At 12:04 PM 04/04/94 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

(If the answer is "No fees, no quotas, use as much as you can," then I maintain it will be relatively easy to continue to flood sites. Flood them worse than anything we've seen so far, in fact. I'll go out on a limb and speculate that cheap delivery makes a fee schedule of some sort _more important_, not less important. Of course, this is up to the service providers; anyone who wishes to provded a free bandwidth link should be free to do so!)

Obviously it doesn't map directly, but phones can provide a good example. people can phone-bomb people, but it gets boring. Most prank callers ger sick of it by the time they hit highschool. There are cases of prank callers getting scary but these are pretty few and fall between. You may say that the difference is that I have to have to be on the phone to do this, which doesn't apply to computers- well, I can, using a Macintosh and phone set up a pretty good combination war dialer/recorded message to bomb everyone in my local access range. How often does this happen? and what would happen to me if I did this? *There's* the key. You slap people's hand for this kinda thing. If I send a 200 meg binary file to a site once every 15 seconds for a couple of hours, I get in trouble. Easy. People talking about the future with computers always talk about ways to make things impossible for someone to do- this has never worked in the real world, and won't in the virual one. You just make it not worth doing.

I can think of certain malicious persons--and I expect more of them in the future, not fewer--who would mount "denial of service" attacks on sites they didn't like by turning the firehoses of data on them.

See above- If I mount a denial of service attack on you via phone- tell my computer to call you once every 15 seconds, forever, how long would it take to get the cops to pay me a visit? About as long as it took you to find a phone that isn't tied up by me ;)

TANSTAAFL--There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Link

I still agree- Whoever ends up standing to profit from this ain't gonna give it way...

--Tim May