What do you think about communications data collection and storage?

[Roland Perry]

In article <4A002B9D.2030306@bbk.ac.uk>, ken <k.brown@bbk.ac.uk> writes
>Roland Perry wrote:
>> And who accesses  the Internet by dynamic-IP dialup any more?
>
>An absurdly high proportion of the computers sending packets that get 
>blocked by our edge firewall, apparently probing the same IP port on 
>the all the addresses in a /24 subnet one at a time.
>
>If we could wave a magic wand and remove all modem/dialup IP access in 
>the world tomorrow we'd lose connectivity to maybe one member of staff 
>but cut out a quarter of the spam and the probes and shit.  (If we 
>could remove Korean and German high schools we'd probably lose another 
>quarter)

I think you are seeing an effect traditionally associated with spammers 
(in the age before Botnets, anyway) - that they use disposable accounts, 
which are therefore dial-up accounts. (Disposable broadband accounts are 
a non-concept).

To get back on topic, there's no particular reason they suffer from 
enough clock drift to hamper traceablity.
-- 
Roland Perry