Boing Boing Founder Warns of "Internet AIDS" 154
An anonymous reader writes "Cory Doctorow, founder of Boing Boing, says he doesn't have a problem in principle with the automated network defense systems that guard the Internet against malware, spamigation bots, and other network nasties. However, in his article 'The Future of Internet Immune Systems,' he bemoans the problems caused by 'Internet autoimmune disorder' — where the network defenses designed to block network attacks are automated and instantaneous, but the systems in place to reverse erroneous lockdowns are manual and unresponsive."
Internet AIDS (Score:3, Funny)
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It's your pr0n collection what done it! Shoulda got one of them keyboard covers.
Keep Your Tubes AIDS-free (Score:2)
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Maybe, but what the summary describes is an autoimmune syndrome and has nothing to do with AIDS. This, of course, raises the question of why AIDS was even mentioned in the subject.
Could someone go and see the article ? I'd rather not do so myself, because of the Firefox CPU/memory consumption bug would make restarting the browser a neccessity afterwards, and I have a lot of tabs already open.
AC Post is from Family Guy! (Score:2)
Since when is Family Guy "off-topic"?
Oh, wait, that's the entire premise behind most of their humor, isn't it?
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automation is only one-way (Score:4, Insightful)
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This already exists (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This already exists (Score:5, Insightful)
These various Spam Blocking Lists (or SBLs) are almost all automated. A few of them let you push a button and get removed. However some of them require manually emailing an explanation and still others try to extort money from you to speed up the unblocking process. We didn't even send any spam. The previous owners of the IP did.
If this isn't a strong argument that blacklisting systems are unethical, I don't know what is. Imagine being targeted by vigilantes because you bought a house which was previously occupied by a sex offender and so the addreess is listed on the local sex offender registry. That's essentially what's happening here.
There is no such thing as an "evil IP address" any more than there is an "evil house." These systems are technically, logically, as well as ethically flawed. Anybody who buys into blacklist-based technology is a reactionary and a bigot.
Blacklists (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no such thing as an "evil IP address" any more than there is an "evil house." These systems are technically, logically, as well as ethically flawed. Anybody who buys into blacklist-based technology is a reactionary and a bigot.
And you're a poopy-head!
If you're getting hammered with DoS attacks, spam, interweb herpaids or whatever TFA is about, you block the source. Blocking an IP address has nothing to do with some irrational fear of 32-bit numbers - it blocks the person using that number fro
Re:Blacklists (Score:5, Informative)
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Blacklist timeouts (Score:3, Informative)
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What might be an idea, although this is abusable, would be some way of having a site collect info from others. Say domains A, B, and C are getting hit from the same IP range and blacklist it. They communicate that to some server, so domain D and E would either blacklist
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What might be an idea, although this is abusable, would be some way of having a site collect info from others. Say domains A, B, and C are getting hit from the same IP range and blacklist it. They communicate that to some server, so domain D and E would either blacklist or use tarpits/QoS or other precautionary measures until their spam/DoS filters get triggered.
I do this for domains using the GOSSiP protocol as implemented by pygossip. Each MTA consults a gossip server for reputation, and provides spam/ham feedback on specific messages. The gossip server maintains its own reputation database, and also queries peers for their opinion of a domain, and combines scores to get a reputation and a confidence.
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Blame the man who let his PC get infected; not the poor server op who has to deal with the attacks.
Besides, I don't know of any systems that keep individual IPs permanently blocked; the perma-bans seem reserved for troubled subnets. Very rarely does an entire network change hands; and TFA is complaining not about permanence, but that manual response is "too slow."
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You can safely block those for quite long. Those IP ranges must not send email directly, ever. They must relay through their ISP's smarthost. Even if they are running their own MTA. It doesn't matter if the current user of that IP spams or not.
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For a lot of broadband, dynamic lease times are a year or longer, and I would argue that, on the Internet (where an ISP's standard mail servers might be replaced with newer machines that occupy different IP addresses once or twice a year), a year is a semi-permanent amount of time...
If I want to
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If you're getting hammered with DoS attacks, spam, interweb herpaids or whatever TFA is about, you block the source. Blocking an IP address has nothing to do with some irrational fear of 32-bit numbers - it blocks the person using that number from destroying your network.
Key point being the word "your" in "your network." Do whatever the hell you want on your own network. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about ISPs who take it upon themselves to filter the email to their own users based on
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I've been in your shoes with large e-mail service providers. One in particular (let's call it Company Y) treated my e-mail in each of the following ways over the course of a year: spam box (slightly tolerable), blackhole (never got delivered), and just plain rejected at the MTA level. I made an effort to contact them about whitelisting my domain (as I was not on any known blacklist), but it seemed to fall on deaf
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I'm talking about ISPs who take it upon themselves to filter the email to their own users based on criteria the users have no say over and probably zero knowledge of.
My favorite related personal anecdote:
My ISP acquired some new netblocks and was migrating customers into them. When they moved my /28 and I had problems, I tried to email them but it bounced: my new netblock was on a RBL that their server used to reject messages.
One quick phone call and all was resolved, but it was annoying (and amusing) for a day or two.
BTW, there are two ISPs in my city and this was the good one. My alternatives for getting "better" access consisted solely of moving to another
Re:This already exists (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's pretend I agree that SBL's are immoral, I'd gladly take the hit to my moral standing if it means the (even less moral) spammers can't get as much of their crap to my inbox.
No one sane has ever said that block lists are the ultimate solution for the fight against spam, it is a very useful and very effective supplement to other measures. If something better comes along, I'd gladly use it.
If you don't like block lists, don't use them.
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Well then you obviously are not on the receiving end of millions of spam emails every day that *COULD* have been rejected outright if only you'd been using an SBL. Or you have so much free time to delete all of the junk emails, in which case where do you work?
I use a Bayesian filter, perhaps you've heard of it? It filters about 300 messages a day. That's down, from about 3000 a day a year ago. Filter the content, not the source.
Why should I waste all of my time looking and and handling spam emails I
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Good for you. Bayesian filters work great for some scenarios, but they do not work well for everyone. Do you think companies like Yahoo, Gmail, MSN, etc can use Bayesian filters? They have to be trained by the end user which is not an easy task or even possible in some cases like where people outsource their anti-spam to other companies
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True, the blacklists have blocked some of a large e-mail provider's servers (because spam was indeed sent from those compromised servers), which has inconvenienced me, but at the sa
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If this isn't a strong argument that blacklisting systems are unethical, I don't know what is.
It's a strong argument for changing providers more than anything else. The abuse department that found and killed the previous customer should have done a sweep of those IPs with all the usual places then get them removed. For professional abuse departments this is a matter of doing business, and is unfortunately part of what makes the Internet go 'round whether anyone likes it or not.
A black list is a list of domain or IPs the provider of the black list wishes to list. The provider of the list gets to
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The Upgrade that Wasn't (Score:2)
If this isn't a strong argument that blacklisting systems are unethical, I don't know what is. Imagine being targeted by vigilantes because you bought a house which was previously occupied by a sex offender and so the addreess is listed on the local sex offender registry. That's essentially what's happening here.
Yeah, they're unethical and sleazy, and yeah, I held out for as long as I could, but I'm only one person. I'm part of a small group of like-minded business people, and when we got fed up with "ho
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If this isn't hysterical hyperbole, I don't know what is. What's happening is that he is having trouble getting a few emails delivered. No one is getting "targeted".
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Wah wah wah! Grow up. You sound like a spammer.
A spammer who published a paper [usenix.org] on automated classification of spam, and devised a neural network/information clustering technique which was shown to be even more effective than Bayesian filtering -- in fact, more effective than ANY other known content-based method at the time? Yeah, okay, chief. So tell me, what the hell have YOU been doing to combat the spam problem, aside from widesweeping, ill-advised, technically flawed, misanthropic methods?
Filter t
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I would not have even posted if I hadn't been accused of being a "spammer," which is the typical response when I criticize RBL. This happens so often that by default I give a pointer to our paper. The point is, there is no reason to give up our freedom on the Internet because of a few dickheads. I believe this fervently enough that I've done research work on the topic to try to improve the situation. Am I overly opinionated? Probably. But I see absolutely no reason why normal Internet users should be victim
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Or simply buried in spam so e-mail isn't functional. Blacklisting China, Amsterdam, and Russia lightened my load considerably.
The problem with blacklists is the re-assignment of an IP address does not clear up the black ball. There should be a way to have blacklists auto-check the MX record for new ownership.
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If this isn't a strong argument that blacklisting systems are unethical, I don't know what is. Imagine being targeted by vigilantes because you bought a house which was previously occupied by a sex offender and so the addreess is listed on the local sex offender registry. That's essentially what's happening here.
Except that on the network, whole subnets are written off because of one or two addresses.
One house shouldn't be equal to a whole block (class C) or a whole town (class B) even though it makes life easier for the RBL maintainers.
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If you think blacklisting is unethical, then you must think that ignoring something for any reason(or for no reason at all) is unethical. I doubt you actually believe this.
Not an equivalent for comparison. It's not ME who chooses to ignore something. It's a piece of software on a server that I have no control over. My mom didn't have a choice when her ISP started blocking my emails. Except of course to change ISPs to one which has a sane policy. And I'm not switching hosting services just because my IP
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Holy exaggeration, Batman ! Well, I guess animistic faiths could incorporate gods of e-mail servers for various domains. Sure would make an impressive title for your CV, too ;).
But seriously, in what way does deciding not to receive (not deliver; receive) an e-mail mean you've got delusions of grandieur ? And do I have such delusions if I put "no junk mail" sticker on my
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More like metapHorrible (Score:3, Funny)
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AIDS isnt even all that bad anymore. You take some pills.
Not that bad as in *if* you're in a rich country you can get a treatment that's quite uncomfortable and has lots of not very nice side effects and while it leaves you still alive (and therefore free to do science if you like), still leaves you with a depressed immune system which means you still have to take lots of silly precautions.
So while I suppose that people with AIDS are happy not to be dead, it's still not a very comfortable illness to have. Not to mention that there's apparently still a heavy soci
Trigger trippers (Score:2, Interesting)
Yep, almost as bad as trying to get set up with service in the first place.
I guess the way to foil these critters is to try to trip as many as possible. Then again, the intarweb mischief-makers will probably do just that.
Please stay on the line, your call is important to us.
Automatic Forgiveness in Autonomic Systems... (Score:5, Insightful)
EG, in a scan detector, forgive 1 scan per minute/hour and eventually release the block. This saves a call to tech support, and papers over a lot of sins when building an automatic system.
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I do this in all of my active defense systems for production sites. I tend to make the firewall rules reasonably aggressive at detecting anything that looks remotely like attack traffic (connections on ports that neither us or customers are ever supposed to use but do see attack traffic (22, 139, etc...), tcp flag combos common in stealth scanners, certain known exploit string matches on port 80 traffic, etc), but the offending IPs are only blacklisted for a few minutes at first, ramping up to perhaps half
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What are you using to implement this?
same thing happens with p2p blocklists (Score:2)
Auto-immune != immuno-deficient (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary title is stupid.
AIDS is not auto-immune; it is immuno-deficient. The FA doesn't mention AIDS. Try this [wikipedia.org].
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Re:Auto-immune != immuno-deficient (Score:4, Informative)
There are many, many examples of problems when that balance is disrupted. AIDS on one hand when you don't have enough of an immune response, Lupus when your immune system is too jazzed up. Furthermore, the immune system is incredibly complex and has layers and layers of feedback systems, redundancies, control loops and things we really don't understand well. I suppose AIDS would be a Windows box hooked up to a cable modem. Not long for this world.... Lupus might be what Doctorow is complaining about - too much "immune" activity.
Unlike the Internet, the immune system has had millions of years to evolve to it's present state - and it is still hardly a perfect system. Perhaps some up and coming "Internet Immunologist" might start out with this course [mit.edu] to take advantage of those millenniums of experiments
Or perhaps we should just chuck the immune system thing and try to come up with a car analogy.
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What? Youre saying a science fiction author who has never worked with large scale networking has invalid opinions about network security and his proposed fix-all is questionable musings? Say it aint so!
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Glad someone spotted this (Score:3, Insightful)
Auto-immune means that the body's immune system starts to attack itself, a condition which is largely incompatible with the one mentioned. AIDS deals with the destruction of the immune system by outside causes (whatever they may be). Autoimmune diseases cover the body's own immune system going haywire and destroying the body.
Analogy: AIDS is a demolition crew, Auto-immune is "Extreme Makover: Home
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mmmMMMMMMMmmmm cooked long pig.
Allergic reaction (Score:2)
Bunch of cash (Score:2, Insightful)
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The hero is a neckbeard, it's set in a world where everything wants to be free, and the main part of the action takes place in Disneyland. Oddly and unbelievably, the author will not understand the ironic incongruity of that...
Not AIDS (Score:2, Informative)
Not AIDS (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not AIDS (Score:5, Funny)
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hmm (Score:5, Funny)
the systems in place to reverse erroneous lockdowns are manual and unresponsive
Anyone who is married knows how much of a dilemma this presents...
Guess we'll have to... (Score:3, Funny)
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Pardon my naivety (Score:1)
Seriously, I believe that until processors/hardware works with the OS to sandbox applications correctly, there is no really effective way to sanitize the Internet, and there are some really good reasons for not doing so.
At least some malware uses the OS features to hide itself, and propagate itself. Much of the rest of it relies on users to initialize it locally. Tell me how that will automatically be rem
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That's not AIDS (Score:3, Informative)
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where is your god now?
I've had this experience (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway. It turns out that spammers could blindly use my webproxy to push email to my local port 25 and send mail using it. Damn clever spammers. I figured it out after my email system croaked and I looked at the logs and mailq. (crap, 1000 spam messages in the outbox, originated on my system).
So I'd been a tool, and used, and it was my damn fault. I fixed it (uninstalled the proxy) and started to repair the damage.
One of the items of fallout was that the RBL lists had nailed my IP address as a spammer. Fair enough. But getting them to turn it off was a royal pain in the ass and took days - even though their notes described exactly how the spam was delivered through my system and it was easily verifiable that it was no longer an issue.
It left me pretty peeved, and I've never used an RBL since.
The pool is closed! (Score:3, Funny)
Whitelists and Blacklists (Score:2)
There probably is one, but it's hidden behind an opaque trust network of people who know about it, but who I don't know, though we have that SW relationship (need/have) in common. Let's see if the manual broadcast still works.
Cory's not a BB founder, nor is AIDS (Score:1)
that's the second article i read today (Score:2)
"Lust, Caution" prompts virus, medical warnings [reuters.com]
although this was quite the amusing bit:
Doctorow not a founder of BoingBoing (Score:3, Informative)
Credit card lockdown (Score:3, Informative)
My wife and I drove over three hours to a different state to buy furniture. On the way, we stopped at a gas station and bought gas. Apparently, our credit union doesn't believe in such things as traveling from state to state, and flagged this is a suspicious transaction. Nevermind that we go to this neighboring state regularly and their "system" has never seen this as unusual. Of course, the card was silently suspended. This has happened a few times in the past, but we'd always received a phone call within minutes of it happening. No such call, so we remained oblivious and continued on.
Proceeded to drive to our destination, spent a few MORE hours picking out furniture, went to pay, and... Whoops. Luckily I managed to dig out a credit card from the depths of my wallet that I'd forgotten about, and which still worked, luckily. But it easily could have been a completely wasted day.
Of course, calling the credit union about it didn't help. They aren't open on the weekends. They can shut your account down kid, but they won't turn it back on again.
Imagine that. People occasionally drive into a neighboring state and... buy gas on the way! If that's not suspicious, what the hell is, right?
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When a card is stolen, the thief will often follow a predictable pattern: a small, relatively anonymous purchase (like gas), to confirm that the card works, followed shortly by a large transaction (like, in your case, furniture). Gas stations are the perfect place for that first transaction: if the card is cancelled, no one's at the pump to call the card company or rat them out.
When the credit card companies see transactions that fit that pattern,
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Of course, calling the credit union about it didn't help. They aren't open on the weekends. They can shut your account down kid, but they won't turn it back on again.
You don't call your credit union. You call the credit card company.
I belong to a credit union too, and I have a CC issued by my credit union. I bought an expensive piece of electronics, first major purchase on the card. On a Sunday afternoon, no less. That went through...but 30 minutes later, another transaction was declined. The cred
Okay, other side of the story (Score:2)
Didn't happen to me, I was just a witness. I was at a police station to sign a statement regarding an attempted burglary the night before, they asked me to wait as they had to deal with a woman who was a bit upset. Privacy? Not when you are so loud you are overpowering my iPod.
Her story? Money had been withdrawn from her debit account (Postbank for dutch readers) and she wanted to report it, she had already contacted the bank and been told the money had been widthdrawn from spain, this was in the summer an
Welcome to racial profiling (Score:1)
Ater specifically notifying B of A I was going to France, and asking them to raise the limit, because I would be withdrawing a lot of cash, my card was suspended.
Suspiciously, someone was withdrawing a lot of cash. In France.
This is basically the price we pay for weak law enforcement. There are laws against spam, and phishing, but no money to prosecute, so we end up with flawed automated systems.
There a
Waiting for Total Collapse (Score:2)
More and more it is left to the end user or consumer to battle their way though e-mail and voice systems to undo the damage inflicted by automated systems. To add insult to injury it seems that the blame for these problems is always placed on the customer, not on bad system design. I guess that this is all part of the "Leave you bag at the door" attitude that assumes that every customer is a shop
Simple rule (Score:2)
A Simple Well Thought Out Solution (Score:2)
I'll simply get my HERF gun and this time things will not end badly!
(If you think this is OT, you need to read more Doctorow)Cory's A Cool Guy And All But... (Score:3, Informative)
The Internet is closed... (Score:2, Funny)
The internet is no longer a series of tubes. (Score:4, Funny)
What? (Score:2)
WTF are these terms you are referring to? I run Linux and Unix and I'm unfamiliar with "malware" and "spamigation bots". Are these Windows applications?
Just asking
it's more like allergies (Score:2)
Allergic reactions are where your body identifies foreign or even native substances as harmful and treats them with hostillity (like by making your eyes water and your nose run to flush them out) This is an immune over-reaction, which is what the article is talking about.
AIDS would be more like the many many viruses that seek to shut down common anti-virus programs. But of course, AIDS is more scary and sensational than histamine
Non-credible source (Score:2)
Cory's specialty is making mountains out of molehills. He whines that he got kicked off his hotel network after playing an online game that taxed their shared resources, and from that he makes sweeping generalizations about overall Internet security. Excuse me if I completely disreg
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AIDS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Spam is email that forces itself upon me -- that can be "Internet rape."
What Comcast is doing to bittorrent traffic: "Internet genocide."
And the projected brownouts as described by that other article on the front page right now: "Internet Alzheimer's."
These attention-grabbing headlines are so accurate and informative!
WTF is *A VIDEO GAME* doing a portscan for??? (Score:2)
If it quacks like a duck
and it flies like a duck
it's damn well going t
Not founder, not AIDS, otherwise, w00t! (Score:4, Informative)
* I didn't found Boing Boing -- I co-edit it with Mark Frauenfelder (who *did* found it, along with Carla Sinclair), Xeni Jardin and David Pescovitz
* I didn't use the word AIDS in the article, and I don't think that this is comparable to AIDS; I used "autoimmune disorder," as in "allergy" or even "lupus" -- that is, any time when the systems that are supposed to protect you end up attacking you
Otherwise, many w00ts for this making it to the
Virus analogy (Score:2)
Well, one of the less nice properties (and then I'm making an understatement) is that it is euh, viral and contagious.
So this analogy is a bit overdone I guess.