Getting OT, but I guess I'll add to the noise once.. hopefully more signal than noise. Human factors argument follows. At 12:57 PM 6/5/04, Ralph Seichter wrote:
[...] If you could convice your bosses to do so, I'd very much doubt their intelligence.
Why? How much business do they do with the people using those addresses?
Why not block China or the USA aswell? Why not live on an IT island?
As a matter of fact, and I'm in the USA, but I have noticed that I do block significant parts of certain countries (no, not Germany AFAIK) at my own firewall; it's a simple expedient, and I suppose it reduces the amount of e-mail problems as a side effect. I also block certain companies which provide certain "services" (and in the current climate, what is the distinction?). Do you really want to see my firewall logs? Come on, look at where your problem traffic originates and tell me there isn't some coherence. (I also run a 'bot motel on one web server.) Furthermore yes there is a certain block of addresses belonging to a German ISP which doesn't get access to our FTP server at my day job; I've also been authorized once to call up an ISP and tell them we were no longer going to accept traffic from their block if they could not identify the party using a certain range within it (does it matter for our purposes here whether we blocked the ISP or they divulged the party?). This is simply another cost-benefit equation: how much legitimate interest do I get from these people, versus grief? If anybody from one of these blocks was denied access and wrote me saying "hey, I'm one of the good guys" and could support it (no list trolls, won't work; you have to find me through the usual channels to make a case), I'll punch a hole for them. My point is that yes, in spite of the clouded vision produced when one's head is in the clouds of idealism, the Internet is Balkanized. In fact, is it not as Balkanized (at least in the USA) as when DARPA and the US educational backbone provided significant (free) bandwidth. Most of us do live on "IT islands" as a practical matter: we visit a limited number of web sites, we exchange e-mail with a limited number of people or entities, we share certain interests and goals which inform our exchanges of information. We deploy technology to facilitate such exchanges at our convenience, not to make it easy for random parties to exercise a misconstructed form of "free speech". In addition to the islands of common interest, you can also look at this as a "web of trust". People want to declare technological solutions to these "problems" but, as with electronic voting, it's a solution in search of a problem. In either of these paradigms, there is no great harm to selective blocking; "island hopping" is often possible and of course when you visit some other island you may very well encounter a visitor from yet another island somewhere and decide that a closer affiliation is in order. This is technology reflecting the human limitations on the dissemination and absorption of knowledge. On a day to day basis, my life is a whole lot simpler and less worrisome if I restrict access when traffic analysis indicates there is a locus of annoying activity (by the way there are automated tools such as snort which can be set up to do just this); I don't need PGP keys, for instance, as an excuse to exercise reasonable human judgement. In fact, trusting technology is no substitute for human judgement (it can only be an adjunct unless you truly want a Balkanized internet). I agree that people should be "liberal in what they accept, conservative in what they send" which is an underlying precept echoed in numerous RFCs. But at the end of the day, my IT island is mine, and you're a visitor on it and you're expected to act like one; and when I visit someone else's IT island I respect it as theirs and try to comport myself, as a visitor, in such a fashion as is likely to allow me to visit again in the future... provided I want to be able to visit again in the future. This includes not filling their logs or inboxes with garbage (it's not a perfect world, I do send some autoreplies to e-mail for instance), not poking around on weird ports, trying to maintain some relevance in my contributions (difficult at times), and so forth. It's not a perfect world of course, and I try to forgive people's trespasses as I wish them to forgive mine; but when there's nothing coming from somewhere but noise... I just don't have a problem with people electing to block or restrict access, in fact I completely understand. fin. -- Fred Morris, speaking for Fred Morris Consulting, not InWa.net (they're just my ISP) fredm3047@inwa.net (I-ACK)