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Scam-Linked ISP Intercage / Atrivo Gets Shut Out
alphadogg writes with this excerpt from Network World: "The lifeline linking notorious service provider Intercage to the rest of the Internet has been severed. Intercage, which has also done business under the name Atrivo, was knocked offline late Saturday night when the last upstream provider connecting it to the Internet's backbone, Pacific Internet Exchange, terminated Intercage's service. Intercage president Emil Kacperski said Pacific did not tell him why his company had been knocked offline, but he believes it was in response to pressure from Spamhaus, a volunteer-run antispam group, which has been highly critical of Intercage's business practices."
Yup. The end of TFA was the painful (albeit obvious) part:
Kacperski said Monday he was looking for a new service provider, but that he had no idea how long it will take him to get back online.
"I've got to basically start all over," he said.
Ugh. And the sad part is that, while he's scrambling to rebuild his "business", other people will be scrambling to fill in the void.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Nice typo in the title - very appropriate slip.
No sig? Sigh...
That's nothing. I got an offer this morning of $700B, with little oversight and no accountability. All I have to do is prove that I recklessly lost hundreds of billions of investor capital.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Nigerian Mortgage Enlargement Pills.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I for one welcome this chance for other spam vendors to engage in a little competition. It will be a wholly new playing field if/when Intercage re-emerges online, after previously holding a dominant position. Hopefully the free-market nature of Internet business will only encourage the production of more quality spam. The recipients of spam can only benefit from this new development.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
For a couple of hours?
For a day. They found a new upstream now, though, Unitedlayer, Inc., who obviously didn't pay any attention to the news (or just decided to ignore it):
http://cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS27595
27595 INTERCAGE - InterCage, Inc.
Adjacency: 1 Upstream: 1 Downstream: 0
Upstream Adjacent AS list
AS23342 UNITEDLAYER - Unitedlayer, Inc.
Ok, for the record I am happy they are offline, but the devil's advocate in me does make me wonder about impact of this on net-neutrality.
Consider this, a bandwidth provider cuts off certain traffic because it disproves of this traffic and feels most of it is illegal and it is bad for their business.
Is it Pacific Internet Exchange cutting off access to Intercage because they believe most of the sites (70+ %) involves spam or some other illegal acvitivy?
Or is it Comcast cutting off access to P2P protocols because they believe most of it (98+ %) involves copyright infringement or some other illegal activity?
I am all for getting rid of the spam and malware, but something about this method is setting off red flags.
Or maybe I am over-thinking it.
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Yea, don't give them any ideas!
...
Next thing you know `traceroute intercage.com` will look something like this:
traceroute to intercage.com (128.102.0.99), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
12 TKC-COMMUNI.hsa4.SanJose1.Level3.net (209.245.146.6) 36.243 ms 36.086 ms 36.397 ms
13 n254-border-rtr-nisn-sip.arc.nasa.gov (198.123.41.9) 36.087 ms 36.086 ms 36.403 ms
14 intercage.com (128.102.0.99) 36.432 ms 36.231 ms 36.891 ms
In Soviet Russia ________
The economy bails you out?
A bit over a week ago Brian Krebs, who writes the "Security Fix" blog in the Washington Post, went public with a number of allegations about Atrivo and its activities. As a result, many of Atrivo's own upstream connectivity providers disconnected them.
Will more ISP's/Hosters refuse to do business with "questionable" parties?
Some parties are always considered questionable, e.g. when they actively disrupt the Net. Those parties have always been cut-off, even in the pre-IP times: a misbehaving USENET host was quickly blacklisted and it had a very hard time to find peers. This is "technical questionability".
Other parties are sometimes considered questionable, e.g. when they provide content that is deemed questionable in some areas and cultures (say, e.g. pr0n). This is "social/cultural questionability".
Cutting someone off because of technical reasons is absolutely justifiable, because not cutting him off would disrupt the system itself. Cutting someone off because of social/cultural reasons is not necessary from a technical point of view, and is open to political debate.
Now, Net Neutrality is essentially a political (and economical) debate, and has nothing to do with the first category (technical constraints). Cutting off Intercage/Atrivo seems to me like belonging to the first category: they were actively disrupting the Net on the technical level, and they had to go. IMHO.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Spamhaus was not the central issue or cause of the disconnection. If you read the article, you will see that there was a paper that was researched and published with regard to Intercage/Atrivo activities. The fact that I/A ended up on Spamhaus was simply a reflection of their activities. Not the cause of their disconnection. The network operators who each independently made a decision to not accomodate I/A traffic did so based on the merits of their own knowledge, some of which came from that paper and the rest of which came from their own experiences, and a tiny bit coming from spamhaus which, as noted elsewhere in this thread has a reputation of its own. (good and/or bad. )