Webone blocking port 25??

[Drake Diedrich]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 01:42:13PM +1000, Sam Couter wrote:
> 
> Just because you can't fully solve a problem doesn't mean you shouldn't
> try to partially solve the problem, or reduce the risks presented by the
> problem.
> 

   I'd just like to point out that partially solving a problem, in the Real
World of hostile organisms, can be sufficient to drive that hostile organism
to extinction.  Small Pox was not eradicated by vaccinating 5 billion people
(and potentially killing many of those due to side effects). Spot
vaccination in the areas of infection, quarantine, travel restrictions,
quick reporting and medical care for the infected, and a number of other
mitigation strategies reduced the virus' ability to breed below it's die-off
rate, and it's now gone from all but two (known) storage sites.  And it was
one of the most virulent and slippery organisms we've ever known (it did
escape once and hit some unsuspecting researcher on another floor years
later - no one knows how).  Plug: if interested in disease eradication and
Australia's & JCSMR's contributions to it over the years, stop by JCSMR on
Open Day, 23 Aug, and visit the Blue Room.
   Computer viruses are susceptible to the same strategy, whether their
one-rung-higher brethren, the spammers, are also susceptible to the same
reduced-vector strategies remains to be seen, but don't write it off just
because there aren't public executions of the offending parasites.  OTOH the
boost to morale at what we can only hope is the crest of the outbreak might
be worthwhile in it's own right...

  Q: If a typical human lifespan is a couple billion seconds, and a spammer
in the course of their career wastes 1000 seconds of 2 million people's
lives, why shouldn't the spammer face a penalty equivalent to murder?  Of 2
million people, isn't there a fairly good chance that one of them, in that
1000 wasted seconds, might have done something worth more than the spammer's
life?  To go further, if the cost of fixing one mildly annoying bug in a
program you and milliions of others use was the life of a spammer .. oh
nevermind.  As if life would ever pose such an easy question.