I’m really not certain what they can do about it short of providing free spyware removal tools and maybe sending out the odd paper newsletter to their customers (since the electronic one would just be lost in a sea of spam, ironically). If they sent a tech to everyone’s house once a month there’d be screams of privacy, convenience, and of course it’d cost a ton.
If they banned Windows, it’d be just as bad. If they forced you to use Windows and scanned for compliant systems, their customers would (rightly) scream bloody murder. All that stuff works differently and has different vulnerabilities. Customers have Linux, Windows, MacOSX, and obscure hardware devices. Part of the problem, though, is that most ISPs understand that you’re going to connect almost anything to their network. At least AOL is starting to include virus scanners and such tools built into their software packages. Some ISPs will block traffic from known worms/viruses in their routers, but that’s about all they seem willing to do. After all, many Windows users are still too helpless to look after their own machines properly (obviously) and it seems like their ISPs really couldn’t care less about it. I’m not trying to deflect blame from Microsoft for their shortcomings at all here, but I just wonder if more people should be directing their anger at ISPs instead to make them take more responsibility for what goes on in their own network domains and affects everyone else on the internet.
I think a lot of that process could be pretty much automated without undue effort and these basic defenses should be provided, perhaps even mandatory, to any home user who buys internet access. Most ISPs now provide spam filtering for email but they could also enforce all home-user clients to have some sort of firewall, anti-spyware and anti-virus installed before they are even permitted to connect to the internet at large so that they aren’t a menace to the rest of us. But it is the ISPs who are allowing all of those boxes to be connected to the internet in the first place and I think they could do a lot more to educate and equip hapless end-users whom they are selling services to. than they currently are.įor the great masses of compromised machines connected to the internet causing everyone grief, Microsoft gets bashed constantly for not doing enough. It just occurred to me that all of the big internet carriers (telecoms and ISPs) should maybe be making a bigger effort to protect the internet from spyware, zombie pc’s, viruses, etc.
0 kommentar(er)
