On Sun, 5 Oct 2003, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
Kee Hinckley [05/10/03 00:57 -0400]:
Bringing this back to the more relevant topic. Is there something that ISPs could do to notify users and get in their face more without shutting off their connection? Perhaps a custom piece of
I have seen corporate and university networks that make every PC have PC Anywhere or its equivalent as part of the standard install, for activity to be monitored.
There are some differences between private networks and public networks. In a company, the company is the "owner" of the PCs and employees (in the US) have little expectation of privacy using company computers. On the public network, generally the customer owns the computer not the ISP. How far should an ISP go monitoring the activities of their customers? ISPs can and do notify customers by many methods such as popups, email, mail, phone calls, knocking on the door, etc. Notification doesn't seem to be the problem, but of the customer taking action. And even if the customer is willing, its difficult for them to tell if they have actually fixed their computers. Windows XP System Restore and anti-virus programs don't get along well. Booting Windows in "Safe Mode" requires dexterity. Most people don't have sniffers to check what their computers are transmitting. Sometimes it takes a non-expert several attempts to completely fix things. So from an ISPs point of view, is there a way for the ISP to quickly tell the customer if the particular computer is fixed without unduly intruding on the privacy of the customer? With home networks, there may be multiple computers behind a NAT/router/firewall. So a simple network scan doesn't always work.