Hello, As one poster pointed out the idea of a web page where on can supply IP ranges to a site that are doing "research" via pings. I have had an issue or concern with some to my site. I sent off an email last night asking for an explanation. The below is an decent response and a way to have ones IP space removed. I dont agrtee 100% with the reasoning but I do like the care offorded. No I dont like not being asked beforehand. But at least there is a response and a vehicle to have it stopped in a timely manner. Michael... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 16:57:57 -0400 From: Customer Care at Akamai <ccare@akamai.com> To: "'michael@aplatform.com'" <michael@aplatform.com> Greetings Michael - Our company sometimes does research on Internet connectivity. The goal of our research is to improve download times for end users. No attack to your system was intended or attempted. The activity you saw was a standard ICMP echo request (ping) packet. We're using standard pings which only send one packet per second so there is no risk of a ping flood attack. Pings from different machines are coordinated to prevent a machine from being simultaneously pinged from a multitude of locations. The ping traffic is intended to try and triangulate the location of name-servers with respect to our data- centers in order to provide end users with better performance when they download web pages via the Akamai network. We regret any concern or inconvenience on your part. If you have IP addresses you'd like to be excluded from our testing, please visit the following URL. http://support.akamai.com/cgi-public/cease-pinging.cgi?id=134 Best, Akamai Customer Care