Points on your Internet driver's license

Sun Jun 13 19:55:52 UTC 2004

At 12:15 PM -0700 6/13/04, Randy Bush wrote:
>
>tell us, john, when you were at xo and gt&e, how much did you
>educate your users as to to the perils of running open; how
>much education and notification did you give them about
>applying security patches; ...? 

Reasonable question.... business customers were indeed asked at
installation what they were connecting for mail and web servers,
told that a firewall was a good idea and pointing at both online
and reference books that could get.  I don't know what consumer
DSL got, but I imagine it was a lot less.   In the pre-GTE-I (i.e. BBN)
days, we actually went on-site to help customers with their mail
relay and local routing configurations.

For consumer connections, this just doesn't scale.  The consumer
is going to acknowledge/clickthru/sign whatever disclaimer you
put in front of them in order to get their high speed access.  And
as much as ISPs might want to fix the problem, they're not going
to require a networking quiz before taking the order.

>how is the user going know the brokenness you net vigilantes
>propose to impose from the brokenness the other miscreants
>impose? 

Nicely put.    How about: if their mail and web access works, then
its the fault of the net vigilantes and filtered Internet service.   If
their machine is running 100% on the CPU and rebooting at random
after just a few minutes online, then it's those other miscreants...

/John