[AusNOG] Telstra manipulating DNS to block botnets

[Rod Veith]

I don't like the idea of protecting customers from themselves. We are not a
nanny state and I don't want to live in one. People have to learn to take
responsibility for their own actions. We are all supposed to be adults or
adults supervising kids access. If people are too lazy to protect themselves
that is their problem. Too many times I've heard courts be lenient because
people say "I didn't know that could happen, I didn't understand what I was
doing, I was too drunk/drugged when I hit him that hard, but I was only
looking at my phone when I stepped in front of the car etc etc" and courts
actually lend some weight to their excuses.  

It seems that some in our industry want to extend the reasoning "people have
to be protected from themselves" to the internet. I clearly and
unequivocally reject this. If people expect they have rights, they need to
also accept the responsibilities that come with the rights.

I believe we and the Government have a duty to inform people of the risks
when connecting to the internet and how people can minimise risk, but not to
control what they access or what they do or don't do to protect themselves.

I can understand network operators taking action to protect the integrity
and uptime of their networks but that action must only be for that reason.
It must not be to protect customers from the customers own
actions/inactions.

My 4 cents.

Rod

-----Original Message-----
From: ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net
[mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Paul Brooks
Sent: Friday, 15 June 2012 2:01 PM
To: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Telstra manipulating DNS to block botnets

On 15/06/2012 12:56 PM, Martin - StudioCoast wrote:
>
>
> My view is there are numerous options available to an ISP to deal with 
> these sorts of issues without putting a sledgehammer to net neutrality.
>
> Contacting the customer for example....

Would be nice if contacting the customer was easy, but its not.
Apparently only around 1 customer in 7 reads their ISP-provided email
address, and most don't read a monthly invoice because of automatic direct
debit.
Plus we've taught them to ignore calls from call centres claiming 'Hi, I'm
from (large
ISP) and I'm here to help you, we've detected that your machine is infected
with a virus, let me step you through the steps to clean it" while
occasionally the call gets reported to the ACCC ScamWatch site.

Apart from sending a tech around to knock on the customer's door, contacting
the customer isn't always easy or automatable.

P.
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