Fwd: Re: Digital Island sponsors DoS attempt

Pete Kruckenberg pete at kruckenberg.com
Fri Oct 26 07:02:29 UTC 2001


On 25 Oct 2001, Paul Vixie wrote:

> another test for "welcome" is "if everybody did this,
> would the recipient be injured?"  clearly this is the
> same profile as "unequal benefit to the sender" and the
> answer in the case of these pings is "yes, ouch."

As the saying goes, even too much of a good thing can be
bad. So looking at this from the 'too much' side, how can
you tell if it was bad because it was all bad, or if it was
just too much good, and that made it bad?

I don't think you can infer that because the extreme case
(everyone doing it) is bad (unequal), therefore the singular
case is also bad/unequal. Most things tend to be viewed as
'equal' or otherwise tolerably 'fair' within certain ranges
we call 'reasonable', and outside of those ranges is where
they are considered unequally balanced.

> this criteria.  it *is* possible to know before
> initiating communication whether it's implicitly
> "welcome" by this standard, even if you have no direct
> relationship to the recipient whose terms and conditions
> would explicitly tell you the answer.

By this reasoning, I could never send an email or make a
phone call or go visit everyone (especially a new
acquaintance), because if /everyone/ sent them an email, or
called them, or visited them, it would certainly be
unwelcome (and possibly cause injury). My singular action is
within the range considered fair and reasonable, where
everyone doing it (or in fact, even just a few dozen people
doing it) would probably not.

Pete.





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