On 8 Jun 2001, at 20:51, Paul D. Robertson wrote: > On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Young, Beth A. wrote: > > > Should we make home computer users attend a mandatory licensing class and > > teach them safe computing (getting a drivers license)? Maybe we should have > > a ticketing system and if they guilty of 3 network violations, they have to > > attend class again (the dreaded traffic review course). Or if all else > > fails, suspend their access to the network for a year? > > That's a very tempting thing. All of the professional certification > courses hope to eschew to be that driver's license-type thing. However, > the analogy is fairly apt, as the vehicle manufacturers need to produce > safer vehicles, the road builders and fixers need to do so well *and* > people need to drive responsibly. Each piece of that isn't predicated on > the others having already been done. Pinto, anyone? Explorer? Difference, of course, being that unsafe computers -- in the DDoS case which is our focus at the moment -- tend to do their damage to third parties and not to the owners/operators. [BTW, I don't think "eschew" is the right word here. "Aspire", perhaps?] > > Now, how do you do that world wide? It always come down to that final > > question....How do you get world buy in? > > Peer pressure mostly. Certainly the whole world has bought in to that for > BGP advertisements, DNS, and IP addressing, so it's neither without > precedent nor terribly onerous to expect. On the other hand, China, which makes a lot of noise about agressively content-filtering all Internet traffic within/across their borders, can't seem to get email admins to block relaying on their machines.... I *hope* you're right. David Gillett - [To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@lists.gnac.net with "unsubscribe firewalls" in the body of the message.]