"Default" Internet Service

Sun Jun 13 23:02:09 UTC 2004

Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

>On Sat, 12 Jun 2004, John Curran wrote:
>
>  
>
>>The real challenge here is that the "default" Internet service is
>>wide-open Internet Protocol, w/o any safeties or controls.   This
>>made a lot of sense when the Internet was a few hundred sites,
>>but is showing real scaling problems today (spam, major viruses,
>>etc.)
>>
>>One could imagine changing the paradigm (never easy) so that
>>the normal Internet service was proxied for common applications
>>and NAT'ed for everything else...  This wouldn't eliminate all the
>>problems, but would dramatically cut down the incident rate.
>>    
>>
>
>This sounds like a fantastic idea, for instance: How much direct IP does
>joe-average Internet user really require? Do they require anything more
>than imap(s)/pop(s)/smtp(+tls) and dns/http/https ? I suppose they also
>need:
>1) internet gaming
>2) voip
>3) kazaa/p2p-app(s)-of-choice
>4) IM
>
>Actually I'm sure there are quite a few things they need, things which
>require either very smart NAT/Proxy devices or open access. The filtering
>of IP on the broad scale will hamper creativity and innovation. I'm fairly
>certain this was not what we want in the long term, is it?
>  
>
I acutally suggested something like this at the recent AusCERT 2004 
conference...  It's not such a bad idea....

The real question being "why are we giving mum's and dad's who sign up 
to the internet, and know nothing about either the Internet or 
computers, full unrestricted incoming and outgoing access...?"  ... 
answer because the more bandwidth they use the more the ISP earns... so 
the ISPs don't care (in some cases) if the mum's and dad's get trojaned, 
because it's all money.

My suggestion to the AusCERT delegates was to introduce a new default 
service which has very limited access, and if people ask for more, give 
them the access after they have read through various 'educational' 
pages....  Perhaps a simple online quiz at the end -just 3-5 questions 
with the answers being very clearly explained in the previous pages - 
just to show the people have actually read the pages, rather than 
skipped to the end and hit 'I accept'.

I also suggested that if ISPs have the technology perhaps a simple IP 
pools method of allocating the users IP, where they could turn on and 
turn off access to certain protocols - eg: have a pool for P2P users, a 
pool for VOIP etc...

/ Mat