On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Tuc at T-B-O-H.NET wrote:
I would imagine that if we're talking about "unsophisticated" users, the majority of them have no idea what IRC is anyway -- most of them are using AIM, or Yahoo! IM, or....
Quite true. I do know of a small fraction, however, that when Yahoo stopped supporting the chats for their groups, that went over to a Java IRC client. Granted, they still don't know that its IRC, but they'll still end up running into something totally unexplained.
and the sympton TODAY is 'irc', but in reality if cox spoke up I'd bet they are doing this with much more than just this one irc server (or set of irc servers)... So, to back this up and get off the original complaint, if a service provider can protect a large portion of their customer base with some decent intelligence gathering and security policy implementation is that a good thing? keeping in mind that in this implementation users who know enough and are willing to forgoe that 'protection' (for some value of protection) can certainly circumvent/avoid it. It's perfectly plausible that cox implemented some trend-micro-like (or maybe trend micro actual) device to do this work for them... just to pick on one vendor of solutions in this space. -Chris