Slashdot Mirror
Australia's Largest ISP Redefines Spam
cpudney writes "According to this article in NEWS.com.au, Telstra BigPond, Australia's largest ISP will monitor its customers' e-mails and suspend the accounts of users suspected of sending spam, viruses or denial-of-service attacks. Under changes to its Acceptable Use Policy, BigPond will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers sending more than 20 e-mails in a 10-minute period, and BigPond management "may suspend the (user's) account while the customer is contacted" if they are suspected of sending spam. Previously, BigPond's definition of spam was held to be 400 messages sent over a 15-minute period and now it's changed to 20 e-mails over 10 minutes. Internet Society of Australia president Tony Hill said BigPond's new definition of spam was very restrictive and he was concerned the limit had been set too low for legitimate e-mail users."
I hope they at least contact the user before shutting off service. I can think of many legitimate reasons to send 20 e-mails in 10 minutes. My adress book has many times that, and sending a CC to a fraction of my adress book would trip this.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Why is BigPond trying to identify a spammer from just 10 minutes of traffic. Or even just 15 minutes? I would think it would be much better to have a metric like 1000 emails in a single day. Or 10,000 emails over a week?
I can very easily go through 20 emails in 10 minutes just because I might be having one of those back-and-forth email conversations. I don't know if I could do 400 in a 15-minute period, unless I was running a mailing list (well, which I do, but that's why I use "personal" business ISPs).
This sort of metric just seems extremely silly. Is someone putting pressure on BigPond, or is one of their executives being an idiot?
...if not for Slashdot's 2-minute delay policy.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Quote:
Under changes to its Acceptable Use Policy, BigPond will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers sending more than 20 e-mails in a 10-minute period, and BigPond management "may suspend the (user's) account while the customer is contacted" if they are suspected of sending spam.
It doesn't say anywhere they they will suspend your account if you simply send 20 emails in 10 minutes. All it says is they may investigate users who do, and may suspend their account upon further investigation. I really don't see a huge deal with this, and there isn't any plausible reason to get angry with this policy if it is followed properly.
It's not like there's an automatic suspension for exceeding the limit. They're just advising that 20 in ten minutes is the level that now prompts them to look more closely at. If they aren't stupid about it, it shouldn't be a problem.
Admittedly, that's a big if, given that it's Telestra that we're talking about, but . . .
They're only going to investigate those people, not disable their accounts. If they look at it and see that they sent legitimate messages because they just pop on to send e-mail, they'll be find and their ISP will move on. At least this should make the net big enough to actively catch spammers eariler.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
One of my uni lecturers uses Bigpond as his ISP. He also has his uni email accounts redirected to his Bigpond address. He had problems a while ago when Bigpond went down. He normally accepts assignments via email, but everything sent to him got delayed a few days. Thankfully he accepted assignments which had been sent to him on time, otherwise a lot of people would have inconvenienced.
This lecturer also has other responsibilities (I won't go into detail here) which require him to him to send out newsletters to all of the students in our department, plus international committees and a large number of university staff. We are a small department, but still have ~100 students. Sending out a student newsletter would trip the new email limit. I don't know how he's going to get around this from home (obviously he can send it using our uni mail server when he's at work).
Just another example of Bigpond not being up to scratch these days. I personally use a competing ISP, and have never had a problem. I don't know how Bigpond is going to keep its customers with shit like this.
It's been reported that SpamCop is paying upwards to $30K / year for bandwidth as a direct cause of the continous DDOS attacks on it.
The spammers are doing everything they can to squeeze the anti-spammers out. They use frivolous lawsuits (aka Mark Felstein and his porn spamming backers) or DDOS attacks that either knock the anti-spam resources off completely or increase the costs so that no hobbyist can run them.
And while all this is going on, the law enforcement agencies are doing nothing to counter the clearly illegal acts of the spammers.
And ISPs are doing NOTHING to reduce the number of zombies on their networks. So the DDOS attacks continue.
Nice going.
It's only a matter of time when someone (Al Queda?) will use the zombie network for something that will truly be noticed.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
If you read a little better, this is only for ADSL and Cable customers, why they would read offline (Unless they have a notebook or something) when on ADSL or Cable it doesn't matter if they are online or not?
On top of the previous posters comment regarding it only being investigated and not an automatic immediate suspension.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Sections in this document:
English Inflections First off, the OED gives nothing but viruses for the plural. Here's its abbreviated entry:
Other sources that support viruses include Birchfield (n Fowler :-) in Modern English Usage (3rd
Edition), and also the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language .
Classical Inflections
While one would hope that the authoritative sources cited above would
suffice, some writers prefer to maintain the classical inflections on
some English words, particularly in technical writing. For example,
conflicting indexes/indices and minimums/minima are both
easily found, depending on the intended audience and use. In that case, what's
the classical plural of virus?
The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.
Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.
Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.
This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may als
This is probably common with all huge Telco ISPs the world over but I think that Bigpond themselves could do more to prevent tides of Spam originating from their customers... I think these mega ISPs have a "CPE" attitude that's left over from their Telco division - i.e. If it's beyond the equipment we provide - it's "Customer Premises Equipment" and we therefore, don't care.
Bigpond could install heavy default firewalling (especially ports 80 and 25) to protect against people who install default operating systems with Christmas tree options or are infected with spamware so they readily become spam relays and force customers to use ISP provided gateway servers. Better yet, ask customers to knowingly switch off their ISP firewalling if they're providing a legitimate Internet service. (and therefore prove that they know what they're doing)
The end days of open-slather unfirewalled broadband accounts for "Mum and Dad" Internet users is long overdue.
The conspiracy theorists claim that because Bigpond charges customers per Mb for both incoming and outgoing traffic, they really don't care if their customers are open-proxy spam relays because they'll be hit with a bill for the traffic "they've" used at the end of it. That's probably extreme, it's more than likely that they just don't care or have the technical/human resources to do anything about it...