Re: remailer abuse

[frantz@netcom.com (Bill Frantz)]

At 22:43 11/19/95 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>Yes, anonymous communication is getting easier, and the costs of trying to
>stop it are becoming impossibly high. It would essentially require a police
>state to stop, and even then it probably couldn't be stopped...

Considering that there are well known ways of spoofing IP addresses, if you
really want to, you can be anyone.  (They must be well know.  I know at
least one. <grin>)


>2. Sender pays the costs of transmission. That is, if someone wishes to
>send 10 megabytes to a site, at least _he_ (or _she_) pays the freight.
>This is of course the way things now work with the U.S. postal system, with
>"Postage Due" no longer common...

I think we lack direct charges for network traffic because detailed
accounting for use of each net-link is too expensive.  The situation is
similar to that of the telephone system in the 1950s, where the switches
which connected local calls did not have enough smarts to do charging, and
so started the tradition of "free" local calls.

When lots of people start sending full motion video over the net we may see
ISPs develop use based charging schemes.  I should add that one of the
reasons I use Netcom is that they do NOT charge for connect time or network
traffic.  There is a market for known, fixed costs too.

Bill


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Bill Frantz                   Periwinkle  --  Computer Consulting
(408)356-8506                 16345 Englewood Ave.
frantz@netcom.com             Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA