[ NNSquad ] Re: Selected comments on the FCC case

[Brett Glass <nnsquad@brettglass.com>]

At 08:24 PM 2/14/2008, Vint Cerf wrote:
 
>let me just take up one point about abuse.
>
>If you were protecting against DOS, I would agree. 

Use of P2P often constitutes a denial of service attack. Before we
began to engage in P2P mitigation, we saw situations where all the 
bandwidth we could afford to give to an entire neighborhood was 
hogged by a few college kids running Ares, Limewire, and BitTorrent.
Other customers were ready to quit. That's what motivated us to
start developing P2P mitigation. 

>If you are  
>protecting against email spam, I would agree that it makes sense for  
>you to do that for the email service that YOU offer 

Unfortunately, it is not practical to limit it to that. We must
also prevent outgoing spam to avoid being blacklisted and firewalled
and to avoid being cut off altogether by our upstream providers. One
of our upstream providers has gone as far as to mandate blocking of
outgoing TCP Port 25 sessions, except those from our own mail servers 
and those of business customers. And we monitor carefully to ensure
that these aren't being exploited, too -- both by gathering statistics
(we're not using deep packet inspection for this purpose because it
is too computationally expensive) and by watching spamtraps and
blacklists. 

>but that deep  
>packet inspection to detect spam at the packet layer is not  
>appropriate nor perhaps even desired by subscribers to email services  
>other than the broadband ISP's. 

Our customers have thanked us many times over when we've told them
that their machines have become "spambots." But again, deep packet
inspection is not the best way to detect spam. It's better at detecting
P2P, worms, and other problems.

>For example, I use coxnet cable but  
>email service comes from others. I would not like coxnet to examine  
>my email traffic to "protect" against spam. I would expect to get  
>this service, if desired, from my email service provider.

It's Cox who would be blacklisted and firewalled if your machine
was sending spam (either because you were a spammer or because
your system had been commandeered). It has the right to institute
safeguards against this. Cox used to be one of the biggest sources
of spam on the Net; now that they're being good Netizens, the
amount of spam we're seeing from them has dropped dramatically.
(Verizon and RoadRunner are now at the top of the list.)

--Brett Glass