[clug] mail problem on bigpond
Alex Satrapa
grail at goldweb.com.au
Mon Aug 15 03:42:40 GMT 2005
On 15 Aug 2005, at 12:52, Stephen Rothwell wrote:
> Yeah, but then you can filter them. You could, for instance, throttle
> them, or scan them for virsuses, or ban them if they send too many
> emails
> in a specified period ...
Though with the number of Windows PCs that have been turned into spam
zombies, this will get harder and harder. I was watching a friend
connect her brand new, reinstalled-from-scratch PC to the Internet on
the weekend, and in less time than it took to say, "Have you
installed Service Pack 2?" a Windows Messenger dialog box popped up
saying that the user "must" download in important security update
from some site that I don't recognise, my friend (bless her poor
naive soul) had typed that URL by hand into Internet Explorer, and
the machine's TX traffic had jumped to 100% of available bandwidth.
Users these days! You just turn around for a second to make a cup of
tea, and they've gone and messed everything up! Who needs children to
give you nightmares, when all those friends with Windows PCs are so
much worse? Who needs viruses to infect computers with your latest
malware when you just have to tell the user to do it themselves? So
much more efficient.
The worst part of the story? Explaining to the poor lady that it's
going to take another few hours to reinstall the machine again from
scratch (and this time it'll have Service Pack 2 installed, the
firewall enabled, and Firefox + Thunderbird installed as default apps).
Of course, IMHO the ISP should be doing some minimal port blocking
such as blocking the SMB ports (136-139, 445) at a minimum (inbound
and outbound). If someone really wants to share their files and
printers with the world, let them ask for the ports to be unblocked.
Port 25 is one of those contentious ones - I support blocking it
outgoing (if someone wants to receive SMTP connections, fine by me),
and providing case-by-case unblocking (for those people who know what
they're doing). Unless the ISP really messes up (or even worse, does
a BigPond), I'm happy with using their relay.
Alex Satrapa M: +61 4 0770 5332
grail at goldweb.com.au W: http://homepage.mac.com/alexsatrapa
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