Cloudflare, and the 120Gbps DDOS "that almost broke the Internet"

Wed Mar 27 22:25:40 UTC 2013

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 12:30:43PM -0700, Paul Ferguson wrote:
> Consider this a call-to-arms, in all aspects. Please.

+1

No.  Not enough.  +10.

But...our collective track record in responding in a timely and effective
fashion to such calls is not very good.  Twenty years ago we could have
killed spam.  Ten years ago we could have killed botnets.  We didn't
do either (despite *numerous* warnings of how bad it would get --
warnings dismissed as unduly pessimistic at the time, now viewed as
naively optimistic) and in part because we didn't...now we have this.
There are entire business sectors which now exist just to make up for
our failure to do those things when we had the chance.  And while
there are good and smart people in those doing some good and smart
things, all those sectors are really doing are (a) costing us a ton
of money and (b) helping us tread water.

I suggest we fix these problems before we wind up creating yet another
market for yet another several billion dollars that could be better used
on making forward progress.

Or worse, before some government somewhere decides to "solve" this
problem for a value of "solved" involving (shudder) legislation.

--rsk