Wed, 19 Oct 2005

Bruce Schneier talks cyber law

Usually I'm with Mr. Schneier 100%, but in this case, well, I don't know. He uses the analogy of a river:

It’s about externalities – like a chemical company polluting a river – they don’t live downstream and they don’t care what happens. You need regulation to make it bad business for them not to care. You need to raise the cost of doing it wrong.

But generally speaking, it's not the ISP that's injecting the "pollutants" into the network stream - it's third parties. Blaming the ISP in this case would be like blaming everyone who has a home on the riverbank for every bit of waste oil that floats by ...

To carry on with this analogy, these third parties usually dump their pollution by parking their chemical trucks on a section of network riverbank owned by an ISP - but do we hold landowners responsible when this happens in the real world, with real chemicals? No, we consider the landowners to be victims of criminal trespass ... why should entities in the virtual world be held to a different standard?

An ISP can act much like a water treatment plant, in that it is possible for them to "clean" most of the pollutants out of the water flowing by. But this always comes at an extra cost in the real world, and is why such "clean pipes" are added value in the virtual, network world as well. It takes real effort to remove polluting chemicals or Trojan horses.

Market forces will drive some ISP's to offer pollution removal as part of their sales offerings, while others just give you access to the river - note the Earthlink and AOL offerings for "virus free surfing". Again, this is as it should be. But to blame the ISP when a virus streams past them, or a new Trojan goes undetected by their scanning software, seems to me to be counter-productive, and a virtual form of blaming a victim.

ISPs must be made liable for viruses and other bad network traffic, Bruce Schneier, security guru and founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, told The Register yesterday.

(link) [The Register]

/Technology | 2 writebacks | permanent link

On 10/19/2005 14:29:59
Starlight Bunnybutt wrote

On 10/19/2005 14:41:18
Dave H wrote

Dialup..

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time