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

[David Matusiak <dave AT matusiak.org>]

Hi,

Please pardon my ignorance all the subject, but here is my $0.02.

Since birth, I have been hearing about how the USA represents the
"best and brightest" and how we are so awesome regarding the creation
of all things.  Indeed, there must be some smart people somewhere
because we actually have stuff like the Internet and the Snuggie.

Now, I'm going to leave aside the part where we are continually
falling behind practically every other country in the world in
educational matters (particularly science and math).  But still, we're
supposed to be a cutting-edge, technologically advanced society,
right?

Okay, so places like China, Japan, Korea, Sweden, Norway, Finland (and
many others) have networks so sassy and crisp it would make your head
spin.  They can download a 2 GB movie in about as long as it takes to
read this sentence.  They even have upload speeds that don't beckon
back to the days of dial-up.  And for a lot of those citizens, their
costs for this blazing network access are negligible or even free.

What do we have in the "best and brightest" USA?  We have one or two
money-grubbing monopolies (heh, I though Monopoly was illegal in this
country?) that have not invested a dime in improving their
infrastructures since 1980, yet they continue to raise their prices,
add more customers, and perpetually downgrade our service levels.  Now
they want even more opportunity to downgrade our service levels and
raise our prices.

I don't care if you call it "Network Neutrality" or "Freedom of
Network Access" or "Shep Pettibone's Eternal Madonna Internet Remix."
Those are just semantic games.  What we need to be competitive and
relevant in the coming century is lightning fast Internet that rivals
or bests the other countries and lots of people trained in how to
use/secure/design/program/implement/upgrade this infrastructure.
Instead, we're wasting our time and energy with geriatrics who still
think AOL is the Internet.  (And I'm sure many of those Congresspeople
accept hefty amounts of public and private money from those same
monopolies. Great system!).

Lord help the USA.

David M.


On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com> wrote:
> on Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 09:09:20AM -0500, Matt Drew wrote:
>> > What makes our current system great is
>> > that for $20/month I can have pretty excellent hosting that can reach
>> > anybody in the world up to a certain number of concurrent users, and
>> > with free or cheap tools I can publish text, video, and more on that
>> > platform.
>>
>> The examples you give are perfect examples of why mostly leaving the
>> FCC out of things has been extremely beneficial to all of us.  Hosting
>> providers are in a highly competitive business with few rules, mostly
>> focused around preventing outright fraud and theft.  Since customers
>> can simply move their entire operation in a few hours, hosting
>> providers are constantly driven to provide better service at lower
>> cost.  This has driven down prices to the point where virtually anyone
>> can set up and publish on the internet - for free, in cases such as
>> blogspot.com and wordpress.com.
>
> It has also made it impossible for most in the hosting business to
> provide security audits, abuse desks, and other functions of any
> responsible commercial Internet entity, attracted hordes of snowshoe
> spammers, and driven many high-quality hosting service providers out of
> the business for good. We certainly had to get out of hosting, because
> we couldn't compete with ridiculous $5/month hosting providers, and did
> not want to (and we still have trouble finding /quality/ hosting, for
> customers who have needs beyond the cpanel/ensim/etc. control panel
> software that is endemic in the business). "Better service" here perhaps
> in the eyes of know-nothing customers, but certainly not in the eyes of
> the sysadmins and netadmins who have to deal with the nonstop effluent
> that streams out of most of these places. We routinely had former
> hosting customers ask us if they could come back after their newer,
> cheaper, host failed in every aspect of service. And we routinely had to
> charge more in tech support costs than they would have saved in several
> years' hosting costs just to get their new hosts to configure their
> setups properly.
>
> I see nothing at all good about the current rush to the bottom in
> hosting, nor in the market forces that practically require that webhosts
> be fully automated, light-on-but-nobody-watching spam havens with no
> sense of responsibility for the abuses their customers are allowed to
> perpetrate on the rest of the Internet at large.
>
> We block inbound mail from several dozen web hosting companies as a
> matter of course due to their complete lack of oversight of their
> customers. Many others we have to periodically block at the /28 or /27
> or /24 level as they sell out to snowshoers, and suffer endless abuse by
> way of phishing and 419 scams sent via insecure webmail and cpanel
> setups, or machines with accounts with weak passwords on their networks.
> And we've had to come up with patterns for the default naming conventions
> used by webhosts in order to block and/or quarantine all mail from their
> customers; we currently have almost 3K patterns for some ~2300 known
> web hosting providers worldwide.
>
> And with no incentive to provide oversight in security matters, because
> they're barely making money as it is, the situation will continue. And
> because of stiff competition, there are many hosting providers whose
> entire networks, when the reverse DNS is scanned, reveal huge snowshoe
> installations - and very little else other than unallocated space and
> maybe a few legit customers or shared hosting boxes.
>
> Sure, there are a few large providers with good service /and/ a decent
> reputation for dealing with reported abuse, Rackspace, thePlanet/ev1,
> ServerBeach, and a few others, mostly in the colo business rather than
> shared hosting, but they're the exception. The rise of "cloud" computing
> has made matters worse, with providers routinely failing to address core
> matters such as naming statically assigned instances something different
> from the dynamically spawned abuse vectors, or for that matter, as with
> Amazon, even bothering to provide abuse desk staff for dealing with
> the inevitable abuse. It never even occurred to them to do so - though
> anyone with a credit card (even stolen) can set up a spam blaster on
> as many Ec2 instances as they can "afford".
>
> And there are no laws against most of the crap everyone has to suffer
> from (just against the fraud or trespass or whatever, not the state that
> allows such abuse on a massive scale to continue). CAN-SPAM is a joke,
> widely recognized as a complete failure by those of us in the antispam
> industry and in the relevant governmental organization such as the FTC.
>
> But hey, at least the market isn't regulated.
>
> --
> hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2553 w: 
> http://hesketh.com/
> antispam news and intelligence to help you stop spam: 
> http://enemieslist.com/