From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 95 08:03:30 PST
To: eric@remailer.net (Eric Hughes)
Subject: Re: (none)
In-Reply-To: <199501181554.HAA08177@largo.remailer.net>
Message-ID: <9501181603.AA01635@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Eric Hughes says:
> I argue that if you hook your machine up to the Internet, you've
> implicitly authorized people to send you packets -- as many as they
> want and of whatever nature as they want.  No service provision I've
> ever seen gives any recourse to the end user against the provider for
> "bad" packets.

Be that as it may, people HAVE been kicked off for mischief like
forging routing packets -- and if someone started hosing me down with
any one of several really nasty packet based attacks I'm familiar with
I would expect action to be taken against them.

Remember that degree is important in such instances. You are allowed
to shine a flashlight at your neighbor's house -- you aren't allowed
to shine a fifty megawatt laser. Degree counts.

> I also think this is the one great flaw in the design of the Internet;
> namely, that the sender has all the control over what packets flow
> over the net.  A receiver can ask for a slowdown or cessation, but
> there's no obligation to do so.  This will be, if anything, the
> limiting factor in scalability of the internet.

I doubt it. It really hasn't proved to be an actual problem thus
far. If anything, the limiting factor on scalability is the fact that
the net has no locality of reference, which is making routing design
harder and harder. Routing is currently THE big unsolved problem on
the net -- something outsiders to the IETF rarely suspect, because the
engineers have been faking it so well for so long. Unfortunately, all
the good solutions to the routing problem are mathematically
intractable -- and the practical ones are leading to bad potential
long term problems...

Perry