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by pfranz 3494 days ago
Ehh. I disagree with both Default Permit and Enumerating Badness--I think they have their place. If I run a club do I background check and whitelist every customer? Or to a blacklist the troublemakers? The problems cited in the article were reasonable decisions at the time, but years later grew into headaches when the use-cases changed.

Does their no Default Permit policy apply to network egress? Do I have to approve each and every application that wants to connect to the Internet? I think the leaving port 80 open because it was whitelisted is why so many things tunnel through port 80 instead of using other protocols and ports. Now how do you filter and whitelist traffic?

His example of antivirus products using Enumerating Badness is a market failing more than anything else. I'm not sure I see the alternative for a naive user. Call a specialist to investigate their use-cases and "open the system" to accommodate? Any time you want to update your tool or workflow or try something new have that specialist come out and reevaluate your system?