“Your browser found this site in no small part through the
efforts of Paul Vixie. Vixie is the head architect of BIND, the
most popular implementation of DNS. He’s also president and founder
of the Internet Software Consortium, the home of BIND, INN, and the
DHCP server. As if that weren’t enough, Vixie leads the fight
against spam with the Mail Abuse Protection System (MAPS), which
includes the renowned Realtime Blackhole List, through which
countless spammers (and one or two ISPs) have learned the power of
the Internet community to say no to network abuse. He took a break
from his extremely busy schedule to answer our questions about all
that and more.”
“How would you characterize the key security problems faced by
sysadmins, especially in dealing with email and the Internet? What
are their key weapons in fighting theft of service and other
network abuse?”
“Security problems faced by sysadmins” is a large topic, of
which theft of service is a relatively minor part. Of that part,
it’s safe to say that the original design of virtually all Internet
technology took no account of human nature – because the subset of
humanity who used the early Internet had been preselected by their
employers and schools and research labs and whatnot to weed out
rudeness. Now that the Internet has the full spectrum of humanity
as users, the technology is showing its weakness: it was designed
to be used by friendly, smart people. Spammers, as an example of a
class, are neither friendly nor smart.”