MV Communications Newsletter: December 2003

In this issue:

Unfamiliar or bizarre terms that you run across might be in the newsletter glossary (-- if not, suggest that we add it.)

Clarinet going away

We've decided to terminate our subscription to Clarinet news, effective the end of this year. Clarinet is a for-pay service that delivered us real-world news, sports, features, and other articles via usenet news channels. We offered these articles for free to our customers, via both the usenet news server and the web server.

Sadly, we've found that this service has simply lost a great deal of its utility to us and to our customers. Many of the things we valued in it are gone. Many articles consist simply of a link to an external web site. Much of the news seems missing or delayed or not covered in the depth we were used to seeing in the past. Over the past few years it has become easier to find this sort of news on the web in general, in better shape, in more detail, and more up to date. And frankly, only a handful of our customers ever accessed it, making it a very poor value/return issue for us.

We were always fond of this service, having offered it to our customers since 1992 (and having subscribed to it personally prior to that). If you've read many of our newsletters you'll know that we have re-evaluated this service from time to time. Although we may investigate other news publishing services in the future, it's pretty clear that it's time to let this one go.

Update Dec 19: We've been asked if we know of other interesting news sources on the Internet. Some that we know of include the following:

General news sources such as Google News, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC;
Some regional news outlets: The Concord Monitor , The Nashua Telegraph, The Manchester Union Leader, Fosters Daily Democrat, The Hippo Press, and The Boston Globe.;
More global views like: worldpress.org, and Newseum's stunning array of front pages around the world.

Please also see our customer service site, home.mv.net for other links to news and information sources.

Damage Control: SPAM, viruses, worms

We talk about SPAM quite often here, since it affects you, it affects us, and it affects the Internet. Often we talk about ways that you can protect yourself against receiving spam, but this time we are going to focus more on protecting other users and the rest of the Internet. SPAM, along with other forms of Internet abuse, is interesting in that those who cause it or facilitate it are not the ones who suffer the direct consequences. These consequences are felt by others. In this context, actions that you take to secure your systems against abuse help the rest of the net more than they help you. The irony is that you have less motivation to prevent your system from attacking others than you do in fending off attacks from others who, in their turn, do not feel the direct consequences of what their systems are doing. Yet securing your systems and your connections at the source are the kinds of things that must be done in order to help the Internet be a better place.

As an ISP, we are subject to indirect consequences of abusive material coming out of our network. (Make no mistake though: we care less about those consequences than we care about what's right and what's good for the Internet.) Other network citizens may refuse to accept traffic from an abusive source (whether that source be a single customer or the entire ISP). As a responsible ISP, we accept abuse reports from others on the Internet and do our best to track down and correct the source of abuse.

We very rarely have a customer who is truly and deliberately abusive: in fact one of the reasons people use MV is that we are very concerned with the integrity of the Internet, and that we have policies clearly designed to deal specifically with abuse. However we do from time to time have customers who are indirectly and unknowingly abetting SPAM or other sorts of other bad things. As time goes by, there are more and more viruses and worms designed to infect your systems and turn them into an agent of spam or an attack on the net. It becomes more and more and important for everyone connected to the Internet to make sure their systems are not used in this way.

In other words, we do recommend that you take the protection of the rest of the Internet seriously. Some things you can think about:

General packet filters.: Install a packet filter or learn about the filtering capabilities built into your system. Let in or out of your system only those packet types that you use, or packets that belong to sessions that you initiated. Systems that are always connected to the Internet (such as those on a DSL connection) are particularly vulnerable, and there's good reason to consider making some level of firewalling mandatory for such sites.
SMTP (port 25) filtering: (This is a special case of packet filtering). SMTP is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, used to exchange email between computers on the Internet. Most of you send email by having your email program deliver your message to MV's mail server, which then sends it on to its final destination. Very few users have any reason to make an SMTP connection directly to that final destination; in fact a lot of SPAM is sent by systems that are infected with worms that make those kinds of connections. Use a packet filter to allow port 25 traffic only to our mail servers, and block the rest. Some ISPs block port 25 traffic from all subscribers: we would prefer not to do that.
Anti-virus protection.: If your system is infected by a virus or a worm, it is almost certainly going to be used to attack other systems on the net. Use anti-virus software, particularly if you are using a system or utilities that are known to be vulnerable to such things. Similarly, make sure you apply the latest security patches from your software vendors. Many viruses and worms propagate not because the security problems haven't been solved, but because system owners haven't applied the solutions.
Anti-virus thinking: Don't do things that bring viruses and worms onto your computer. The easiest way to get your computer infected is to run a program that hasn't been inspected or is otherwise of unknown quality. Don't run strange programs-- it doesn't matter who gives it to you. Don't click on email attachments that cause programs to run. Don't click on anything in a spam message: there's no upside to it.
Watch for suspicious traffic.: When your system is being used for Internet abuse, it's going to be sending out traffic. If your dialup connection is being used to send things you don't know about, your Internet access is going to seem slower to you than it should. One thing you can do is install a data rate monitor such as netpersec, and check the outbound data rate from time to time. If your computer is sending out bits for no apparent reason, you might suspect something is wrong.

We mentioned some ISPs blocking port 25 access: while we don't plan on that, we do block certain NETBIOS ports (which shouldn't be used over the Internet at all). We may develop other policies and procedures, including adopting certain abuse detection techniques, scanning for infections, applying penalties for repeated abuse, and deploying ways to help detect and block virus and worm attacks.

New Rates Pages and Rates

We have updated our rates and services pages somewhat-- not so much a redesign as a reorganization. On our main rates and services page, you will now see a complete menu, making it a a little easier to see our product list and representative rates at a glance. Most of the individual product pages have been made more consistent and (we hope) easier to follow. And, there have been a few items added, and some rates reduced.

DSL/V users may have noticed that the standard entry service is 1.5Mbps/128Kbps (up from 768Kbps/128Kbps). Your actual connection rate will vary depending on how far you are from the central office DSL equipment, but you can get up to this service rate for the entry price. Some DSL/C rates and T1 prices have been reduced as well: you should see this on your latest invoice.

Subnets justifications

Note: if you have a subnet from MV, this is for you.

Among the things we offer is a routable subnet that can be used with certain kinds of accounts. Our policy is to require that the need for all subnets issued be justified by the end user. This policy derives from ARIN, the agency from which we get our allocations. We have regrettably been lax at collecting these documents, so we will begin contacting customers in order to get the proper justification agreements. If you'd like to get the jump on this, please feel free to fill out the form and FAX or mail it to us. You can find the form here: http://www.mv.com/mv/enh/ras/subjust.shtml

Interesting Link(s)

Here is a corner of our newsletter where we mention one or more sites that we have run across (via our wanderings or in newsletters we receive or in other places) that are interesting to us. Items here do not necessarily have anything to do with us (and probably do not), nor do they necessarily have anything to do with our business or anything else we do. (It should go without saying that we make no representation about anything contained on those web sites.)

Powers of 10: This site (at http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html ) shows a powers-of-10 progression from a galactic scale down to subatomic sizes (or the reverse). It's quite a trip.

Your feedback?

Do you have feedback on this newsletter (or past or future newsletters)? If so, please either:

Go here to fill out our simple feedback form, or;
Send us email at mv-feedback (on our domain, mv.com).

Edit History

20031217: posted

20031219: add some Internet news sources.