Dutch ISPs to collaborate and take responsibility for bottedclients

Mon Oct 5 11:59:36 UTC 2009

On Sun, Oct 04, 2009 at 08:07:00PM -0400, Barton F Bruce wrote:
>> Exactly correct.  The number one priority, which trumps all others,
>> is making the abuse stop.  Yes, there are many other things that can
>> and should be done, but that's the first one.
>
> Stopping the abuse is fine, but cutting service to the point that a family
> using VOIP only for their phone service can't call 911 and several children
> burn to death could bring all sorts of undesirable regulation let alone the
> bad press and legal expenses.

First, this is fear-mongering.  By this argument, we should do nothing,
ever, because we cannot know that seconds after taking whatever action
we take, Something Terrible could happen.

Second, a compromised system no longer belongs to its putative user(s):
it's not under their control.  It's thus a huge reach to presume that
it will, whether "we" take any action or not, do what the people who
used to own it (and likely think they still do) expect it to.  In
other words, just as likely as the scenario you outline, is the scenario
where the VOIP call doesn't go through because the new owner of the
system would prefer that it spend its cycles and bandwidth sending spam.

---Rsk