as of today, there are 16
sites in the script.
As far as I know, this global antispam option was a first for a
major ISP, and made a stir when it was announced. The optionality, of
course, protected them from the legal counterattack that AOL got hit with.
Since last Friday, Panix has been crippled by a severe attack from
unknown sources. Its mail, news and web servers, user login machines and
name servers are being flooded with bogus connection requests (SYN packets,
for the technically minded), making legitimate requests difficult or
impossible to process: They've been virtually knocked off the air at times.
The source address of the packets has been counterfeited to make
tracing impossible without the committed resources of most of the major
network companies that comprise the Internet itself. It's the worst
sustained, targetted denial-of-service attack I've ever heard of.
There could be a zillion "motives" for someone to do this, but
conspiracy theorists (and there are many on Panix) are discussing the
possibility that it's a retaliatory attack by someone who doesn't like their
creative -- and effective -- measures against e-mail spam.
==========================================================================
Gordon T. Thompson gordy@nytimes.com
Manager, Internet Services 212 556 1386
The New York Times fax: 212 556 1636
The Times and I have an arrangement: Neither of us speaks for the other.
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To: Alan Flippen , online-news@planetarynews.com