RE: Stealth Blocking

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

From: David Schwartz [mailto:davids@webmaster.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2001 5:24 PM

> > From: David Schwartz [mailto:davids@webmaster.com]
> > Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2001 4:54 PM
> >
> > > In the PURE war, one ONLY shoots confirmed bad-guys and has ZERO
> > > collateral damage.
> >
> > So if someone has a machine gun and is firing randomly,
> > you don't act to stop him until he happens to hit someone?
>
> Lottsa mitigating circumstances here;
> .Are they shooting spam?
> .Are they trying to hit anyone?

  How can you tell if you don't check? As soon as you
have reason to believe
they're creating a hazzard to innocent people, you are
justified in checking
if they really are. This has been standard Internet practice
since day one.

I don't need to check because I have a piece of confirmed spam from them. A
smoking gun. That's the way MAPS RBL has been working for years. That is the
way I expect it to continue to work. The main reason that I posted to this
thread is that some of the posts lead me to believe otherwise. They were
confused.

> One spammer is no justification for nuking their entire
city. Targeted
> response, sir ... targeted response. That's what MAPS is, a laser
> beam, not
> a hand granade.

  Absolutely. Probe the machine that is of concern, not
whole blocks randomly.

Also, only block the proven spam-host. No one else.

> > That's madness. [I] don't advocate
> > random scanning, as it is unethical to probe random people for
> > vulnerability. However, once you know there is in fact an
> > open relay, you are entirely justified in blocking it.

> Agreed, but its open-relay status is irrelevent. The fact
that one has
> proof-positive of spam, from that site, is.

  No, its open-relay status is not irrelevant. If you
know a site is an open
relay, however you know this, and you want to block open
relays (which I do)
and it's my right to block open relays, then I will block
them. How I find
out they're an open relay is another story. The usual way is
you probe a
site when it becomes an actual problem.

I submit that if you have a piece of spam, from a site, and are blocking
them, why do you need to probe them?

  So let me ask you three questions:

  1) If I find out a site is an open relay by legitimate
means, do you agree
that I have the right to block it if I want to?

Sure.

  2) If a site sends me spam or otherwise inconveniences
me, do you agree
that I have the right to probe it to see if it's an open
relay if I wish to
do so?

sure

  3) Do you think it's unreasonable to block known open
relays as a
protection against future spam.

Absolutely not. Our entire Norte Americano culture is biased AGAINST apriori
restrictions. You DO NOT spank someone for something that they have NOT, in
fact, done. It's called prior restraint and there is a reason that it is
considered unjust. It violates the PURE WAR ethos. There is no excuse for
collateral damage. Innocents should not be involved, period. This is
important because we DO have the technology to wage the PURE WAR and are
ethically compelled to use it.

> > And if you have legitimate reason to
> > suspect a site is an open relay, you are entirely justified
> > in probing it to see whether or not it is.

> No you are not, by your own ethical standards. Suspicion is not
> proof. Only
> a piece of spam, in hand, from that specific site, is
sufficient grounds.

  If you really believe what I think you're saying, then
you would have to
object to, for example, the ident protocol.

I think we have [only] a slight disconnect here. ident is part of the
protocol. [side note: I'm setting up a new Postfix host (my first Postfix
host ... used to doing sendmail). Does Postfix do SMTP AUTH?]

> > If your neighbor is aiming a gun at you, you are
> > justified in checking to see if it's loaded.

> No you are not, you assume that it is and fire first
<grin>. But, you are
> not justified in taking out his whole block, including the other
> neighbors.
> You are not allowed ANY collateral damage. Anything less is
sloppy anyway.
> What's the matter, ain't you that good? Can't you aim?

  The only collateral damage is that the man's children
lose their father. There's nothing you can do about that.

Yes, but with ORBS, they take out the entire town, even if there aren't any
spammers there. That's serious collateral damage. It is unacceptable. It is
not the PURE WAR.

Similarly, if you block a site that's
a known problem, you inconvenience any legitimate mail
traffic that might have passed through that site.
But that's the kind of collateral damage
that's unavoidable.

Not really, since it is the owner of the site that is directly responsible
for that site's mail delivery. The atomic unit is the site, not the users of
that site. To go effectively below that level of granularity is, IMHO, not
technologically feasible.

Unfortunately, you have to make hazardous
misconfigurations inconveniencing or they won't be fixed.

There is a major distinction between a spam hazard and a proven spam site.

2

Roeland Meyer wrote:

I don't need to check because I have a piece of confirmed spam
from them. A
smoking gun. That's the way MAPS RBL has been working for years.
That is the
way I expect it to continue to work. The main reason that I posted to this
thread is that some of the posts lead me to believe otherwise. They were
confused.

  I think you're missing the big picture. If you receive a single piece of
spam from a site, that's not automatically grounds to block the site. That's
a recipe for maximizing collateral damage.

  Receiving spam from a site is your grounds for investigating the site.
Perhaps you file a complaint. Perhaps you do a web search to see if others
have complaints about the same site. Perhaps you check if the mailer is an
open relay. Perhaps you wait for the site's administrator to respond to you.

  In some cases, can can't make a rational judgment without all this
additional information. In some cases, you can make one immediately based
only upon the immediate circumstances.

  So the receipt of a spam from a site is the beginning of the process, not
the end.

> Absolutely. Probe the machine that is of concern, not
> whole blocks randomly.

Also, only block the proven spam-host. No one else.

  That's a more complex judgment. In most cases, I agree that this is
appropriate, but I can think of (and have personally witnessed) more extreme
circumstances. I've seen ISPs who say, "no, we like to spam and we will spam
in the future". In those extreme cases, I'll block their entire address
space from reaching my mail servers until their policy changes.

> No, its open-relay status is not irrelevant. If you
> know a site is an open
> relay, however you know this, and you want to block open
> relays (which I do)
> and it's my right to block open relays, then I will block
> them. How I find
> out they're an open relay is another story. The usual way is
> you probe a
> site when it becomes an actual problem.

I submit that if you have a piece of spam, from a site, and are blocking
them, why do you need to probe them?

  Well, if you're blocking them because they're an open relay and they say
they've fixed the problem, it's certainly reasonable to probe them to decide
whether you should begin allowing mail from them. Or do you think it's
better to block them indefinitely just so that you don't 'trespass' by
probing them?

> 3) Do you think it's unreasonable to block known open
> relays as a
> protection against future spam.

Absolutely not. Our entire Norte Americano culture is biased
AGAINST apriori
restrictions.

  Nonsense! This argument would say that you should allow children to bring
guns into school provided they haven't yet shot them. Our culture is biased
against a priori restrictions upon speech imposed by the government, but
there is nothing inherently bad about a priori restrictions.

You DO NOT spank someone for something that they
have NOT, in
fact, done. It's called prior restraint and there is a reason that it is
considered unjust. It violates the PURE WAR ethos. There is no excuse for
collateral damage. Innocents should not be involved, period. This is
important because we DO have the technology to wage the PURE WAR and are
ethically compelled to use it.

  I honestly don't understand what you're talking about at this point. If
another person puts you at unacceptable risk of harm, you defend yourself
from them without waiting for them to shoot you. If you don't want to be
shot on your property, you have every right to prevent people from bringing
guns onto your property. That this means people who always carry guns can't
go to your parties is their problem, not yours.

> If you really believe what I think you're saying, then
> you would have to
> object to, for example, the ident protocol.

I think we have [only] a slight disconnect here. ident is part of the
protocol. [side note: I'm setting up a new Postfix host (my first Postfix
host ... used to doing sendmail). Does Postfix do SMTP AUTH?]

  Ident is part of what protocl? Ident is a protocol all its own.

> Unfortunately, you have to make hazardous
> misconfigurations inconveniencing or they won't be fixed.

There is a major distinction between a spam hazard and a proven spam site.

  Yes, time. But I agree that there's a difference between malicious spammers
(those who knowing the issues but send spam anyway), accidental spammers
(those who honestly don't understand the problem), spam supporters (those
who don't care if their customers spam), those who just haven't secure their
sites (perhaps because their operating system installed as an open relay and
they never checked or don't know how to), and those who can't easily secure
their sites without inconveniencing their customers. I personally treat
these five cases differently. I've heard some complaints that MAPS RBL
doesn't do a good job of distinguishing these cases, but I don't know enough
about them to comment.

  DS

3

Absolutely not. Our entire Norte Americano culture is biased AGAINST apriori
restrictions. You DO NOT spank someone for something that they have NOT, in
fact, done.

Leash laws. Prohibitions on minors buying spray paint. Speeding laws.

I think we have [only] a slight disconnect here. ident is part of the
protocol. [side note: I'm setting up a new Postfix host (my first Postfix

Ident is a completely seperate protocol. Saying ident is part of SMTP
is like saying TCP/IP is. Ident is optionally used by SMTP, but it's not
a part of it.