Fwd: Re: Digital Island sponsors DoS attempt

Fri Oct 26 11:43:18 UTC 2001

On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Scott Francis wrote:

> Intentions matter not at all. Only results of said traffic, the consequences
> of which are borne entirely by the receiver. If the receiver doesn't want it,
> the receiver should not have to receive it.

This is not how things are done elsewhere, so I don't see why it would
have to be on the net. Also, how do you intend to inform everyone about
everyone else's wishes in this regard?

And it seems to me that if I send someone a request and they honor that
request (to echo back the packet) this doesn't really indiciate that these
kinds of requests are unwelcome. There are several ICMP messages that
would convey this sentiment much more clearly.

> Unless you're willing to come out
> and state that being connected to the Internet is a de facto agreement to
> receive anything and everything somebody wishes to send you

It is, "de facto". If you know that doing something has a certain result,
and you do it, you can't really be surprised that the result ensues.
Connecting to the net means you'll receive packets. If you don't like
this, don't connect or filter out the unwanted packets.

What we really need is something where you can have a system close to the
source block the unwanted traffic. This would help a lot against all those
stupid bandwidth-hungry worms.