On Mon, 2004-02-02 at 03:22, Juha Saarinen wrote:
OTOH, customers on metered connections really should have some way of controlling the traffic, e.g. through a Web interface that allows you to set things at a central firewall. It shouldn't be that the only way to control traffic to your connection is to switch off the CPE.
Absolutely! I am about to finally sign up for adsl and plan to have a box (an old 133MHz pentium running OBSD) as a firewall and metering box to ensure that we don't get 'unexpected' bills. But how many people have the expertise to do this? I firmly believe that if ISPs are going to charge for 'excess' traffic on 'always on' connections then they are morally obliged to provide reasonable mechanisms to protect users from disaster. I have first hand knowledge of a small business who signed up to Jet Stream in the early days and got billed nearly $20K for their first monthly account because all the machines got compromised and turned in to Warez servers. I never did find out what Xtra did about the bill, my involvement was purely on the technical side. -- Russell Fulton /~\ The ASCII Network Security Officer \ / Ribbon Campaign The University of Auckland X Against HTML New Zealand / \ Email!