Spam [was Re: still looking for that stuff?]

That's a technical issue. The probjlem is not technical. In a civilized net, I could write to the postmaster at the host that handed me the spam, who would then either smack down their local user or chase the pointer to the next hop, as applicable. Postmasters that refused to act against abusers would find themselves without connectivity, because providers would enforce terms-of-service against them. (Providers that refused to do so would find themselves without address space and/or peering. This chases up the governance pyramid, hence the remark about needing will-to-enforce at the top.) Time was - say, back when Jon Postel, rather than the US Department of Commerce, was the top of the pyramid - back about when the MicroVAX-II was new, to put it in terms people here can relate to :-) - I could have lost my access for forging email. Today? Today I'd be surprised if anyone even noticed, much less cared. And nobody caring, and being permitted to not care all the way up the governance chain, is exactly the problem I'm talking about. I suppose that's what happens when you put the Department of Commerce in charge of something. As long as it doesn't collapse far enough to stop concentrating money in the hands of large corporations, there's nothing wrong with it. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B