Re: Killing Napster and beyond...

[Darren Reed <darrenr () reed wattle id au>]

In some email I received from Brad Van Orden, sie wrote:
> Vern Paxson wrote:
> > > Technology should not be used to manage people's behavior.
> >
> > Um, so why do we bother with firewalls?
>
> Firewalls are to protect you from those Bozos that are not under your control.

That's a rather limited way of looking at them.  How about this for a
high level definition of firewall:

firewall: means for enforcing a policy of operation between two networks.

Note: I don't say security policy.

As for technology and people behaving bad...the uselessness of attempting
to do this is best embodied by the constant struggle that is in place on
the various large IRC chat networks between the people who run them and
those who think DDoS, etc, is fun.  You can't use technology to solve social
problems otherwise we'd have ridden ourselves of politicians and lawyers
already ;-)

But solving a problem is different to managing it...and I'd argue that
technology can be used to limit people's behavour (which is what the
current range of firewall products do) but I think "manage" is the
wrong word to use here, short of chip implants.

Darren

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