From: Mike Duvos <enoch@zipcon.net>
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 1997 05:37:32 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Picketing With Packets
Message-ID: <19970816212754.10722.qmail@zipcon.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



I availed myself of some free home page enhancements on the Web
yesterday, and all of a sudden, my SPAM has increased by at least
an order of magnitude.  Obviously, one or more of the sites I
visited sold my email address to Mr. Spamford.

I am now getting almost continuous Cyberpromo, EmailBlaster, and
SubmitKing mailings as well as one from some female entrepreneur
in Singapore who wants me to send her US$10 to email me obscene
stories.  (sigh)

The time has come to make an example of Wallace Spamford, and to
mount his stuffed carcass on the gates of the Internet as a
warning to those who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps.

The following was suggested to me by someone on IRC this morning,
and I think it's a pretty nifty idea.  We write a little Perl
script that keeps exactly ONE AND ONLY ONE TCP connection open to
each of Mr. Spamford's machines.  Keeping a single TCP connection
open to someone's box is unlikely to be illegal, and does not
constitute a Denial of Service attack.  Consider it the packet
equivalent of a single person picketing.

We publish the script, and encourage every Sysadmin who hates Mr.
Spamford to run it.  When thousands do so, he will be out of
sockets, and consequently out of business.  Consider this the
packet equivalent of the UPS strike.  We can make the scripts
clever, and have them goose a wide variety of ports on Mr.
Spamford's machines.  He can, of course, devise a technical
defense against this, but he does not have one installed at
present, and it will shut him down for the time being, and give
him sufficient time to ponder his evil ways.

This also has the advantage of distributing the liability over
thousands of individuals, a technique shown in the recent uunet
UDP to render legal redress impractical.

Anyone have any comments on this scheme, or anything even more 
insidious to suggest?

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     enoch@zipcon.com   $    via Finger                       $
         {Free Cypherpunk Political Prisoner Jim Bell}