Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Tanner Lovelace <lovelace AT wayfarer.org>]

Alan MacHett said the following on 4/5/04 11:10 PM:
> It's only mildly annoying, but I just thought of a potential glitch.  What
> if I had to send a legitimate mass mailing and many of the addresses were
> at Earthlink?  Now I'm stuck having to respond to a sizeable number of
> these automated responses.  Or what if so-n-so AT earthlink.net signs onto a
> listserv for the first time and the listserv sends an automated response,
> to which it gets an automated response to which the listserv will never
> respond, and then the person in question becomes irritated that he can't
> seem to get signed up on the listserv.

Even worse.  What if someone forges e-mail from you and sends it to
thousands or hundreds of thousands of earthlink subscribers!  Now, all
of a sudden, you're innundated with thousands and thousands of these
challenges.  Welcome to being joe-jobbed.

From what I've seen out there, there are extremely few if any challenge
response systems without serious problems.  See
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Rants/challenge-response.html for more
info.  It sounds like a nice idea at first, but unfortunately, it
provides new ways to screw systems over.  On the mailing lists I run
the rule is the first time I see a misconfigured challenge response
system sending e-mail to either the list or to list members from list
postings the person who's system it is gets unsubscribed, no questions
asked.

Cheers,
Tanner
--
Tanner Lovelace       | Don't move! Or I'll fill ya full of... little
lovelace AT wayfarer.org | yellow bolts of light! - Commander John Crichton