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Comment by oaiey | Hacker News Reader

I do not know what is more critical: the risk of censorship or stand by while hospitals, banking, nuclear power plants and other systems become compromised and go down with people dying because of it. These decision makers not only have powers but also have a responsibility

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Have you ever seen a hospital, a bank, a power plan to expose telnetd to the public internet in the last 20 years? It should be extremely rare and should be addressed by company’s IT not by ISPs.

Probably Tier 1 providers have some insight on this.

These are the institutions I would most expect to do that.

Well, maybe not a bank.

This feels more akin to discovering an alarming weakness in the concrete used to build those hospitals, banks and nuclear power plants – and society responding by grounding all flights to make sure people can't get to, and thus overstress, the floors of those hospitals, banks and nuclear power plants.

You feel it's similar because having access to port 23 is similarly life critical as having access to an hospital? Or is it because like with ports, when people can't flight to an hospital, they have 65000 other alternative options?

All I'm saying is that the only right place to fix this is at the hospital. Not at the roads leading to it.

That's my question. Why is there infrastructure that has open access to port 23 on the Internet. That shouldn't be a problem that the service provider has to solve, but it should absolutely be illegal for whomever is in charge of managing the service or providing equipment to the people managing the service. That is like selling a car without seatbelts.

We are beyond the point where not putting infrastructure equipment behind a firewall should result in a fine. It's beyond the point that this is negligence.

There again, I think the comparison fails.

Fixing the hospital: single place to work on, easier

Blocking all the roads/flights: everywhere, harder

Fixing all the telnet: everywhere, harder/impossible

Blocking port 23 on an infra provider: single place, easier

It makes sense to me to favor the realistic solution that actually works vs the unrealistic one which is guaranteed not fix the issue, especially when it's much easier to implement

I run telnetd on 2323 because I don't want hackers to find it.

The hospital-plural-s: many places.

Roads: a lot more places than that.

The core of the analogy holds.

In the UK we have in fact discovered an alarming weakness in the concrete used to build schools, hospitals and other public building (in one case, the roof of a primary school collapsed without warning). The response was basically "Everybody out now".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_Kingdom_reinforced...

https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/raac-crisis...

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/aug/31/what-is-ra...

nah, that's like seeing an open gate to nuclear tank - a thing easily fixed within few minutes - and responding to it by removing every road in existence that can bear cars

Censorship is one of these words that get slapped on anything.

Filtering one port is not censorship. Not even close.

> censorship, the suppression or removal of writing, artistic work, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security

It is not the responsibility of the Tier 1 or the ISP to configure your server securely, it is their responsibility to deliver the message. Therefore it is an overreach to block it because you might be insecure. What is next. They block the traffic to your website because you run PHP?

Similar to how the mailman is obligated to deliver your letter at address 13 even though he personally might be very superstitious and believe by delivering the mail to that address bad things will happen.

I don't agree with your argument, but I don't want to debate that.

But let's say I agree: That still is not censorship.

If that really affects them it's better to take them offline.

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