[plug] Re: Doing Jeremy's work for him

[Leon Brooks]

On Wednesday 05 June 2002 12:13, Peter Wright wrote:
> On 05/06 10:55:04, Simon Scott wrote:
>> People buy bandwidth, not a guarantee that a packet entering network A
>> will make it out the other end to Network B etc.

> Well, perhaps not a guarantee - of course the administrator(s) of Network B
> could just refuse everything from Network A if they felt like it. A person
> living in Network A who doesn't have any legal link to Network B simply has
> no grounds to force Network B to accept their traffic.

> However, if B is refusing traffic from A _and_ makes it clear that they are
> doing this because A is harbouring spammers - then I would think that the
> "legitimate" clients of A would have some reasonable legal cause for
> complaint.

Let's turn up the contrast on this picture.

The Code Octarine worm is released, which resurfaces any Windows box it 
touches with sapient pearwood and causes it to grow legs. People dread seeing 
the Brown Screen Of Death, especially when it has shark teeth embedded in it 
here and there.

Soon B discovers that A's users and servers are infected with Code Octarine. B 
knows that there is no patch. B blocks traffic from A, buys shares in 
ChiliSoft, starts replacing all of his Windows boxes with a real OS, and 
tells A that the block comes off when no more Code Octarine wormsign is seen 
from A's subnets for a week.

A sues B. With reasonable legal cause?

Cheers, Leon