RE: Killing Napster and beyond...

[Henry Sieff <hsieff () orthodon com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brad Van Orden [mailto:Brad.VanOrden () navius com]
> Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2000 6:30 AM
> To: firewall-wizards () nfr com
> Subject: Re: [fw-wiz] Killing Napster and beyond...
>
>
> "R. DuFresne" wrote:
> > folks serious about security are concerned, as well as 
> those trying to use
> > their bandwidth for work over play.  Then again, I work for a
major
> > provider that does some big time maintainance for some very large
> > companies, and they are not only willing to turn their 
> firewalls into
> > glorified routers passing some of the nonsense traffic,

[SNIP]

> Technology should not be used to manage people's behavior.

What is a firewall if not an application of technology to the problem
of how to manage (or at least, mitigate the effects of) people's
behavior? A program like Napster, indeed anything which makes an
IP-based server out of a workstation, has to be avoided and restricted
or else you may as well not restrict anything going in and out of your
network. I don't allow my users to run FTP servers, and I enforce this
throught technology, or rather, by not opening the ports they'd need
direct to the inside.

I'm certainly not going to treat Napster any differently. When people
in my company first dl'd and set it up, they were unable to connect to
any napster servers out there, and I kept it like that. If they get
clever, and figure out alternative ways to connect, I'll treat it as
an attempt to circumvent our perimeter.

Of course, there are alternative ways of looking at this; you may
decide that security is not as important to you or your organization,
or that you don't mind having to monitor the implications of users
running their own file sharing servers. But then, why bother with the
hassle and expense of maintaining a firewall at all; the only point of
a firewall is to regulate via technology the rules you have laid out
in policy.

My $.02, unadjusted for any inflation.

Henry Sieff

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