How to game the system (was Re: What does 95th %tile mean?)

Fri Apr 20 15:30:21 UTC 2001

On 19 Apr 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:

> True, there is some buffering in the Internet.  And it does make it
> much more resilant to short term peaks.  But as any DDOS attack shows,
> if you use near peak capacity for even a short term, other traffic is
> rudely shoved aside.  Further, traffic does not return to its original
> levels for a considerable period of time after each peak capacity
> event.  If you set up conditions just right, not only will you not
> receive "peak" payment from from the customer gaming the system, you
> receive lower payments from all your "average" customers too.

Thats why statiscial queueing which penalizes unfriendly flows is a good
thing.

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~wuchang/blue/

You could think of the unfriendly penalizing as an data version of a
'self-reseting fuse': disobey the rules (congestion control) and find
yourself cut off. 