Re: [PLUG] Article on 'cyberwarfare'

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 3:47 PM, Keith C. Perry
<kperry@daotechnologies.com> wrote:
>
> The internet would be as useful as a wet napkin if only a select number of people could host.  The fact that anyone can host their own site I see as a strength not a weakness.

Agree.  It isn't necessary from a security standpoint to regulate who
can host, though it seems likely that this is exactly the solution
most likely to be pushed for economic/political reasons.  I think that
from a security standpoint it is just as effective to regulate WHERE
you can host.

Again, going back to the physical world analogy:  Anybody in the world
can send anybody in the US a package.  If that package doesn't cross
the border, there tends to be fairly little interference, but the US
government has worked to ensure that you can't send a package to
anybody without identifying yourself somehow.  If the package does
cross the border then it is subject to inspection.  The result is
fairly secure.

>
> That guy in Moscow just needs to end up on enough FW policies.  Problem solved.  If anything we need a better way to
> report and aggregate activity- not just an email blacklist but a blacklist of all types of bad actors and their traffic.  I suspect
> that might even already exist.

That seems a bit analogous to getting rid of the police and just
reporting crimes and relying on everybody to just keep track of who
all the criminals are so as to not get too involved with them.

If you know some guy in Moscow sends out malware, then just arrest
him.  If the local government doesn't cooperate, then just exclude
them from the "Internet."  The result will of course be several
"internets" with only limited connectivity between them.

That's exactly how these kinds of problems get solved in any other
area of commerce.  Why should we treat data packets as being any
different?

But, I agree that this is unlikely to happen.  It seems like the more
likely solution is to just turn the internet into a big cable TV
system.  That would certainly make the lobbyists happier, and the
voters will probably go along with it once a few dozen more Sony-style
hacks occur.

--
Rich
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