My major sources of spam traffic are Chinese and Indian residential and mobile IP blocks. So there's that.
Second, everybody screamed loudly when they were cracking down on file sharing traffic. You're saying spying on the citizens is ok when it's for this little reason over here, but not this one over there. It doesn't track.
Not to mention most ISP abuse mailboxes are automated these days because they are flooded with LLM-generated reports from "security" grifters.
The tech industry flooding the market with countless IoS (Internet of Shit) devices didn't help. This has moved way beyond accidentally installing spyware on your PC. People are intentionally bugging their homes with these devices.
I understand the FCC is trying to crack down on this stuff - starting with routers - but of course that gets pushback too. You can't win.
There's no spying required. The NSA and ISPs can find open proxies through infiltration and report them to (e.g. abuse@comcast.com), then Comcast simply has to act on it robustly.
ISPs already deal with abuse reports like this, the system just isn't being operated comptently.
The ways you are asking the government to mutilate the internet are quite similar to the ways the media industries asked the government to mutilate the internet.
What I'm calling for is exactly how things are already supposed to work.
The US government should already be infiltrating hacker groups and identifying infected American computers. Internet providers should be informing customers that hackers have compromised their devices.
Characterizing this as "mutilating the internet" is ridiculous.
Our government condemns and even demolishes people's houses when they're dangerous or become a public nuisances because their owners fail to maintain them.
Most Americans agree with this policy and don't see it as infringing on their freedom at all. Our choice is to enforce basic standards or allow our cities to become horrible places to live, and the same is true of the internet.
So yeah, it seems pretty reasonable to give people repeated warnings, then slow or pause their internet until they take basic steps to stop their connection from being used to abuse others.
Okay, I was being imprecise. These residential proxies aren't "open proxies" in the traditional sense, but they're usually "open" to anyone willing to pay a small amount of money to use them.
> Most ISP abuse reports are routinely ignored. They might as well be a dead letter box.
This is where regulation might play a role, or at least a change in attitude. Companies shouldn't be allowed to pollute the internet in this way when they can easily prevent it.
> Ok but these proxies almost certainly reverse-tunnel. How do you prove a customer is hosting one?
Why do you think that? These are proxies, so they're making huge numbers of outbound connections to websites on behalf of the people operating them. They are the "exit nodes" in this setup.
You could probably just count the number of unique destination IPs they connect to each day. If the average residential user connects to 5,000, an infected machine is probably connecting to 50,000+.
But the simplest approach is to buy access to these illicit proxy services and use them to make requests to web servers you control. If you see your own unique request arrive from a residential IP, you've proven that connection is being used as a proxy.
Second, everybody screamed loudly when they were cracking down on file sharing traffic. You're saying spying on the citizens is ok when it's for this little reason over here, but not this one over there. It doesn't track.
Not to mention most ISP abuse mailboxes are automated these days because they are flooded with LLM-generated reports from "security" grifters.
The tech industry flooding the market with countless IoS (Internet of Shit) devices didn't help. This has moved way beyond accidentally installing spyware on your PC. People are intentionally bugging their homes with these devices.
I understand the FCC is trying to crack down on this stuff - starting with routers - but of course that gets pushback too. You can't win.