[11564] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Internet abuse and firewalls
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert G. Moskowitz)
Fri Apr 8 09:51:47 1994
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 94 06:39 EST
From: "Robert G. Moskowitz" <0003858921@mcimail.com>
To: com priv <com-priv@psi.com>
Gregers Bilse said:
>Go ahead and abuse the Internet, and you'll soon see everybody
>closing their doors, all around. From a purely technical point of
>view, this is happening already: more and more open sites are
>putting themselves behind firewalls, because of attacks by hackers.
As a corporate creature, I strongly disagree with you! Firewalls are the
only way my auditors will allow me to connect to the INTERNET and that is
how it should be.
Forget the random Hacker. Forget even the Vandal that wants to do nothing
but destroy.
The issue is corporate ideas and information. These are proprietary and
highly desired by many other corporations. Corporate espionage is BIG
business. Not just anyone is allowed into our buildings, and likewise not
just anyone is allowed into our networks.
The firewall makes it possible for me to offer INTERNET access to my
colleagues and will eventually allow me to offer to you information about
myself.
An example of the latter that I am fighting for: The 1991 Clean Air Act
requires all automotives to make publicly available all information about
the design of their cars that effect air quality in SGML format by the 1995
model year. The current plan is that tapes will be delivered on a regular
basis to an industry group that would then have to distribute the info to
any requester. I have pointed out that we can meet our obligation by
putting it up on an anon FTP server... But we don't want ANY of our
competitors to get anywhere close to the systems that did the research that
produced those documents!
Bob Moskowitz
Chrysler Corp
