North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: What would you tell the White House?

  • From: Eric A. Hall
  • Date: Mon Feb 14 03:11:34 2000

> - he will sue the ISP for every penny since he is working on a
> multi-million dollar deal and without email he will lose everything;

> Because if Best.net filtered at their end - they may be liable to a
> lawsuit from the user who had his access blocked.

There is another end on that very-sharp stick: the ISPs that allow their
users to do this crap -- esp. when they have been notified of the hack
attempts -- will most likely be sued for negligence in the near future.

The lawyers will get involved one way or another, and ISPs would do well
to choose sides beforehand: do you want to get sued by your users or by
Yahoo and eBay, who actually did lose millions and are looking for any
way to prevent this from happening again? Who will be more pissed, and
who will have the better lawyers: Joe Dialup's 16 year old kid who's
playing with the latest warez, or Yahoo's board of directors who's
trying to increae their multi-billion dollar market valuation?

In the long run, zero-tolerance policies are going to be the only thing
that solves the liability problems. Coincidentally, those policies will
also be what stops most of the attacks.

> I suspect we will only see more attacks and not to expect any
> solutions from ISPs in the near future.

I suspect that a few high-profile lawsuits would change that.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                            [email protected]
+1-650-685-0557                                    http://www.ehsco.com