Slashdot Mirror
Postfix's Creator Outlines Spam Solution
SATAN writes "Wietse Venema started out as a physicist, but became interested in the security of the programs he wrote to control his physics experiments. He went on to create several well-known network and security tools, including the Security Administrator's Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN) and The Coroner's Toolkit with Dan Farmer. He is also the creator of the popular MTA Postfix and TCP Wrapper.
SecurityFocus chatted up Venema to talk about software security, how to improve the code quality, what solutions we might have to fight spam successfully, the principle of least privilege, and the philosophy behind the design of Postfix. Venema is currently a researcher at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center."
Your post advocates a
(x) technical (x) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(x) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
(x) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I always said if you had poorly-written code or spam clogging up your inbox, you would need a Venema.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
...why not send your thanks to Victor.Duchovni@MorganStanley.com and perhaps tell him a bit about your day.
Spam Assassin.
No, not the program of the same name, an actual assassin that kills spammers, CEOs of companies that use SPAM etc.
And if he has some extra time, assassinate some of the Wall Street Pirates responsible for the mess we're in.
I suggest 1 Trillion Dollars as a bounty, since the Government is handing money out like candy.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Little typos like that don't matter. I mean, things work just fine whenever I sign into BankFoAmercia.com. Okay, sometimes the initially login fails, and I have to login at BankOfAmerica.com again, but after that things are fine.
Strange, though, I never can seem to make my paychecks last more than a day or two. Hrm.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
It's quite simple. If you write an MTA, you have to be an asshole. It's the law.
Yeah, like customer support centers or contract companies already know everyone who will contact them.~
No SIG for you!
Slashdot itself is proof enough of that.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
LoL
d00d, you are so going to miss out on big cash hand-outs from Nigerian families...
oh, be fair: openbsd is much more than an MTA