the neverending battle

OK, I’ll confess. We use Satyam Infoway’s (NYSE: SAY; Nasdaq: SIFY) Sify broadband service. Never mind that the local cable provider strung our lines through the neighborhood trees, bushes and streetlights like Spiderman on a bender, so that every time it rains we lose our connection. Never mind that an unknown rival from a competing service keeps climbing the tree on the corner and cutting our cable (“Aap ko yaad hai jis din hum us ped ke neeche mile the?” the cable guy told Shailaja with filmi sincerity. “Wahin par koi roze aakey wire cut karta hai.”). Never mind that the idiots connect us all through a giant LAN so I can see everybody’s machine in my “network neighborhood” and print out documents and save files all over town if I wish. The real trouble is the spammers.

Actually, they’re spam relayers, I guess. I see them on my firewall screen, requesting http:// from our server, every day. We’re talking about thousands of hits an hour. They used up most of the 2 gigabytes of traffic we bought in our first package before I started consigning the IP addresses they’re using to “black holes.” Don’t get me wrong: I take inordinate pleasure in logging into my firewall, checking the latest addresses they’re using, and typing them into the ban list. But this IS a US-listed company we’re talking about, isn’t it? Shouldn’t they have SOME concept of security—and I don’t mean a chowkidar standing under the tree to catch the guy with the wirecutters.