RE: Xerox on file sharing

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

From: Meltsner, Kenneth (Kenneth.Meltsner@ca.com)
Date: Wed Aug 23 2000 - 11:13:57 PDT


It's always surprised me that the music industry hasn't tried some sort of
"distributed denial of service" attack on Napster and its brethren.

They could:

* Poison the searches by listing files with the names of desirable content
but that contain crud

* Overwhelm the servers by flooding them with requests (which is where the
DDoS aspects) might come in

and other nasty things that I haven't thought of.

Admittedly, it would all look pretty bad if the origins of the attack were
disclosed, but just as spam and fuggheads tend to shut down unmoderated news
groups, the noise and load would tend to make Napster/Gnutella/etc.
substantially less attractive.

Ken Meltsner


Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 23 2000 - 11:18:48 PDT