Re: A question for the group
- From: David Brown <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 10 Jul 2006 12:59:43 +0200
joseph2k wrote:
Ken Smith wrote:
In article <44ab6d79$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David Brown <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
A real firewall/router will cost about $30, and do a vastly better job of protecting your network or PC from trojans and other nasties.They don't protect you from trojans. Trojans are named after that Greek horse that the idiots in Troy downloaded to inside their firewall.
And your ISP should be able to virus-scan your emails for you - again,I want my ISP to keep its hands off my e-mails. We really don't want the status of ISPs to be changed. Today, very like the phone company, they are not responsible for what is said over their system. I want ISPs to keep this protection.
they will (should!) do a better job than a home system.As far as I know, there are no viruses for Apples. I think that this is in part because they are very well defended. The problem with the PC is that its software has a history that extends back to when "everything can be trusted". Microsoft has to make the new stuff work with the old software but somehow also make it protected against malware. This isn't an easy task even if it is given higher priority that animating that stupid paperclip.
I differ with your calls. I want to control just how much and exactly what
filtering they do, failing this i minimize what they do. My current bottom
line, some spam, some infected traffic gets in; very little legitimate
traffic gets blocked. Best of all my ISP implements learning algorithms to
see what i "rescue" and what i manually bounce: i make about two passes a
month manually. Of course a really good implementation would allow me to
use a SMTP client (suitable to a proper workstation) rather that a lowly
POP client (suitable to a thin terminal).
Make no mistake, the market is for foolish users on thin clients rather than
low grade admin class clients on workstations. The issue is not
computational power but the home computer administrators capabilities, they
just want it to work.
Just the same i want to make IP's and ISP's common carriers; nearly like the
way telephone is supposed to be. Net Neutrality is a Good Thing.
Actually, I don't think we are too different. I'd certainly prefer no filtering to too much filtering from the ISP - it is better to get spams and even virus emails than to have legitimate email blocked. Any spam checking in particular must be fully controlled by the user (even if it is carried out by the ISP's server) - presumably there are some people out there who think special offers for little blue pills are important legitimate emails. Viruses are a bit different - no one wants them, and false positives for virus checkers are orders of magnitude lower than for spam checkers. And while spams are harmless (merely annoying), viruses are dangerous.
ISPs should provide a proper firewall, individually controllable by each customer, providing the same sort of protection as hardware firewall/routers, or they should include a cheap device in their startup package.
It's vital that people are free to do as they will with their internet connection (Net Neutrality is a Good Thing), but for the sake of everyone, newbies should be better protected from themselves. Firewalls that default to denying all incoming traffic, but can be configured to enable ports as required, would be a good step.
.
- References:
- A question for the group
- From: smccaine
- Re: A question for the group
- From: Ken Smith
- Re: A question for the group
- From: Luhan
- Re: A question for the group
- From: David Brown
- Re: A question for the group
- From: Ken Smith
- Re: A question for the group
- From: joseph2k
- A question for the group
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