Open Letter to D-Link about their NTP vandalism

Thu Apr 13 04:03:29 UTC 2006

    Well,

    With the way you named your address book (North American Noise and 
Off-topic Gripes).

    We now know where to fill your futur comments.
    (In the killfile that is)

Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

>On Wed, Apr 12, 2006 at 01:32:26PM -0500, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
>  
>
>>On the plus side, after seeing D-Link's (lack of) reaction to this, I'll 
>>bet none of us will buy another of their products again.
>>    
>>
>
>If it was legal to sell whatever you people are smoking that makes you 
>think dlink gives a flying crap about you as customers, I'd be a very rich 
>man. What part of "mass consumer product" isn't clear here, 99.9% of their 
>target market doesn't know NTP is, and doesn't care.
>
>I am absolutely appalled by the number of "slashdot warriors" here, ready 
>to launch a crusade of spreading misinformation to the media in hopes of 
>obtaining a large monetary payout or otherwise causing dlink, in the name 
>of "doing the right thing", and without any consideration or understanding 
>of the facts at hand. You know why dlink can't just come forward and say 
>"woops we're sorry, we didn't see that you wanted this used for DIX 
>members only, our bad"? Because they have to contend with people who will 
>take that apology and then use it in court as an admission of guilt, and 
>seek many tens of thousands of dollars or more in non-existent damages.
>  
>
    As a (older, since '87) operator of a small network, I'll always 
help other operators when its question of making the 'net better.

    Good luck advocating the next turd coming from sub-standard design 
flow that contributed to the DIX issues with DLink.

    Me, I prefer to strive for excellence...

>I think we all know that dlink was wrong. They should have double-checked 
>the list of NTP servers they included in their default shipping firmware 
>to make certain that the owners were ok with having their services used 
>publically, there is no question about this. However, just because they 
>made this mistake, it is not an excuse for everyone involved to start 
>cashing in like they hit the lottery. Imagine that you get rear ended in 
>traffic by an inattentive driver, and they dent your bumper. Yes it is 
>their fault, yes they made a mistake and they should be responsible for 
>it, but it is not okay for you to start screaming whiplash as soon as you 
>see that you got hit by a Mercedes. It also doesn't mean that you are 
>going to get a new car instead of them paying to have your bumper fixed.
>  
>

    FYI I didn't read anything about somebody looking to make money on 
this...

>If anyone else is going to carry this as a story, please act responsibly 
>and do a little fact checking. We're talking about 37 packets/sec, less 
>than a dialup worth of bandwidth, and any number of technical solutions 
>which could completely mitigate that traffic without ANY additional 
>expenses. Also, IANAL, but I think that refusing to take reasonable action 
>to mitigate the damages because you feel the other party is "at fault" and 
>should be 100% responsible is probably a good way to hurt any kind of case 
>you might actually have against them too.
>
>  
>
    Yeap.... x packets/sec times millions...

-- 
Alain Hebert                                ahebert at pubnix.net   
PubNIX Inc.        
P.O. Box 175       Beaconsfield, Quebec     H9W 5T7	
tel 514-990-5911   http://www.pubnix.net    fax 514-990-9443