[AusNOG] Oh this is a good laugh.

[Terry Manderson]

On 22/06/2010, at 3:05 PM, Dobbins, Roland wrote:

> 
> Education of the end-user has been definitively proven to be totally ineffective over the years - there's tons of 'education' out there, yet nobody seems to learn anything.  End-users aren't interested in being 'educated', heh. 

Mostly agree, to a point. Education can be fruitful if people make mistakes on the way to knowledge. I find the people who actually learn have been sufficiently stung by their own actions. For example your family and friends who invariably get a virus/trojan "and don't know how they got it", aka pr0n (since they also don't  know how to clear browser history/cache), and plead for assistance. Or perhaps the people who find a few thousand missing from their bank account.

Education is there, and can work its just a harder lesson.

> The only reasonable posture to adopt is to assume a 100%-hostile environment, and to design and build one's networks/systems/applications/services accordingly so as to be able to function in said toxic environment.
> 

Lovely ideal. But very few of the networks/systems/applications/services are built to function unmolested in the environment. It seems the various designers and architects are still working that out (ie learning). Personally I agree with you that that the only way to assess a node's attitude is by watching the packets from/to the node, and that leads to a walled garden approach. I'm personally aware of one or two AU isps that do a walled garden for various reasons. I'm aware of one .nl ISP that does this en masse for bot/viruses off their own back and their  customers love them for it.. but having a government try to mandate it... hrmmm.. not sure, and I'm still thinking on that.

Terry