Is there a line of defense against Distributed Reflective attacks?

Deepak Jain deepak at ai.net
Mon Jan 20 06:44:10 UTC 2003


> > As long as the car _moves_ under its own power across the highway, its
> > essentially not the car manufacturers' (or the consumers') immediate
> > concern.
>
>   That's really not true.  Before car companies sell cars, they
> pass (lots of) safety certification tests.  Before owners drive
> cars legally, they pass a safety and emissions test.  Sure, the
> highway folks clean up after the occasional tire blowout, but
> there's been a lot of work put in to make sure that the engines
> aren't going to drop out on a regular basis.
>
>   If the Internet was a highway, it would be covered in
> burned-out engines.
>

True, in the literal sense. 1) Software companies and hardware manufacturers
have their own QA, focus groups and eval processes. Since very few people
will die in the event
of a burned-out engine on the Internet. Determiniation of the value of these
things is up to the reader.

An internal combustion engine is a much older, more widely tested thing than
the "cars" we drive on
the Internet and it figures that in reliability/safety numbers they win.

The motherboards don't blow out, and the asphalt that makes the Internet
highway works too (generally).

DJ




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