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Spamhaus: MCI Makes $5M A Year In Spam Profits
An anonymous reader submits "According to a new Spamhaus report, MCI makes $5 million a year hosting spammers and illegal spamware. MCI/UUNET has long topped the Spamhaus spam supporting ISPs list, with nearly 200 active SBL entries. MCI even took on spammers such as iMedia, when they were terminated by Savvis in their half-hearted response to leaked pro-spam memos."
woops i hit post what was meant to been said was: with a company that big what % is 5$ million? It cant be that much. 50$ or 500$ million then would be a big deal.
MCI == UUNet == huge portion of the backbone. It's impossible, and this is an old old pissing match.
You do realize that UUNET(/MCI/WorldCom) supports roughly one third of all the traffic on the internet, don't you. You can't simply block one third of all your legitimate incoming mail.
Furthermore, I don't want to make ISP's responsible for the content that they are hosting. I think that would set very bad precedent, and the internet as a whole will be much better off if if ISPs are legal regarded as common carriers.
Fight the spammers not the postal service.
Then they should have no quals about cutting off the spammers.
We've already got competing solutions to some of the problems with SMTP, but not a lot of people are using them. Most people don't encrypt email, S/MIME still is not widely used.
Does anyone know MCI's AS number? Because I am going to take it out of my BGP.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
The point is, they're still making $5M so why bother cutting off the spammers unless it is advantageous for them to do so. I.E. if they make $5M by keeping the spammers, I'm sure they'd drop them if they could make $10M in that action. It's kind of like if you make $80,000/year and every year an extra $5 appears in your account. Even if somebody told you "hey if you stop serving such and such, those $5 will disappear." Why would you bother? In fact, if somebody said "if you stop serving those people, that $5 will turn into $10" you still probably wouldn't care:P In order for MCI to have a legitimate reason to cancel those accounts, they'd have to make hundreds of millions from that decision and/or be in legal trouble. Otherwise, it's a non-issue.
Could someone tell me the rationale for the Slashdot crowd supporting the file sharing programs/networks because they can be used for legit purposes and the "owners" stay out of the mix so to speak, and then on the other hand, slaming MCI for basically doing the same thing in this case? Sounds hypocritical to me.
The credo list you have (1. to the customer 2. to the employees 3. to the community 4. to the shareholders) was a short term abberation that virtually no company in the world today would agree with.
:) It has been long known that many companies calculate just how bad they can perform customer service without running off most of the thier customers. Why do you think companies want you to input your account numbers when you call customer service? So they can identify really good customers from the rest of and drop you into a long wait queue in India. Really good customers (read high dollar value customers) get put at the head of the line and get routed to customer service centers here in the US.
All companies today use the following order 1. shareholders 2. shareholders 3. shareholders 4. company executives.
Companies today have a vision that is about 3 months out to the next quarterly report. The reason is that shareholders will trash a companies stock if they don't exceed all expectation each quarter. And companies have no loyalty or responsibility toward employees. Employees are the first ones cast adrift so a company can show a short term improvement on their bottom line. As to customers, I have to think that most companies feel their customers are morons and idiots. Just look at the commercials they run.
J&J was in a shear panic over that incident. And they did what they did because they felt the company was dead if they did not. Bottom line. Nothing more nothing less.
Corporately, they don't care about $5M revenue streams. If it's not a homerun, billion dollar profit potential, it's not going to be developed.
I believe you are correct in that the board of directors for MCI, in the course of business, would not be overly concerned about losing $5 million a year in business, or even $5 million a month in business. On the other hand, one of the many VPs at MCI in charge of the smaller regional sales units would probably view the loss of $5 million in revenue as possibly the end of his/her employment.
The decision making process for finding and enrolling actual customers is RARELY done at the board level. With few exceptions this type of activity is done at the business unit level, and these are often broken into smaller regionally or line-of-business units.
Activists need to find a way to target the individuals who are actually in charge of driving and maintaining relationships with incorporated spam outfits. These are likely to be your average Sales VPs not your board members. Ensuring that board members understand the potential public relations problems associated with these negative associations and the specific presence of them in their own organization has to be one of the better ways to bring about change.
The top decision makers in a corporation are usually much more interested in maintaining their corporate image of being a "good" public citizen because they view the value of a solid public image toward the generation of future business. So when we can, we should bring those "bad" public citizens to the attention of the board of directors for which they work.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
I've found our mail server blocked by several smaller RBL's merely because our Class C is part of MCI's pool. Granted that most ISP's don't use these small personal RBL's, but it isn't a good sign when someone will block MCI's entire IP block because of the amount of spam originating within their network.
:-(
I wish they were still just uuNet.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
and what better option do you see than blocking ip addresses?
the BIG advantage of IP blocklists is they can stop the spam BEFORE it uses any significant bandwidth.
unlike content filtering which requires accepting transfer of the whole email before it can be rejected.
would you blame a bouncer for stopping the identical twin of a known troublemaker from entering a club?
Furthermore, I don't want to make ISP's responsible for the content that they are hosting. I think that would set very bad precedent, and the internet as a whole will be much better off if if ISPs are legal regarded as common carriers.
This isn't about content; it's about behavior. If I rant with a bullhorn at 4 am on your street, the cops will happily haul me off for disturbing the peace, even if I'm reading the Bill of Rights.
Sending spam is in the same category as running DDOS attacks, spreading viruses, or attempting to break in to other people's servers. It's an abuse of the network, and ISPs have no legal or moral obligation to lend their resources to people abusing the network, any more than a landlord has the obligation to let somebody run a crack house.