what the heck do i do now?

Thu Feb 1 03:04:37 UTC 2007

Brian Wallingford wrote:
> ...  Considering the time passed since maps went
> defunct, Paul is entirely justified in doing whatever is necessary to
> cluebat the offending networks, imho.

That's my opinion too. But I do have some domain name server addresses 
that get a lot of traffic due to historical misconfiguration by people 
who are likely too clueless to adjust it properly.

And I tried some interesting experiments around providing "wrong" 
wildcard answers to queries that were received.

And then, after getting some nasty complaints (including threats of 
legal action) from people who, for instance, didn't like that whenever 
their PC tried to use me as a resolver, they couldn't get to their 
favorite web sites any more and who weren't interested in removing me 
from their resolver list... I talked to my lawyer. And while I am not a 
lawyer, I can tell you that my lawyer pointed out several interesting 
legal theories under which I could have some serious liability, and so I 
don't do that any more. (As an example, consider what happens *to you* 
if a hospital stops getting emailed results back from their outside 
laboratory service because their "email firewall" is checking your 
server, and someone dies as a result of the delay)

So while I think you'd be justified in doing it, I think you'd find that 
1) lots of people wouldn't change their configs at all, and 2) you might 
find that your liability insurance doesn't cover deliberate acts.

Matthew Kaufman
matthew at eeph.com