Anyone notice strange announcements for 174.128.31.0/24

Mon Jan 12 22:24:04 UTC 2009

In a message written on Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 04:51:36PM -0500, Joe Abley wrote:
> Randy's application, and Lorenzo's before him also seem like short- 
> term applications designed to explore answering operational questions.
> 
> Just because something is generally not used, or even if it's only  
> worth using in an emergency, doesn't make it "sketchy".
> 
> Most knee-jerk reactions to AS_PATH manipulation sound to me like fear  
> of the unusual.

I have no issues with people doing research and reporting on the
findings, however I think this statement by Randy is where I believe
it went over the line:

] part of the experiment is to measure the difference between the amount
] of nanog mail lorenzo drew in 2005 by pre-announcing with the amount we
] get in 2009 while not pre-announcing.  :)

This statement is an admission that he set out to annoy people,
annoy them enough they would complain on a  public mailing list.
More over, I can't see how any researcher could use "the amount of
nanog mail" as a valid indicator of anything.  It has as much to
do with how many engineers are bored on a given day as it does with
the severity of the problem.

So the goal of this research seemed to be to see how many people
the researchers could panic, and then see how 10,000 people reacted
to the panic.  Sounds a lot like yelling "fire" in a crowded movie
house just to "research" what the results might be, and then measuring
success by the number of words in the article on the front page of
the paper, or perhaps the number of people trampled to death, or
both.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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