[anti-abuse-wg] A Network without contact!

On Mar 30, 2013, at 1:54 am, andre <andre at ox.co.za> wrote:

[…]

> roflmao, the phone thingy is also increasing in complexity as it
> also takes pics, videos, pays for stuff purchased and in fact is
> becoming so sophisticated that it is easy to forget that you can also
> just talk into it... Hardcore old style / old school :) 

Putting humour to one side, when I visited the Scania NL website I didn't find an e-mail address. So, I ask whether there ought to be a requirement for anyone running an IP network to commit to accepting e-mail? My initial thoughts are that it is unreasonable to require an organisation to turn up and maintain an e-mail service solely to be contacted by people it doesn't have a business relationship with. Frankly, I don't like the idea of people turning up mail servers and then forgetting to maintain them just so they can have an abuse@ address. It strikes me as a recipe for increasing the volume of spam and compromised systems.

That being said, it does mean that the set of communication protocols the reporter prefers and the set of communication protocols the network manager implements might not overlap. 

As I understand it, the RIPE database currently supports the publication of postal addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. It's possible that there is value in expanding the number of supported systems to include things like instant messaging identifiers and social network IDs in a structured way that allows them to be parsed by abuse reporting systems.

The death of e-mail seems to be a favourite of newspaper features editors and is often reported in a Mark Twain fashion. Nonetheless, if e-mail is on a death spiral, it would seem sensible for the RIPE database to provide support for whatever takes its place so that abuse reporters and network owners can easily communicate.

Regards,

Leo
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