<IANAL> The blocking issue is BS. Make the customers... all customers, dialup AND dedicated... sign something that says that they will agree to the AUP and Terms of Service, and specify that traffic will be filtered for security reasons. </IANAL> "Eric A. Hall" wrote:
- 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 ehall@ehsco.com +1-650-685-0557 http://www.ehsco.com
-- North Shore Technologies, Cleveland, OH http://NorthShoreTechnologies.net Steve Sobol, President, Chief Website Architect and Janitor sjsobol@NorthShoreTechnologies.net - 888.480.4NET - 216.619.2NET