geoincidents@nls.net ("Geoincidents") writes:
refundable after one year if there are no further incidents. then offer to remotely manage their host ("give me your root passwords, trust me!") for an annual fee of $(0.75*N). if the initial value of N were $500, you might be able to get the people who need this service to pay for it. it's worth a try?
Paul, why don't you make this offer to all your relatives? Don't want the job? NEITHER DO WE!! ... We are ISP's, we got into this business because we know how to network not how to patch every OS on the planet. ...
if you're not set up to offer this then don't. but sean's employer already has the trucks and the phonebanks, and they might be able to monetize a solution to this problem, and they should be encouraged to try it.
It's bad enough we have to filter email or customers go running off to another ISP but to provide security and deal with patching and then on top of that explain to parents how their 14 year old compromised their machine by running something she downloaded off the web so they really shouldn't sue us because someone got their CC and bank account numbers?
as an ISP who knows how to network, the only thing i request of you is that if your customer is spewing virus segments at me, you give me a way to prove that to you (that costs me less time and aggravation than blackholing you), and that once proven, you will revoke the account until you're sure that the infestation, and the process errors which led to it, are gone. (same as if they were spamming, or controlling a ddos botnet, or etc.) if you won't do that then you should not complain when folks blackhole your customers and otherwise treat you as a chemical polluter, like i treat sean's network. an isp has to take responsibility for the output from their network, and the ones who won't, are going to be treated by their victims as "bad internet neighborhoods". hopefully sean is ready to stop whining about that by this point in the thread. if not i can do another database extract for him. -- Paul Vixie