Schneier: ISPs should bear security burden

Thu Apr 28 18:03:14 UTC 2005

James Baldwin wrote:
> 
> Again, this is a poor analogy. I am not penalizing customers who act 
> responsibly. There is no direct correlation between users who are 
> responsible and users who require unfiltered internet access. There are 
> millions of subscribers who are responsible using filtered internet 
> connectivity and they are not penalized for it. In fact, they are 
> rewarded as they are paying a lower price point for this adequate and 
> restricted service.
> 
> Please, stop making the assumption that all responsible users require 
> unfiltered internet access.
> ---
> James Baldwin
> hkp://pgp.mit.edu/[email protected]
> "Syntatic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon."

Well said. I also want to point out that, I believe several people 
discussing this thread are confusing ISP's who just provide Internet 
Services direct to end users, with transit providers who are soley 
providing transit to other ISP's.

In my own opinion, I would not expect a transit provider to filter 
anything other than my BGP announcements. However, I would expect my ISP 
to filter a possible worm infection port(s), as it would completely 
saturate my lowly-end-user datapipe if they did not, making network 
access worthless, even if my host was secure. Ofcourse, I would also, 
not expect to pay a higher fee for this filtering.

Additionally, I am curious why any time a technical issue comes up on 
NANOG (or any other operator list), people resort to terrible analogies 
that have little to do with the actual content of the discussion?

---
Andy