Dark Clouds over the dutch part of the internet
Dark clouds are gathering over the dutch part of the internet.
Yesterday (2007-02-16) the largest ADSL provider in The Netherlands
blocked port 25 traffic. A logical step from their perspective probably.
It is even an understandable step. I also do think that the intentions are
good. But this action is principally wrong.
First of all most spam is send from spam zombies these days and those run on
Microsoft Windows machines. But the people which are hurt the most by this
action are the people running their own mail server. Most of those people run
some version of Linux/Unix/BSD on those systems. Those people are also very
often the ones who have to deal with heavy loads of incoming spam. This means
in fact that the people who suffer the most from the spam problem are punished
for it. Again.
Secondly most people pay for an internet connection. Not for some kind of http
service over TCP/IP on port 80. In fact the whole change means a degradation
of service.
Speaking of port 80 by the way. A lot of spam zombies are
infected via port 80 and port 443 traffic. So it seems a better
idea to block those ports. After all it is better to cure the cause
than to fight the symptoms. But this would probably cause to much complaints
from customers.
But as often happens in history a small minority is punished for
the stupidity of the masses. This time by a internet that gets
more and more crippled. What will be next?
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