[Mimedefang] OS wars... [was Viruses: Bounce or Discard?]

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003, Stephen Smoogen wrote:

> Ways to get this sold to your audience.
>
> 1) You are offering them security by better blocking customers who are
> abusive of the general bandwidth.
> 2) Put it in as a general insurance cost on their bill. Keep a
> documented listing and as the costs of cleaning up this email escalates,
> increase the insurance cost.
> 3) If customers want unrestricted access put them on another VLAN and
> let them pay for it.

My insurance company doesn't charge extra if I have a dog.  They give me a
"no dog" discount if I don't have one.  That kind of game can work here
too.

An ISP can sell this by offering two rates:  The "normal" rate and a "safe
user discount".  Make the "normal" notibly higher than the safe user
rate, but the safe user discount has this .10USD/spew policy.

Gradually make the "normal" account more inconvenient:  All SMTP
redirected to ISP's mail hub, blocking of some dangerous attachments, etc.

Offer notification services with the safe-user account.  Safe user
customers can freely register their OSes with the ISP, and the ISP can
notify those customers about security patches.

Also allow "safe users" to specify an upper limit to the malware fines,
after which the access will simply be cut off.  So someone in the "safe
user" club could say, "shut me down if I accumulate more than $20 fines
for a month."  (some mechanism will be needed to allow them to connect to
get necessary fixes).

-j


-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                            http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
 Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice
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