wowbagger's Journal: Bastard Backbone Baboons!

WARNING: This is a rant, pure and simple. If you don't like rants, then I would suggest you hit your BACK button now.

BASTARD BACKBONE BABOONS! Specifically, WorldCom/MCI/UUNET.

What about SpewSpew.net has raised my ire?

10 April 2003. I began receiving virus-laden emails from netvision.net.il. I wrote a nice, simple letter to the [e-mail] - "One of your users has a virus on their computer, and it is sending copies of itself over the Internet. Here's the headers - you should contact this user and tell them to update their virus scanner."

And I got your standard, run of the mill auto-ack. OK, no problem, as long as the problem gets fixed. I gave them a couple of days to solve the problem.

"The chances of any thing coming from Mars
Are a million to one" they said.
"The chances of any thing coming from Mars
Are a million to one...."
But still
They come!

OK, so I continued to send emails to [e-mail]. And I got the following one day:

Regarding your question :

After warning a customer , there is a period of "Waiting Time" given to
the warned party in order to give him the opportunity to
Take action regarding his abusive behavior.
During that time we will disregard any complaint involving this
customer.
Thank you for your Patience.

That was dated 16th April - almost a WEEK after I started dinging on them. Hell, that's a longer waiting period than on a handgun (fuck you very much Bill Clinton...)

So, I started to CC their upstream provider, alter.net a.k.a. WorldCom a.k.a. YouSpewNet. And I got a series of auto-acks from WorldCom.

Another week goes by.

Now, I get fed up. I call WorldCom on the phone, at the number they gave in the auto-acks. I politely talk to their tech support guy, and fill him in on the deal. "Well, according to this we are going to call them Monday and talk to them about this." OK, fine, thank you for your help and good day.

Monday comes. So do 5 more viruses. OK, due to the time zone differences maybe Netvision didn't get the word until too late, I'll give them a couple of days.

Now mind you, all Netvision needs to do is put a virus scanner on their mail server - all the viruses are coming from the Netvision MX, not directly from their users' machines. So if Netvision would put a virus scanner on their mail server they would quash this in a heartbeat, as well as being able to help protect their customers from this very virus.

I don't consider this an unreasonable request - my ISP does this, Yahoo does this, Hotmail does this, so it's not like I am asking them to choke down a ham and cheese sandwich or anything like that.

"...But still, they come!"

Now, each one of these viruses is 150kBytes of crap. The pose no threat to me - every machine of mine has an X firmly ensconsed in front of its Windows. But they are ANNOYING.

So, a few more days pass, and once again I call ScrewYou.Net up. This time, I am told that "no, we haven't called them, but we HAVE sent them an email." Now, one operant definition of insanity (or stupidity) is doing the same thing and expecting different results. I HAD been emailing them to no avail. "OK, sir, we will contact them and tell them to solve this problem."

"The chances of any fix coming from you
Are a billion to one, I say.
The chances of any fix coming from you
Are a billion to one
And still, they come!"

So, today (just a few minutes ago, to be more exact) I call DooDoo.net again. Now, the truth comes out:
them: "What do you expect us to do, disconnect all of Israel?"
me: "No, just Netvision."
them: "Like I said - all of Israel - they are the main provider."
me: "That's nice - they are still not doing anything about this. Maybe if you nullrouted port 25 for a couple of days they might feel this was important."

I have little doubt that if this were a little ISP like the one I use, ScrewYou.net would not hesitate to pull the plug. But if you are a bastard backbone baboon you can do whatever you want.

While it pains my libertarian leanings to say this, I sometimes wonder if making the actual Internet backbone in the US a federally controlled system is such a terrible idea. The purpose of government is "to secure the common defense [and] promote the general welfare" - perhaps if the telecommunications infrastructure were under that catagory things might be better.

Then again, I have driven on and am getting ready to drive on the highway system....

I would LOVE to come up some hyperdimensional communications technology - something that would allow for gigabit portable links. Then when PeeYoo.net and their ilk came to me and said, "Please let us license your technology", I could say:

"Who's the Bastard Backbone Baboon now, baby!"

I agree

[LinuxOnHal]

I agree...UUNet sucks. When I worked for a small Wireless Broadband provider, we used them for internet transit. When we'd call them up, nobody really cared what we had to say or ask, and they do not seem to return phone calls under any circumstance.

The other thing we always had trouble with was getting IP addresses from them. I know there are ARIN restrictions on the allocation of them, but their policy at the time was no more than so many per megabit of transit purchased...what they failed to understand