[Outages-discussion] Recent outage in Australia affecting Telstra

Wed Feb 29 06:01:21 UTC 2012

On 2/25/2012 2:46 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Gert Doering" <gert at greenie.muc.de>
> 
>>> One of Telstra's downstream customers, a smaller ISP called Dodo,
>>> accidentally announced the global table to Telstra (or perhaps a very
>>> large portion of it.) Enough of it to cause major disruption.
>>
>> This is good. There is a chance that Telstra will learn from it, and
>> do proper customer-facing filters now.
>>
>> OTOH, there also is a chance that Telstra lawyers will just sue the
>> customer, and not change anything...
> 
> Perhaps.  I am not familiar with Australian jurisprudence, but the US there
> is the doctrine of Last Clear Chance[1]... and the work necessary on Telstra's
> part to avoid this problem is a) well known, b) arguably considered best
> practice for a company in their field, and c) not disproportionately 
> onorous for them to have undertaken...
> 
> so even if they sue, it's not at all a clear cut case for them to "win".
> 
> Cheers,
> -- jra 
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_clear_chance

Being a relatively recent immigrant to Australia from the US, I can say
that, although I have no background in Australian legal shenanigans,
they aren't quite the litigious bastards we Americans tend to be.

Most of the commentary on AUSNOG tended towards "that was foolish,
hopefully they learn from that".  I suspect the chances of there being
any legal fallout from this are slim.