NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Traffic shaping law proposed in US
Actually, it's not quite so simple. I have been working in the Information Security industry for quite some time now. Most external security assessments involve sending many probes and sometimes real attacks over the internet. When a client's ISP blocks an attack, it is generally a good thing. The hole is closed from any attacker's perspective. However when an auditor's ISP blocks this traffic, it diminishes their ability to conduct their service. Quite a few of these clients will actually take the time to sniff and hand analyze the attack traffic you send their way. At one point we had a client that called us out for missing some things. Our ISP had been blocking parts of our audit traffic for "security reasons." This wasn't mentioned in our TOS anywhere, we had to find out from an angry customer. In the end we had to break that contract and move no another ISP. Not to mention apologize and re-audit some of the customers. The justification for ISPs automatically filtering for security reasons is that the users are ignorant. That is obviously a flawed justification in many situations. In the very least, any filtering done by an ISP should have the option of being enabled/disabled on a user per user basis and all filtering policy should be disclosed in detail. --Sean Bill S wrote: > > > On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 12:22 PM, Brett Glass <nnsquad@brettglass.com > <mailto:nnsquad@brettglass.com>> wrote: > > At 03:54 PM 3/17/2008, Phil Karn wrote: > > >carriers are banned from any and all discrimination on the basis > of traffic > >content, including port numbers. > > In other words, we would have to let worms like the infamous "SQL > Slammer" > worm though. And we'd have to let spambots spam. > > --Brett Glass > > > I doubt anyone here would seriously consider blocking bona fide > security threats a violation of NN principles. We don't want spam, > harvesters, phishing or trojans any more than you do.The problem is > that with those using typical traffic shaping or port blocking > techniques, they are casting with too wide a net. And as a result, > they catch dolphins, turtles, sharks and all manner of things in > addition to the intended target. Let agree on this and move on. > > Bill > >