Australia's Largest ISP Redefines Spam 304
cpudney writes "According to this article in NEWS.com.au, Telstra BigPond, Australia's largest ISP will monitor its customers' e-mails and suspend the accounts of users suspected of sending spam, viruses or denial-of-service attacks. Under changes to its Acceptable Use Policy, BigPond will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers sending more than 20 e-mails in a 10-minute period, and BigPond management "may suspend the (user's) account while the customer is contacted" if they are suspected of sending spam. Previously, BigPond's definition of spam was held to be 400 messages sent over a 15-minute period and now it's changed to 20 e-mails over 10 minutes. Internet Society of Australia president Tony Hill said BigPond's new definition of spam was very restrictive and he was concerned the limit had been set too low for legitimate e-mail users."
Oh telstra you dorks (Score:3, Insightful)
Log on, send 30 or so emails in 2 minutes, and log off.
Then wonder why they can't email again next week.
Shouldn't be a problem in that case (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case (Score:2)
He wi;; be very busy.
Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case (Score:2)
One that likely works on the "total per longer period" metric, sees it's 30 emails a day, and ignores it.
Re:Shouldn't be a problem in that case (Score:2, Informative)
the article says "will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers"
(1.5 million pensioners on bigpond LOL)
mod parent down -10 off topic, misinformed, knee-jerk
To say nothing of (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Oh telstra you dorks (Score:5, Informative)
On top of the previous posters comment regarding it only being investigated and not an automatic immediate suspension.
Re:Oh telstra you dorks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh telstra you dorks (Score:4, Funny)
Cheers,
M
Re:Oh telstra you dorks (Score:2, Insightful)
There are so many steps along the way to sending and delivering email that if you were concerned about privacy, then don't use email, or start encrypting it...
This does seem a bit restrictive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This does seem a bit restrictive. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a side benefit, this will help them help their customers that get hit with email worms... some people may not even know they are spamming, no?
Re:This does seem a bit restrictive. (Score:3, Informative)
"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4 (Score:5, Funny)
Sections in this document:
English Inflections First off, the OED [oed.com] gives nothing but viruses for the plural. Here's its abbreviated entry:
Other sources that support viruses include Birchfield (n Fowler :-) in Modern English Usage [train4publishing.co.uk] (3rd
Edition), and also the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language [train4publishing.co.uk].
Classical Inflections
While one would hope that the authoritative sources cited above would
suffice, some writers prefer to maintain the classical inflections on
some English words, particularly in technical writing. For example,
conflicting indexes/indices and minimums/minima are both
easily found, depending on the intended audience and use. In that case, what's
the classical plural of virus?
The simple answer is that there wasn't one. The longer answer follows.
Writers who, searching for a fancy plural to virus, incorrectly write *viri are doubtless blindly applying an overreaching -us => -i rule. This mis-inflects many words. For example, status and hiatus only change the length of the final vowel; genus goes to genera; corpus goes to corpora. Others are even worse if this rule is mis-applied, like syllabus, caucus, octopus, mandamus, and rebus.
Anyway, Latin already had a word viri, but it was the nominative plural not of virus (slime, poison, or venom), but of vir (man), which as it turns out is also a 2nd declension noun. I do not believe that writers of English who write viri are intentionally speaking of men. And although there actually is a viri form for virus, it's the genitive singular[1] [slashdot.org], not the nominative plural. And we certainly don't grab for genitive singulars for the plurals when we've started out with a nominative. Such hanky panky would certainly get you talked about, and probably your hand slapped as well.
This apparently invariant use of virus as a genitive singular may als
Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4 (Score:5, Funny)
I've seen grammar nazis before but this is the most incredible thing I've personally ever witnessed.
OT: Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4 (Score:2)
"I've seen grammar nazis before but this is the most incredible thing I've personally ever witnessed."
I read that and the last part of your previous sentence and nearly fell off my chair laughing.
Great work.
Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4 (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html
So it's not like whoever posted that actually *wrote* a 3000+ footnoted slashdot comment, just to point out the correct plural of virus.
Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4 (Score:2)
Re:"Virii" DOES NOT EXIST. BZZZT. defcon4 (Score:4, Funny)
j00 h@\/e \/1ru5e5 f001!!!!!!111111233
not
j00 h@\/e \/1r111111 f001!!!!!!!!!11112
?
Virii is a perfectly cromulent word. (Score:2)
Re:This does seem a bit restrictive. (Score:2, Interesting)
Telstra are the ISP. They can see anything they want.
# tcpdump -i eth0 dst port 25
Re:This does seem a bit restrictive. (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope there are some other triggers for this system, for example: Sending more than 20 email in 10 minutes The first time you log on to a new account would probably be more suspicious.
(Also, I think the comparison to /.'s two minute wait before posting is a very valid one.)
A good idea for new customers. (Score:2)
Or for the first month or two. I'm guessing a spammer would be willing to wait a week or two before sending out spam, but not to be a paying customer for multiple months before spamming.
For customers who have been using an account for over a year I would hope that they would be much more conservative before even invest
Re:A good idea for new customers. (Score:2)
Re:A good idea for new customers. (Score:3, Insightful)
it shouldn't be about stupid arbitrary restrictions or conditions for all users, just about identification and elimination of offenders with no collateral damage.
Re:This does seem a bit restrictive. (Score:5, Insightful)
From: Joe.Blow@bigpond.com.au
To: Entire Address Book
Subject: New address
Re:This does seem a bit restrictive. (Score:2, Insightful)
People with dialup who want to keep their only phone line free for incoming calls.
Yes, it's easy for those of us who have broadband (or, I suppose, those of us who don't get [m]any incoming calls,) to forget about the common hazards of dialup internet access. This isn't stone knives and bearskins; it's a legitimate choice be
As a network professional... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As a network professional... (Score:2)
Web site? What's that?
They are nuts - what about regular POP clients? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They are nuts - what about regular POP clients? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:They are nuts - what about regular POP clients? (Score:2)
Only if you replied to 20+ of them within the alotted time. Frankly, I don't think I could do that on purpose, let alone through casual email use.
Frankly, I don't see what's so bad about this. Not only would it make spamming harder through that ISP, but it'd also cut down on the damage caused by somebody who's machine is infected with a maliscious worm.
I think there are better ways they could approach this, but I'm not ready to knee-jerk into thisisev
Time Scale Too Small (Score:5, Insightful)
I can very easily go through 20 emails in 10 minutes just because I might be having one of those back-and-forth email conversations. I don't know if I could do 400 in a 15-minute period, unless I was running a mailing list (well, which I do, but that's why I use "personal" business ISPs).
This sort of metric just seems extremely silly. Is someone putting pressure on BigPond, or is one of their executives being an idiot?
Re:Time Scale NOT Too Small (Score:2, Informative)
Slashdot style (Score:5, Funny)
Now Telstra's customers are just missing the lameness filter and the moderation. The occasional dupe happens in email allready.
Hm. There's a chance a lot of my work on Healthcare Informatics would be modded -1 Redundant and never reach my professor.
Might be a good start... (Score:4, Informative)
1) Monitor all sources of emails in which large numbers are being sent over a short time period.
2) Allow a central repository for people to report which emails are considered spam. Once that amount reaches a certain threshold...
3) Connect the dots, you get a spammer.
I would have commented on this story sooner... (Score:5, Funny)
...if not for Slashdot's 2-minute delay policy.
Stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if I was stupid enough to apply for one I don't think theres a issurer who's stupid enough to give me one.
Re:Stupid (Score:2)
Re:Stupid (Score:2)
My credit union asked me what I wanted as my credit limit. I said $500, so they gave me $1000. Go figure.
Re:Stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
More slashdot sensationalism (Score:5, Informative)
Under changes to its Acceptable Use Policy, BigPond will investigate cable and ADSL Internet customers sending more than 20 e-mails in a 10-minute period, and BigPond management "may suspend the (user's) account while the customer is contacted" if they are suspected of sending spam.
It doesn't say anywhere they they will suspend your account if you simply send 20 emails in 10 minutes. All it says is they may investigate users who do, and may suspend their account upon further investigation. I really don't see a huge deal with this, and there isn't any plausible reason to get angry with this policy if it is followed properly.
Reputation (Score:2)
When a company is known for screwing [slashdot.org] customers over, then customers should be a little wary of what their ISP does [slashdot.org] might not in customers' best interests
Re:More slashdot sensationalism (Score:2)
Re:More slashdot sensationalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait and see (Score:5, Informative)
Admittedly, that's a big if, given that it's Telestra that we're talking about, but . . .
Re:Wait and see (Score:2)
Re:Wait and see (Score:2)
Mailing list servers (Score:4, Insightful)
their home linux boxes.
If things have been set up to use the ISP's mail servers as relays, which you might do to save on bandwidth, it's going to get sticky. (Or does one message with a trillion addresses count as one message?)
Stability of their email (Score:3, Funny)
Picture this: Telstra Bigpond email systems die again (just give it another week) and you cannot send out your email. You have 20 messages in your outbox waiting to be sent. Finally their systems come back on-line (for now) and you send all the emails only to get flagged as a spammer and denied to email again.
You end up back where you started.
This won't be good for Bigpond customers... (Score:5, Interesting)
This lecturer also has other responsibilities (I won't go into detail here) which require him to him to send out newsletters to all of the students in our department, plus international committees and a large number of university staff. We are a small department, but still have ~100 students. Sending out a student newsletter would trip the new email limit. I don't know how he's going to get around this from home (obviously he can send it using our uni mail server when he's at work).
Just another example of Bigpond not being up to scratch these days. I personally use a competing ISP, and have never had a problem. I don't know how Bigpond is going to keep its customers with shit like this.
Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers... (Score:5, Interesting)
Telstra has all sorts of ways to try keep their customers. For example, misleading advertisements - they were forced to take some of their TV ads off the air by the ACCC. Or abusing their monopoly on the phone lines by lying about the availability of ADSL - they told a customer he was too far from the exchange when he wanted to get ADSL through another ISP, but was close enough for Bigpond. Then they threatened him when he talked!
I think there is only so far they can slide, however, before even the most uninformed consumers see the light. Their recent run of email brown outs must have been hard for even the most tolerant of users to ignore. This article [whirlpool.net.au] at whirpool suggests that people are finally starting to wake up.
Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers... (Score:2)
Everyone here is usually all in favor of any sort unimplementable scheme to prevent spam and this one(with a bit of tweaking) might not be a bad idea. Admitedly some legitimate customers will be inconv
Re:This won't be good for Bigpond customers... (Score:2)
Plenty of possibilities:
1) stagger sending - send 15 every 10 minutes. A real pain, but it'll work, unless they lower the limit again
2) have an alias set up on the uni mail server, that expands to all the relevant users, and send a single mail to it
3) have a mailing list set up on the uni mail server, and send a single mail to it
4) set up a modem on a machine in his office, and
SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attacks (Score:5, Insightful)
The spammers are doing everything they can to squeeze the anti-spammers out. They use frivolous lawsuits (aka Mark Felstein and his porn spamming backers) or DDOS attacks that either knock the anti-spam resources off completely or increase the costs so that no hobbyist can run them.
And while all this is going on, the law enforcement agencies are doing nothing to counter the clearly illegal acts of the spammers.
And ISPs are doing NOTHING to reduce the number of zombies on their networks. So the DDOS attacks continue.
Nice going.
It's only a matter of time when someone (Al Queda?) will use the zombie network for something that will truly be noticed.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. But fighting the spammers won't prevent that. The only way to prevent that is to secure the majority of on-line PCs so they can't be zombified.
Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack (Score:2)
You mean they aren't already?
Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack (Score:2)
Re:SpamCop paying $30K / year to fight DDoS attack (Score:2)
It does take more resources than most anti-spammers have. A little help from law enforcement would be nice -- hopefully before someone uses the same technique to take down something else other than "just that anti-spam stuff".
That's good (Score:2)
In addition, they would do the right thing if they implement filters like my ISP [xtra.co.nz] did recently. Filter works and comes with no extra (NPI) charge.
Grumpy old man' (Score:2)
Voting with my wallet (Score:2)
Vote with your wallet people.
Isn't this rather pointless? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have an SMTP server running on my computer. I set it up a few years ago mainly to try to see how good a handle I had on how SMTP works, and I've continued to make use of it mainly so I can create my own Email aliases and help curb the amount of spam I get and keep track of its "real" origins... But setting it up was very little trouble for me. I grabbed a copy of sendmail, compiled it, spent a few hours figuring out how to configure it, registered an MX record with DHS Interna [dhs.org]
Not about Spam, about using Spam to gouge (Score:5, Insightful)
What it will sneak through under the cover of Spam hysteria is the following.
1) It will force budget business users onto more expensive corporate accounts.
2) It will stop people batching their email correspondence to miminise online time which in turn will reduce peak load on telstra and also bring in more money.
3) Less nasty but equally beneficient to Telstra it will allow them to stop worm riddled machines bogging down their email servers (Telstra are facing massive damages over the near collapse of their email infrastructure and associated business losses).
I know it when i see it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I welcome our new SPAM-throttling overlords (Score:2, Interesting)
This is what you get for being a sheep and supporting your local (ex)Monopoly. No surprises here, none whatsoever.
Pain for many normal users? Sure!
Likely to increase ISPs income? Sure!
Actually going to make a *real* difference to professional spammers? Not likely!
Not much more than the usual big company thinking It's not important to solve the problem. It is only important that we convince the public we're working hard to solve the problem. (eg Microsoft and Security)
Then again, per
Spam Assassin in reverse? (Score:2)
This type of a system could be effective in detecting and disabling accounts that are infected, zombies or unintentially sending out spam. While it would be nice if everyone was a "good netizen" and maintained their systems and was security minded.. its not going to happen. A system like this, if it
Are They Really Dumb? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they're not really really stupid, they might have thought: Gee, I wonder if there's any way to tell what's 3 standard deviations above the mean as far as peak mail sending rate is? Do we have, anywhere, a listing of all the emails that have been sent by our users? Preferably arranged in chronoligical order, with timestamps? If we had that, why all we'd have to do is a little grep and wc action, toss in some particularly ugly perl to aggregate the results, and we'd be able to figure out what normal is. From there, we'd be able to figure out what weird is. Once we know what weird is, we'll know which accounts we should take a closer look at.
I've gotta think they figured that out. After all, they have to have figured out how to count the mails per minute per user to be able to implement this (and their former rule), right?
Of course, it's possible they really are too dumb to look at their own server logs. Maybe they pulled this number out of some business weenie's ass during one of those catered lunch meetings in the big glass windowed room with the collossal oak table. If this is the case, then they'll get false positives by the cartload and they'll quickly be swamped in the acrid stench of their own foolishness.
I find the latter a little implausible. Telstra may be a big evil monopoly, but I don't think they're a big evil imbecilic monopoly.
Re:Are They Really Dumb? (Score:2)
Whoa! (Score:2, Interesting)
What I want to know is, how do they decide if you're sending spam or not? Do they read your email? If so, that's pretty serious - I'd be interested to know what th
Well, this should be entertaining. (Score:2, Interesting)
If that happened here, I could only imagine the number of pseudo-mass-mailers that would have issues. You know, the people that send almost EVERYBODY WHOSE EMAIL ADDRESS THEY EVER HAD the greatest joke they read this morning, or funniest picture or....
Even I could get screwed over! After releasing a newsletter, which goes out upto 10 addresses (half in BCC), I get to hours old email, dashing through as much as I can, which tends to probably push the limit about once a month.
Besides, this problem could
sucks to be their users (Score:2)
Transparent SMTP (Score:2)
Rus
Australia Population: 20,000,000 (Score:2)
Bigpond partly to blame, too (Score:5, Insightful)
Bigpond could install heavy default firewalling (especially ports 80 and 25) to protect against people who install default operating systems with Christmas tree options or are infected with spamware so they readily become spam relays and force customers to use ISP provided gateway servers. Better yet, ask customers to knowingly switch off their ISP firewalling if they're providing a legitimate Internet service. (and therefore prove that they know what they're doing)
The end days of open-slather unfirewalled broadband accounts for "Mum and Dad" Internet users is long overdue.
The conspiracy theorists claim that because Bigpond charges customers per Mb for both incoming and outgoing traffic, they really don't care if their customers are open-proxy spam relays because they'll be hit with a bill for the traffic "they've" used at the end of it. That's probably extreme, it's more than likely that they just don't care or have the technical/human resources to do anything about it...
A far better idea. (Score:2)
Every year or so (Score:2)
Road Runner seems to have this (Score:3, Interesting)
I object to this for several reasons:
Spamassassin on outgoing email (Score:2, Interesting)
Then calculate the scores of each user. If a particular user is sending lots of email that Spamassassin is "scoring" highly, then it is likely that the user is spamming or at least sending out spammy emails, and would warrent a closer look.
This would increase the load on outgoing mail servers, but if they want to do this right, and do it much more automated than manually reviewing everyone that sends "X emails in X m
Sounds familiar -- and not even bad (Score:4, Interesting)
There was an article, featured on Slashdot, quite some time ago, which could be applied here. The thought was that if an identified spammer tries to send to your SMTP server, the service would be slowed down.
To protect both the ISP and the innocent, they could implement a feature where after 20 mails in 10 minutes, mails would only be processed at the speed of, say, one mail per 30 seconds, and maybe slowing progressively after each 100 mails. When the mail pipe has been silent for a given amout of time, say ten minutes, the "mail slower" would be reset.
This wouldn't make much difference for the legit home user but for the spammer (and for a business connection) it would be a tar pit to avoid.
This could probably be implemented just by installing a crappier mail server ;)
~llauren
Cannot run e-mail listserver then... (Score:2)
Hm...
YAY! this is great! (Score:4, Interesting)
As an offline user, I'd appreciate this. (Score:2)
I guess that would kill my majordomo server (Score:2)
Some ISP's have blocked port 25 on ADSL connections. But I would rather prefer if it was open and then they should be more than welcome to block it if people started to send spam. and charge 100$ to open it again.
Those who run their own mail servers watch out. (Score:2)
Damn evil chainletters!
It's the number of recipients,not number of emails (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted, this is going to add some processing and storage overhead, but it could be done offline, and the statistics gathered used to suspend accounts once a day.
-josh
Re:Honest question? (Score:2)
or has a bunch of friends they're emailing at once.
or a keeps a mailinglist..
you know, normal(consumer) users of internet would do that. exactly the one's who will not understand why their email is being blocked...
.
Re:Honest question? (Score:5, Informative)
400 in 15 minutes, yeah, that looks odd and should be checked into. 20 in 10...that's not too hard.
Re:Honest question? (Score:2)
Mmmm.... not that I'm necessarily disagreeing with you, but, natural logical flaw...
Why is it "odd" to send 400 in 15 minutes, but not odd to send 20-60 in that same time period? The numbers are all totally arbitrary, it's just that yours is 60 and "normal" and the original limit happened to be 400.
Granted, I understand implicitly what you're saying: they're not allowing for "odd looking but unsustained spikes" such as offliners or batch responders (like yourself). Best to explicitly point this things o
Re:Honest question? (Score:2)
Re:Honest question? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Honest question? (Score:2)
Re:Honest question? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Honest question? (Score:2)
Anyway I just don't have friends like that in general, because that kind of person pisses me off. If they start sending me email I get annoyed and then I start b
Re:Honest question? (Score:2)
Re:Honest question? (Score:2)
Re:Honest question (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Honest question? (Score:2)
Re:seems fair (Score:2)
I smell a troll here, but I'll bite anyway.
"Reasonable?" I guess you don't run any mailing lists. I'm the webmaster for the local homebrew club [alfter.us]. Some of our members opt to not have dead-tree newsletters mailed to them; instead, they receive notification in the mail that this month's newsletter is up on the website. I u