[11567] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Internet abuse and firewalls
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John [Francis] Stracke)
Fri Apr 8 18:52:16 1994
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 1994 13:11:50 +0500
From: francis@avalle.insoft.com (John [Francis] Stracke)
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: "Robert G. Moskowitz"'s message of Fri, 8 Apr 94 06:39 EST <83940408113938/0003858921NA4EM@mcimail.com>
>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!
Right. The first reaction is "OK, put it on a host outside the
firewall." Problem: if you can't trust anything outside the firewall,
someone could corrupt that info, which might or might not mean you
weren't meeting the obligation, but could pretty definitely be bad for
your image. You'd have to cut a CD-ROM (or, better yet, a WORM) or
put it on a write-protected floppy or something. (The system can be
told to set up a file, or filesystem, as read-only; but that can be
corrupted, too.)
Think to come of it, this could be a valuable service (here's why I
posted back to com-priv instead of going private ;-): a company that
puts up stuff for anon ftp, on a server whose integrity they
guarantee. This service would, of course, be sold to anyone, not just
companies that are themselves on the Net. This would be a service
provided to the company who wants to distribute the stuff; the people
getting it would not (in this instance, anyway) pay for it.
For extra bonus points, redirect (for example) ftp.chrysler.com to
point to the third-party server. (Stupid DNS tricks?)
/===========================================================================\
|John (Francis) Stracke | My opinions are my own. |
|InSoft, Inc. |==================================================|
|Mechanicsburg, PA | "Genius, Brain! But what if the dragon eats us?" |
|francis@insoft.com | "That would alter our plans." |
\===========================================================================/
