And if you smoke, we’ll take away your oxygen.
by schwim on Jan.25, 2010, under Spam
Although it’s long been the most logical solution, this is the first time I’ve seen it seriously proposed. Australia is proposing to kick botnet zombie computers off the internet. The only ambiguous aspect of the article is they plan to determine which computers are bots. I would guess a mix of port 25 activity, a known list of “phone-home” IP’s and the like.
With some real forward thinking going on, they’re proposing that the owner of the infected computer is notified and from there, an escalation of action including slowing the connection and ending with terminating service. I imagine if the U.S. were proposing this, you’d be reading about prison time and compensation to your ISP for the lost bandwidth.
I hope it actually makes it to fruition, simply for the reason that I’m interested to see what the bot owners will do next.
January 26th, 2010 on 7:17 am
I’m in two minds about this one. If they can warn the user, then surely the user can take his/her own action. If they can’t reach the user, then what right have they to disconnect? Plus, and this may just be me overthinking this, if you want to disrupt someone’s online activities (say a political spokesperson, commentator or activist) then you only have to plant a trojan on his/her machine to provide the excuse to cut them off. Convenient, huh?
I once wouldn’t have ventured such a suggestion, but given Senator Conroy’s internet censorship plans, which he intends to press ahead with regardless of public outcry and highly-credible counter argument, I’m forced to consider all possibilities.
January 26th, 2010 on 11:07 am
Being out of the loop of the wizard behind the curtain in this particular case, I’m not in a position to find the ulterior motives, but I do think that the majority of our legislation allows for malicious activity to be done to us, instead of protecting us from it. IMO, that’s always present. Laws can be used for personal gain if you’re in a position of power. In the case of spam, something needs to be done. A conservative estimate has global email consisting of over 92% spam. When you think globally of what it costs to push this shit everywhere, the numbers get very large. Being a small time reseller, even I have to pay for a server specifically dedicated to handling email. The web servers can’t spare the resources required to filter the tens of thousands of spam that my clients get daily.
I know two things, though. One, I probably won’t live long enough to see anything implemented globally that makes an impact and I know that as soon as something is implemented, they will find a way around it. That’s how things work.Those aren’t reasons for apathy though.
Well, I can find a reason for apathy in anything, but I’m talking about others right now.