On 2/21/06, Bill Nash <billn@odyssey.billn.net> wrote:
Big deal. You're talking about volume licensing at that point, and offering vendors an opportunity to compete to get on every desktop in your customer base. That's a big stick to negotiate with, especially if you're an Earthlink or AOL.
Agreed. And with that, the little guys go away.
Yeah, the privacy zealots, of which I'm one, don't have much of a leg to stand on, since as the direct service provider, you'd be directly within AUP/Contractually provided rights to do so, under that particular service model. They can't ding you for being active in your *response* to complaints about malicious activity sourced from your network, and taking the time to verify it. So long as you're keeping their personal information out of the hands of others, they don't have much to bitch about.
Agreed, but without publishing the exact procedures, protocols, etc, they can always complain that something might be happening.. Don't get me wrong, I'm just as much for privacy as most of the "zealots", but there is a point at which there has to be an acceptable risk.
The ISPs win because they've got ready means to tie complaints directly back to an active customer, AND verify the complaint. Consumers win because they've got cheap anti-virus they still don't have to do anything about. The internet wins because ISPs are sharing non-personally identifying information about naughty behaviour and maybe increasing the mean TTL for new Windows machines. In the long term, privacy advocates win because networks have implemented active responses to attacks that routinely lead to identity theft.
I wish everyone had this view. Fixing, or at least patching, this problem would help out a lot in the long run. But there's a lot to be done to handle it. An ISP can deal with it themselves or, more often than not, can ignore it. As I was saying before, if there were some sort of standards body that set forth a best practices guide of some sort, that might go a long way. Education for the end-user is key here too. Educate them to understand what precautions are in place at the ISP level, and what they can do to protect themselves. I think it's gotten better in recent years, despite the increase in viral activity. I think the increase is due to better propogation techniques rather then hordes of dumb users.
The biggest hole I see in this concept is home routers that do NAT (linksys, linux boxes, etc). While capable of PPPOE, you can't quite mandate the A/V clients. You still have the option of doing packet inspection, which is still better than nothing.
Hrm.. Unless some sort of shim was required on the end-user computer.. something transparent that merely identified itself in the background to the central authority and verified signatures and the like..
- billn
-- Jason 'XenoPhage' Frisvold XenoPhage0@gmail.com