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Re: Points on your Internet driver's license (was RE: Even you can be

  • From: Adrian Chadd
  • Date: Sun Jun 13 12:15:20 2004

On Sun, Jun 13, 2004, Adi Linden wrote:

> The reason this isn't economical today is because ISP lack any 
> responsiblity. It is cheaper for an ISP to buy more bandwidth and pass the 
> worms and viruses customers PCs spew to the internet than it is to deal 
> with the problem. Seriously, if I send an ISP reasonable proof that a 
> broadband customer hits my mailserver with thousands of emails an hour I 
> should be able to expect an immediate response. Not hours, days or weeks, 
> minutes and the originating account should be shut down. If this doesn't 
> happen I should be able to go to the upstream of the ISP, present my 
> case, and have connectivity to the ISP suspended. 

Then, start an ISP, charge extra for that kind of maintainence and compete
in the marketplace. See how it works out. I wish you the best of luck,
I really do.

Secondly, I WANT my ISP to require more than just some third party saying
"holy crap, someone's spitting out crap at me. Suspend!". Obviously you've
not been handed Norton Personal firewall logs which CONCLUSIVELY PROVE,
as far as the user is concerned, that MY SQUID reverse proxy server is
spewing out INVALID TCP FLAGS. Not that they could possibly comprehend
what the hell Invalid TCP flags are with the help Norton gives.
I've seen ISPs get "friendly" emails from people who say that they've been
hacked by ${FOO}, received nasty email from ${FOO}, all kinds of crazy
stuff. I'd hate to have my internet connection disabled every week
because some random person decides I'm doing something illegal.

I can understand your point of you. Personally, I'd love it if internet
access was a simple, secure, managed commodity. But it isn't. There are
far, far too many factors involved which you just Don't Get with
water or electricity networks. Specifically, the things you hook up to
your electricity or water network are government controlled with
government guidelines. There are strict penalties for those who break
the rules and there are licences for those who work on them.
I don't see any of this with the internet. You can hook Anything you want
up to an internet connection and have it work if it has a relatively
recent (1990?) TCP/IP stack. There's no _specific_ guidelines on what
can and can't be connected. The ISP has _no_ legal basis in a lot of
cases for terminating accounts when "we" (being the people making noise
on this list) would hope they would. If they do, they possibly expose
themselves legally. Can you imagine the SOHO owner who screams because
he's lost revenue because you shut down his internet connection for a worm?
Even if you have a "bullet proof AUP" you may still end up having to
deal with lawyers and possibly some court time.

So, please explain again, why should an ISP get involved right now?


$AUD0.02.



Adrian

-- 
Adrian Chadd			I'm only a fanboy if
<[email protected]>	    I emailed Wesley Crusher.