In message <1075610074.2007.305.camel(a)localhost>, Steve Withers writes:
On Sun, 2004-02-01 at 15:11, Anaru Hartley wrote:
I kind of sense a "one track mind" approach to the issue at hand. There are plenty of alternatives, personally I don't think tightning the rope is going to help improve the Internet.
The point was that some people (Dean cited his Nana as an example) really don't want to deal with all the complexity of keeping their system patched against the security hole du jour -- they just want an appliance that will let them talk to their grandchildren and maybe check a few details on their latest group's meetings. A 21st century telephone. The suggestion was then made (in a later talk) that the "only" solution to the mass of people who just wanted an applicance and were unwilling/unable to deal with the "dangerous" place that is the modern Internet, was an Internet-Lite -- the Internet for n00bs. The major part of its architecture was, essentially, a bunch of application proxies at the ISP with everything else firewalled off. The aim of this was to (dramatically) reduce the pool of reachable, unpatched, systems on the 'net. The current batch of worms to install open relays would be immunised against pretty much immediately for two reasons (couldn't reach open relays once established, couldn't reach remote hosts to infect them).
True. All you need is one ISP who offers "real" Internet....and everyone would flock there. I know I would, if that was the choice.
Yes, but you're l33t Steve. You'd flock there. Most people here would flock there. Much as I don't want to see "the Internet" become a dumbed down IntaWeb clone, I recognise that's just me ("when I want to be wrapped in cotton wool, I know where to find it"). There's a whole bunch of people, probably the majority by an order of magnitude, for whom the Internet, Large As Life, is scary, and intruding on their ability to just do the things they want to (eg, their machine keeps getting infected). So The Internet for n00bs will probably happen eventually. I just hope it isn't done in such a way that the only way to join the Real Internet (tm) is to qualify for your own ASN or by building tunnels through increasingly inappropriate application level protocols. A "walled garden" (to use the Citylink description of CafeNet) would be more appropriate -- with a way out for those that can figure out the gate, and a rule that they don't get to complain (or get out again) if they get run over by the traffic outside. Ewen