Ewen McNeill wrote:
FWIW, Dean's talk wasn't solely about people spoiling the net for newbies (although there's a lot of that too), but also that they're inadvertantly doing dumb things because it's not obvious that it's dumb and it's not obvious that there's a better way to do it. (For instance consider a newbie mailing out a 10MB attachement to the whole company when they could have just sent a link.)
Sigh, don't remind me...
My point was that you can get 75% of the immediate benefit of a "newbie applicance network" right now simply by firewalling customer connections at the edge -- and that if you do, please provide an opt-out mechanism. (I'd really prefer that it wasn't necessary to buy, say, a E1 link (wholesale connectivity) in order to get reasonably unfiltered access. And tunnelling everywhere sucks.)
Yes, but I have my doubts as to how such a "NewbieNet" would be implemented in a profit-driven environment. I would expect the "opt-out" unfiltered 'Net would cost more and be packaged as a "business class service" or similar. All I'm saying is, be careful what you ask for, because you may get it. 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.
That said, short of a rigorous punishment technique,[0] rigorously applied, I don't think we're going to get all of those that spoil the 'net.
Ewen
[0] Death. Or perhaps transportation to the colonies. I hear Mars isn't too crowded this time of year.
What's wrong with Australia? Oh hang on, it's not a colony anymore... -- Juha