[AusNOG] Interception?

[Mark Newton]

On Fri, Jul 06, 2012 at 10:28:24AM +1000, Jake Anderson wrote:

 > People really have no concept at all about how the Internet works, 
 > actually if somebody had some kind of training package on that I'd be 
 > interested.
 > It has to start from the fundamentals, DNS, tcp/ip etc but in a way that 
 > its relevant to the end users, if they have an understanding of whats 
 > going on i feel I'd get less dumb questions.

"People really have no concept at all about how the phone network works.
...
It has to start from the fundamentals, IPND, SS7, etc but in a way that
it's relevant to the end users..."

No.  Users don't need to know that stuff.  It's our job to make it
transparent to them.

The issue here is applications doing things users don't expect:
A self-created problem.

Users don't expect that visiting google.com causes their browser
to deliver them a portal instead.  

By attempting to break that expectation, network operators who rely
on captive portals create a rod for their own back by giving users
an unexpected error message instead.

Making the network behave in confusing ways which befuddles users
and causes them to add costs by making support calls is something
you might choose to do to support your business model.

But if it doesn't work, or if users hate it and don't use it, or
if the cost of answering the phone for their support calls destroys
your profit margin, that's hardly a technology problem, is it?  It
just means you got your business model wrong.

Think about how payphones work.  Users don't dial their number
and then get randomly connected to some unexpected third party; 
they'd go apeshit if that happened!  They know they're going to
need to do "something" to make the call work before they even
start. Can you leverage that model and those expectations to
make what you're doing work?

  - mark