Chilling effect of Internet requirements ...

[Barry Kort]

While I'm all in favor of Acceptable Use Agreement and Social Contracts,
there remains a serious problem that such documents and agreements don't
address.

I operate a small non-profit educational outreach service for the K-12
community. Over the weekend, one of our mail servers was hit by a
junk mail spammer who dumped tens of thousands of e-mail ads for Viagra
onto our server, expecting them to be forwarded on to subscribers at
AOL and CompuServe. This junk mail spammer went to great lengths to
avoid using his own return address or his own mailer to deliver the
traffic. The load swamped our system and rendered it unusable for 4
days running.

The ISP of the junk mail spammer, AGIS.Net, ignored my call for intervention
and allowed their commercial subscriber to operate unchecked all weekend.

No matter how much we try, the abusers discover new ways to defeat the
anti-spam features and overrun systems like ours. I don't see how we
are going to make the Internet safe for children with unethical businesses
abusing resources dedicated to the K-12 community.

Barry Kort, Ph.D.
Consulting Scientist
MuseNet K-12 Project