*You* may wish to make your life more convenient by bringing government force into your relationship with other network providers, why by what divine right do you get to impose your convenience on others by force?
What's your alternative solution?
As you later point out, a smurf attack is no different than any other denial of service attack. Whether that attack is done by picketters physically preventing customers from entering a store, or pingers preventing network use by overloading circuits, it is *already* prosecutable.
Just go ahead and filter the offenders.
This is ok after the fact. But it doesn't work when you're under attack and trying to get help.
As I said, cooperation cannot be forced. It can be promoted, but if, for an example from my experience, Agis simply ignores your attempts at contact, what good will working with them do anyway?
If I was running a backbone, and I refused to help stop a Denial of Service attack, couldn't I be considered to be aiding and abetting the criminal who was performing the DoS? Couldn't I be held liable?
This precident has been set in the physical world on many occations. So, don't wait for some idiot legislator to write a statute whos purpose is reduntand, and which is written by a non-net person so ends up being violently stupid. If you see harm, prosecute it. Anything and everything that one person can do that harms another, even spam and smurf denial-of-service, is already illegal. What it requires is not waiting for someone else to solve your problems for you, it requires people to take charge of their own lives. I mean, in this case,
we're not talking gray areas here, like spamming and/or third-party mail relaying. We're talking about smurfing, an action which is clearly illegal, which clearly causes damage to the target network...
Exactly. I see you understand.
IOW - I agree with Karl.
Or maybe not. Email has its limitations.
Steven J. Sobol - Founding Member, Postmaster/Webmaster, ISP Liaison -- Forum for Responsible & Ethical E-mail (FREE) - Dedicated to education about, and prevention of, Unsolicited Broadcast E-mail (UBE), also known as SPAM. Info: http://www.ybecker.net
Curt- ...just Curt...