Digital BW, The Print

Paul Roark writes:
 > George,
 > 
 > Thanks for the information.
 > 
 > You wrote in part:
 > 
 > >Apparently many, many, many verizon's home-based users end up with
 > >viruses, etc... on their machines and end up wreaking havoc on the
 > >rest of the net.  This leads to networks black-holing the entire
 > >address space in self defense.... 
 > 
 > I can certainly attest to the fact that my Norton Anti-virus program picks
 > up viruses daily.  I assumed this was normal for everyone these days.  (In
 > my view are solutions to these problems and the industry is messing up big
 > time in not dealing with them.)
 > 
 > It sounds, however, like the files on the servers themselves would be the
 > source of concern that would cause systems to block access to them.  My
 > e-mail is, for example, not blocked by any other systems are far as I know.
 > 
 > So, how would infected home machines relate to blocking the internet site
 > access? 

[Again, this is supposition until someone at one of the ISP's proves
 it]

Some networks take an aggressive/vigilante approach to trying to keep
their users safe.  When they identify networks that are e.g. sources
of spam, or e.g. sources of scans by virus infected computers,
or.... they block access to/from those networks.  While it might be
more fair to just block access to the misbehaving machines, the
Internet's routing tools don't give them that fine of a scalpel, they
can only make decisions in fairly course routable hunks.

Sometimes only email traffic gets blocked, other times entire network
blocks are "black holed".

I know that many sites will not accept email from any machine within
Concentric's (my DSL provider) networks, which doesn't bother me
because I relay all my mail through a well known and well-behaved
network.  I haven't had anyone complain about having trouble getting
to my web stuff (e.g. http://www.alerce.com, although it's not always
on the air...).

Yes, this is paternalistic, some users appreciate being kept safe,
others chafe being denied access to usable sites.

One of the most frustrating aspects is that there's rarely any clean
way to figure out why you can't get from here to there, you just
"can't" (as we're observing).

If it turns out that home1.gte.net is actually the ip address of a big
server somewhere in a big ISP's data center then the particular reason
for it being black-holed looses some luster, although the explanation
still fits the symptoms.

g.