| verizon takes leave of its senses i sent this to tech columnist rob pegoraro at the washington post in order induce him to embarrass verizon in public:
rob-
you might like to ask some verizon PR flacks how much their bosses have been drinking. allegedly as an anti-spam maneuver, verizon says that on 7/12 it is going to restrict the contents of the email "sender" field for all its ISP customers. this will prevent those of us with more than
one email account from using reply addresses that go to our non-verizon accounts. it also prevents those businessmen and women and others with their own private domains from using bellatlantic.net bandwidth to receive mail addressed to the private domain. evidently their "thought" was, enforce reliable sender addresses to kill spam. only problem is,
the way their system works, they don't actually validate the return address. it only has to SAY verizon.net, it doesn't actually have to BE FROM verizon.net. spammers can still forge whatever they like in that field and go merrily on their way. i had a conversation friday with verizon tech support where the 1st level tech script kiddie said essentially (but not verbatim): "yes, we can't figure out why the executives mean that, because it's way stupid, but they assure us in meetings that they do. sure we understand
technically how they are going to go about it, but it is bound to be merely a hassle to legitimate customers and ineffective against big spammers. no, we don't have anything written on the subject beyond the email that was sent to you and to us. but they did brief us at the weekly meeting that this change in policy was going to happen. we will gladly tell our superiors that you object. not that it will make any
difference." because i have had service difficulties with verizon routers going out all the time, i have become acquainted with a couple of second level technicians, one a kind of case manager, the other the fixed IP specialist. i sent them this today just before writing the washington post:
> verizos-
> a discussion of verizon's lame new sender-address maneuvers, due 7/12,
> has begun in a private newsgroup of antispam activists at spamcop.net.
> you may find the below quote instructive, as it gives the view of people
> who have been fighting spam, successfully, for some time, and know the
> ins and outs of all the various technical steps ISPs might want or be
> able to take... if, as suggested below, you are extending the former
> unsuccessful gte policy to verizon as a whole, then you are indeed
> doomed to loss of customers... of course, you techies are powerless in
> this, but several of us do want you to forward this to the security
> honchos and any other vice presidents you can think of who might be able
> to stop this ill-conceived policy in its tracks... or many of your most
> experienced spam-fighters will be forced to learn how to spell "covad"
> real fast... unless you couple it with serious service level guarantees in trade for loss of flexibility...
> >currently the gte servers won't allow customers to use addresses other
> >than @gte and @verizon and whatever...
> >however, they will allow any spammer in the world to abuse their servers,
> >just so long as the spammer claims to have an address which is @gte...
> >using the easily forgable sender address to determine who can send email
> >through the server is dumb...
> >looks like they're extending this policy to verizon, which will
> >inconvenience their own customers, while allowing spammers to abuse their
> >servers... it's almost unbelievable how completely stupid and incompetent
> >they are...
[text was edited by author 2001-07-02 14:24:38] |
