Recovering the Slums of the Internet?

turtleshadow writes "Brian Krebs of the Security Fix Blog analyzes the McColo Spamming one year later and asks an interesting question: 'How does one renovate and recoup the lost trust to the slums of the Internet and reclaim back all the domains and IPs that have been blacklisted?' Indeed, the economic benefits abound when a huge swath of illegal and annoying activity ceases — but given the basic design of the Internet, what happens over the long run to IP space and DNS when hosting companies come and go and vary in their trustworthiness? So too, now Geocities is dead [as a business], but does that still live in your filter list? It still appears in OpenDNS under several policy categories. How, in a few years, will I tell if some Hosting/Colo sold me Whitechapel Road/Ventura Avenue for Mayfair/Boardwalk prices, and no one is going to accept my mail from a former slum? When do you, if ever, roll back the blacklists and filters for 'dead' threats and spammers?"

Comments

You Don't. That's the point.

[Tackhead]

How, in a few years, will I tell if some Hosting/Colo sold me Whitechapel Road/Ventura Avenue for Mayfair/Boardwalk prices, and no one is going to accept my mail from a former slum?

As the purchaser, you probably can't. But what you can do is demand that your provider move you to a better IP neighborhood, or renegotiate (read: "tear up") the contract.

Blocklists aren't about playing whack-a-mole with spammers, they're about disincentivizing spam-friendly providers.

If you're an ISP or hosting provider, and you harbor spammers and botnets, the IP ranges you hold are permanently devalued. That means it's harder for you to get customers, more expensive to support your legitimate customers, and your business, when you decide to sell it, is worth less than if you'd booted the goddamn spammers off your network when you had the chance.

Car Analogy: If you're doing your own oil changes, and instead of hauling the waste oil to a recycler, you dump it into your backyard, don't complain when you try and sell your house and the highest bid still leaves you $100,000 underwater on your mortgage, or requires you to spend $150,000 remediating it. Your property is worth less than it could have been, had you only been a better steward of it.

4chan

[meow27]

isnt THAT the slum of the internet?

1 year

[scorp1us]

Everything should expire after a year.

I also would suggest this in government. That all laws get renewed to automatically expire after 10 years. That way we can keep the law makers busy keeping the good laws while letting the old ones die, as well as keeping them from making crappy new ones that won't survive a 10 year renewal.