[anti-abuse-wg] 2011-06 New Policy Proposal (Abuse Contact Management in the RIPE NCC Database)

Hi Tobias,

You wrote:

> The intention is to make it easier and clearer to publish and find the
> relevant things and maybe in a next step if community wants us to take
> care of focus on data accuracy.

Please don't add yet more data and then start thinking about the possibility of looking at data accuracy. Do it the other way around. There are already plenty of ways to publish abuse reporting data and adding another is not going to improve it. As sending reports to the wrong address is a wasted effort please don't make things worse by introducing requirements for new data to be published against the will of the people being forced to publish it. That will only make the overall dataset less useful.

> I do not see that this will make things more complicated to naive users.
> Imho the opposite is the case. 

Of course it will. The template will say that things are optional while the business rules say they are not. 

> The naive user should use the abuse
> finder tool which is already in place and would run much easier than
> today

I disagree and I support the RIPE NCC's answer in its abuse FAQ:

http://www.ripe.net/data-tools/db/faq/faq-hacking-spamming/should-i-just-ignore-spam

The overwhelming majority of abuse is perpetrated by skilled professionals who work hard to hide their tracks. Telling ordinary Internet users that they have a useful role in identifying abuse sources and reporting them to the hosting networks is a cruel lie. The scale of the problem requires large scale sampling and statistical analysis rather than individual reports.

By all means work on the abuse issue but please approach it from the perspective of solving the abuse rather than adding a new, larger and more polluted set of addresses for reporting abuse. At a minimum, the proposal should include a policy for maintaining data quality and migrating from the existing dataset.

Regards,

Leo