On Jun 30, 2008, at 12:54 PM, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:55:53 EDT, "Tuc at T-B-O-H.NET" said:
220 Sending HELO/EHLO constitutes acceptance of this agreement
Even in a UCITA state that has onerous rules regarding shrink- wrapped EULA terms, I think you'd have a very hard time getting a court to enforce an alleged contract based on this. And it's different from the usual suggestion to put "all activity may be monitored" in your telnet/ssh login banners, because there's an expectation that the human will look at a login banner when they login, but there's no expectation that an SMTP server will look at the 220 banner any further than checking the first digit is a '2' (go read the section on SMTP reply codes in RFC2821).
Feel free to cite any relevant case law (in fact, even the case law on login banners read by humans is a tad skimpy - in most cases, it does nothing for intruders, but it protects you from your own users complaining their privacy was violated)...
I have found the biggest advantage of banners to be the fact that you learn to recognize your own devices *before* typing your password... It you *always* have a banner on *all* of your devices, you quickly learn to expect them... For example: ssh router1.example.net ************************************************************** * This device belongs to example.net. Don't login if you * are not supposed to be here... Blah blah blah. * <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> ************************************************************* wkumari@router1.example.net's password: versus: ssh router1.exsmple.net wkumari@router1.exsmple.net's password: Having a cute, customized banner (not the default from the standard security templates) helps with this... W -- If the bad guys have copies of your MD5 passwords, then you have way bigger problems than the bad guys having copies of your MD5 passwords. -- Richard A Steenbergen