Sure. I think the thread has ended. Though I think it was highly operational in
nature. Several people emailed me grateful messages. The people who wanted to
"change the topic" tended to be the radical antispammers, who didn't want to see
their fringe tactics hindered by operators.

Our relay attacks have gone way done over the holiday weekend, when I would have
otherwise expected an increase. I think this is due to the discussion on Nanog,
and operators blocking ORBS as a result.

--Dean

At 04:22 PM 11/28/1999 -0500, Susan R. Harris supposedly said:
>Hello Dean - I've been on vacation this week, and am not sure if anyone
>else from the NANOG support staff contacted you, or if the "ARIN whois"
>discussion has ended by now.
>
>Would it be possible for you to take this discussion offline? It's
>tending to focus on network politics and legalities, rather than network
>operations. As such it does not conform to the NANOG list AUP
>(http://www.nanog.org/aup.html) and is an inappropriate topic for the
>NANOG list.
>
>Thanks for your cooperation. --Susan Harris
>
>On Wed, 24 Nov 1999, Dean Anderson wrote:
>
>>
>> I'm surprised to see such poorly considered statements from JD.
>>
>> Unless SMTP AUTH (just released in sendmail 3 weeks ago) works in every
>> client, and is support in MS Exchange, then we (that is we as an operations
>> community) don't have the technology to practically authenticate it yet. I too can write
>> an authenticated SSL client & server to transfer mail between two computers.
>> But its not useful unless its widely deployed. Statements to the contrary are just
>> foolishness in an operational context such as a real business. We are running
>> a _BUSINESS_, not a research lab, with one server and one specially developed client.
>>
>> We don't run relays out of laziness. We went out of our way to enable
>> them. We go out of our way to monitor them for unauthorized use. We would certainly
>> prefer an authenticated mail system. We have to live with what is currently deployed.
>>
>> What annoys me about the pressure from the junior antispammer league is they
>> go from "gee, you know you can close those relays"
>>
>> We respond "Yes, we know. We operate them on purpose for business reasons".
>> At times, I've explained these business reasons in detail. The technical conclusion
>> is then that we have to operate relays.
>>
>> They then jump to "Thats unacceptable. You MUST CLOSE THEM".
>>
>> We say "No. Absolutely not."
>>
>> They say "Well, in that case we're going to start committing crimes
>> against your service, posting to alt.2600, inciting attacks, and wasting your time,
>> bandwidth, and computer resources until you agree to close them."
>>
>> We say, thats extortion. We say that crimes against our service are crimes.
>> We report them, and they will get eventually get punished, and we will work
>> hard to get paid for the services rendered and the damages done by criminals. We
>> don't tolerate this sort of behavior. Most companies don't.
>>
>> --Dean
>>
>>
>> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>> Plain Aviation, Inc dean@av8.com
>> LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP http://www.av8.com
>> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>
>>
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