Alan Cox wrote:
In the UK it is certainly the case you could sue an end user for
negligence if their system caused you problems and they were not
following reasonable standards of care. It does make a difference in the
sense that company lawyers standard "cover arse" list includes firewall,
anti-virus etc, but not really on end users.
The thing is when you buy a car it is possible to drive it dangerously,
it is possible to keep it in a dangerous state but as supplied the
defaults are safety focussed if you follow common sense, and even more so
if you read the owners manual.
If you buy a PC install an OS and run it in the default manner this is
less true. This is why I got default firewalling into Red Hat back when
the idea was still controversial, this is why Windows copied Linux on this
and on automated updates.
So who would be at fault if you bought a car before safety features
were added to the new models and didn't dispose of it and buy the new
version? I'd guess that's the situation with almost all compromised
computers. The end user/administrator trusted the distributor to
provide something safe and usable, but that turned out not to be the case.
just nuts. The idiots who provide electricity and an internet
connection to a bot or zombie need to get charged for the pain they
allow others to get hit with. They aren't victims; they're part of the
problem.
Usually they are both. Just like the owner of a dangerous car who trusted
a dodgy mechanic.
But, when they bought that dangerous car from a vendor with good faith
that it was designed correctly, how can you expect the owner to assume
responsibility?
I've always thought that we'd have a much different world today if Sun
had been held responsible for distributing the buggy sendmail that
permitted the original internet worm back in 1987 instead of pretending
that everyone on the internet would always be trustworthy. Instead we
set the stage for a vendor with no security considerations at all to
dump their wares on everyone's desktop with no reason to care about the
problems it would cause.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
