[anti-abuse-wg] [Misc] Research project on blacklists

In message , ac <ac at main.me> writes

>Mostly, what makes me very angry is the audacity 

this does seem a reasonable list to ask for assistance on ... but being
around to answer questions promptly would be appropriately polite

surprisingly, I haven't seen the request on any other lists that are (a)
relevant and (b) open -- perhaps they and their project team are not
especially well connected in this space :(  though there is a recent
"anonymous" survey request about router configurations on the NANOG list

>and then the
>"anonymous" 

the Qualtrics platform is available over Tor (unlike some online survey
platforms) so if you declined to answer the questions about which AS and
company you were associated with then there is a substantial amount of
anonymity available to you should you wish to use it...

>and I can already see the "findings" of this research...
>based on random anonymous, hidden and secret inputs....

that is a concern -- this type of questionnaire pretty much never leads
to high quality research directly (since there are significant biases in
who might choose to give replies and there is scope for multiple
responses from a single person, bots filling it in etc)

nevertheless as a starting point for qualitative research (rather than
quantitative) it can be very useful in allowing a researcher to identify
general trends in the answers and -- importantly -- to help the
researcher frame good research questions that are capable of being
investigated in more detail

as John Levine already noted, the questionnaire seems somewhat confused
as to whether it cares about routing issues (bogon lists, the Spamhaus
DROP list etc) or spam filtering (bad domains, phishing feeds, botnet
IPs etc etc)

it also asked if internally generated lists were used, but seemed
curiously uninterested in anything other than if the answer to that was
yes or no -- a missed opportunity I thought.

-- 
richard                                                   Richard Clayton

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary 
Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin 11 Nov 1755
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