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Of course they're not an enforcement agency, that's kind of the point - there is no enforcement agency. We all have to contribute by being good citizens. I sub

Of course they're not an enforcement agency, that's kind of the point - there is no enforcement agency. We all have to contribute by being good citizens. I subscribe to the idea that it's an ISP's responsibility to police its own network for abuse and my responsibility to police mine. You apparently subscribe to the idea that it's my responsibility to just accept whatever shit you fling at me and it's my problem to deal with and yet somehow I have a responsibility or moral obligation to still provide services to you and your customers. I suspect I'm never going to agree with you.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago
There are two ways to deal with badness. The first is to try to identify bad people and then stop them from doing anything whatsoever. The second is to identify bad acts and stop anyone from doing bad acts. The second one is the only one that works without massive collateral damage. Identifying bad people is only an abstraction over identifying bad acts and it leaks like a sieve. A reformed thief is entirely capable of buying an apple without incident, because not all acts by bad people are bad acts. But a thief has no reputation as a thief until after they steal for the first time. The only way to stop bad things is to detect bad things. But the true failure of reputation systems is that as soon as multiple people share an identity they disintegrate entirely. Innocent people get blamed for malicious acts of other people through no fault of their own and with no ability to prevent it. The only way reputation systems can work at all is if people can prevent other people from using their identities. Which means that IPv4 addresses can't be identities, because we don't have enough of them for them not to be shared. And forcing common carriers to stop doing business with anyone who has ever done anything bad has another problem. It imposes the death penalty for jaywalking. You send spam once -- or get falsely accused of sending spam -- and you're blacklisted. It puts too many innocent people into the same bucket as guilty people and then the innocent people fight you alongside the guilty. It creates the market for these VPN services because too many servers are wrongly using IP addresses as identities. Then the bad people also use the VPN services and bypass your "security" because it was never security to begin with, so you block the VPN services which destroys those and they're replaced with others you haven't blocked. Meanwhile the real bad people also use botnets which are unaffected, so you aren't actually blocking the bad people, you're only blocking the one IP address that they share with the good guys. You don't want this fight. Most of the people you're fighting are innocent. People need to learn to detect bad acts, not "bad IP addresses."

AnthonyMouse 11y ago

There are two ways to deal with badness. The first is to try to identify bad people and then stop them from doing anything whatsoever. The second is to identify bad acts and stop anyone from doing bad acts. The second one is the only one that works without massive collateral damage. Identifying bad people is only an abstraction over identifying bad acts and it leaks like a sieve. A reformed thief is entirely capable of buying an apple without incident, because not all acts by bad people are bad acts. But a thief has no reputation as a thief until after they steal for the first time. The only way to stop bad things is to detect bad things. But the true failure of reputation systems is that as soon as multiple people share an identity they disintegrate entirely. Innocent people get blamed for malicious acts of other people through no fault of their own and with no ability to prevent it. The only way reputation systems can work at all is if people can prevent other people from using their identities. Which means that IPv4 addresses can't be identities, because we don't have enough of them for them not to be shared. And forcing common carriers to stop doing business with anyone who has ever done anything bad has another problem. It imposes the death penalty for jaywalking. You send spam once -- or get falsely accused of sending spam -- and you're blacklisted. It puts too many innocent people into the same bucket as guilty people and then the innocent people fight you alongside the guilty. It creates the market for these VPN services because too many servers are wrongly using IP addresses as identities. Then the bad people also use the VPN services and bypass your "security" because it was never security to begin with, so you block the VPN services which destroys those and they're replaced with others you haven't blocked. Meanwhile the real bad people also use botnets which are unaffected, so you aren't actually blocking the bad people, you're only blocking the one IP address that they share with the good guys. You don't want this fight. Most of the people you're fighting are innocent. People need to learn to detect bad acts, not "bad IP addresses."