Criminals are generally stupid (why else would they be breaking the law so blatantly to require an investigation that cost >$50k?!)
Note that we're talking about the 2,000 or so cases a year where the criminals are smart enough that 10 minutes of detective work doesn't break it wide open - they're sneaky enough that we have to spend $50K in resources to nail them to the wall.
A criminal running a $10M/year drug ring is probably *smarter* than the average businessman who has a $10M/year business - the guy working the legal side of the fence doesn't have to worry about keeping it all under wraps, laundering the money, etc....
Hint: The *OTHER* end of your hypothetical T-1 is in somebody's wiring closet. And you'd have to go to OC-12 (622 mbits/sec) or maybe OC-48 before you severely challenged the current level of traffic sniffers.
>Intel programmer Mike Hawash, detained as a witness by federal authorities >in what appears to be a terrorism probe, will be held until at least the >end of April, according to a court order released on Monday afternoon.
Would you rather find out about the flaws *now*, or discover that the flaw caused a defective porno-star-in-a-can that had teeth in inappropriate places?
Re:If they are reinventing SMTP, might as well...
on
IETF to Look at Spam
·
· Score: 1
RFC3030 SMTP Service Extensions for Transmission of Large and Binary MIME
Messages. G. Vaudreuil. December 2000. (Format: TXT=23405 bytes)
(Obsoletes RFC1830) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD)
Complain to your vendor. The BDAT ESMTP extension has been out for a while now - RFC3030 is an update of RFC1830, from 1995.
For the record, a number of vendors, Sendmail included, don't support BDAT yet because of a rather annoying corner case. It's unclear what you should do if you are a mail gateway, accept a message via BDAT, and then find that the mail server that you need to pass it along to doesn't support BDAT. Or to quote section 3 of RFC3030:
If the receiver-SMTP does not support BINARYMIME and the message to
be sent is a MIME object with a binary encoding, a sender-SMTP has
three options with which to forward the message. First, if the
receiver-SMTP supports the 8bit-MIMEtransport extension [8bit] and
the content is amenable to being encoded in 8bit, the sender-SMTP may
implement a gateway transformation to convert the message into valid
8bit-encoded MIME. Second, it may implement a gateway transformation
to convert the message into valid 7bit-encoded MIME. Third, it may
treat this as a permanent error and handle it in the usual manner for
delivery failures. The specifics of MIME content-transfer-encodings,
including transformations from Binary MIME to 8bit or 7bit MIME are
not described by this RFC; the conversion is nevertheless constrained
in the following ways:
1. The conversion MUST cause no loss of information; MIME
transport encodings MUST be employed as needed to insure this
is the case.
2. The resulting message MUST be valid 7bit or 8bit MIME. In
particular, the transformation MUST NOT result in nested Base-
64 or Quoted-Printable content-transfer-encodings.
Note that at the time of this writing there are no mechanisms for
converting a binary MIME object into an 8-bit MIME object. Such a
transformation will require the specification of a new MIME content-
transfer-encoding.
So we have options (1) and (2) that *may* work sometimes and have no existing standard method of implementation, and option (3) to drop back 10 and punt. Gives you warm-and-fuzzies about its reliability, doesn't it?
The problem is that 47 USC 227(a)(2) clauses (A) and (B) are basically legalistic wrapping saying "a fax machine is something that sends and receives faxes".
If a fax machine is receiving something, the something being received is a fax.
If you say that your comupter receiving e-mail is receiving a fax, then e-mail is a fax. Trying to claim otherwise blows your argument - if it's not a fax, then it isn't receivable as a fax transmission, and whether your computer is a fax machine is irrelevant (notice that making a *voice* call to a fax machine to sell things is totally legal, if useless....)
The worst part is that in order to make it stick at all, you have to take a *very* lenient interpretation of "recieving a fax".
For example - the spammer can *easily* wiggle out if he sends to your mail server rather than directly to your home computer - because the mail server doesn't "transcribe onto paper" as a normal integral part of receiving e-mail.
And the legal argument is dead meat otherwise - focusing on the part where your computer with the printer downloads the mail is a non-starter, as that's not an "unsolicited" transmission. You called the ISP and asked to download the mail...;)
And by the time you stretch the definitions enough to make it stick, the camel has gotten a lot more than just his nose into the tent.
OK. If an e-mail address is a phone number, you just bought all the telephone regulations - this includes stuff like who your long distance carrier is.
So.. is your e-mail to your mom inter-LATA or intra-LATA, and who is your long-distance e-mail carrier?
And don't think the telcos woulnd't jump at the chance here - consider what they've already done to DSL.....
Just because an IP address is understood to be the internet equivalent of a phone number does *NOT* make it so in the legal sense.
Again, *BE CAREFUL* here - for instance, there's laws against unattended phones re-dialing more than a certain number of times if there's no answer.
If IP addresses were legally phone numbers, your mail system would probably be breaking the law every time it re-tried delivery of mail to a host that's down.
It's this sort of "unintended consequence" that makes writing laws so difficult.
No.. *EVERYBODY* is in trouble. The legal reasoning is along these lines:
1) Junk Fax are a subset of all fax.
2) To make spam e-mail legally a junk fax, you first have to rule that all e-mail are fax.
3) Having done that, *all* e-mail is then bound by *ALL* the laws regarding FAX - including a *phone humber* at the top of *each page*. You don't get to pick-and-choose.
This is pretty well understood in other legal fields - if you try to get around (for example) IRS regs by declaring yourself a non-profit, you get stuck with all the regs for non-profits....
I would like to see citations (especially case law) that specifically address your claim that 47 USC 227(a)(2)(B) is applicable in this case. In particular, such legal advice as I've seen states that this is *NOT* applicable to E-mail in general, and for this statute to be applicable, there would need to be a finding of fact that E-mail is legally a FAX. If E-mail *was* ruled to be legally fax, then you would have to comply with all the legal requirements that would entail.
In particular, I suggest that you also read 47 USC 227(d)(1)(B), which states:
(d) Technical and procedural standards
(1) Prohibition
It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States -
(A)....
(B) to use a computer or other electronic device to send any
message via a telephone facsimile machine unless such person
clearly marks, in a margin at the top or bottom of each
transmitted page of the message or on the first page of the
transmission, the date and time it is sent and an
identification of the business, other entity, or individual
sending the message and the telephone number of the sending
machine or of such business, other entity, or individual.
Be careful what you ask for, you may get it....
(Hint - was *your* e-mail stamped with the originating phone number at the top of each page?;)
It's not set to hit the streets for a month - it could still get canned, delayed, misplaced, pulled because of some software patent owned by Microsoft, or any other number of things.
And probably I've missed the chance for FP because I hit the preview button....
It's actually possible to wander into a Barnes&Noble and be unable to identify all the books in a series. This is especially true if it's an extended universe and/or not all the books are in the store at the moment. For instance, I recently found the *FIRST* book in the Wheel of Time series in Waldenbooks. And of course, it didn't have any blurbs on what the next 9 books were.
Then there's series where "the order they were written", "chronological order" and "order to read them in" are 3 different things. See Bradley's Darkover books or Lackey's Valdemar books for examples.
Don't forget his collaboration with Terry Pratchett:
"Good Omens".
Very funny book - anything that starts with a nun misplacing the Antichrist is almost certainly going to have some severe sillyness to it. But unlike Douglas Adams, where the sillyness dictates the plot, "Good Omens" has sillyness that just naturally fits in - often making deep statements in the process.
For instance, they toss off a comment that demons find themselves bored, because their job is to torment humans. Unfortunately, humans have free will and demons don't - and humans are *so* much better at inventing new ways to be mean and nasty to each other that the demons are left on the sidelines.
I read that the first time and chuckled. Then I backtracked and said "oooh.. that's actually a lot more profound than it seemed...".
Great read all around. Don't hesitate, just do it.
Actually, the Areceibo dish with its current transmitter and receiver should be able to hear a copy of itself from anywhere within the Milky Way (except possible for the small wedge hidden by the galactic core). And those could be upgraded if we really felt the need/desire to do so.
We're *well* within the ability technically to make ourselves heard. The problem is being noticed. With that many stars in the galaxy, everybody's transmitting with a -3 AC penalty.
We've not found a *sustainable* way to *stay* in outer space.
NASA is seriously looking at mothballing the ISS because the Russians are broke.
We don't have the technological ability to get a manned mission to the moon anymore.
And that's just pure engineering that we *understand*. We don't understand ecology to the point of being able to make designs/predictions. Also, I suspect that you don't realize how *BIG* an ocean is. Sure, we may be able to launch several tons into orbit. But...
The sharks disappear. The resulting explosion in second-tier predators causes a drop in plankton-eaters. The resulting plankton bloom makes the various "red tide" outbreaks look tiny. The whole thing might take 5-10 years tops. If we can't stop it *before* it goes critical, what makes you think we can deal with it *after*?
Sure. We might be able to launch a few guys into orbit. That doesn't mean we know how to clean the algae out of a swimming pool the size of the North Atlantic without killing ourselves in the process.
Large-scale ecological collapse sucks, and we don't have the ability to deal with it. We couldn't stop the Dust Bowl in the central US in the 1930s once it got started (if we had more clue we might have prevented it, but once it got established.. yow). We don't have *THAT* much of a better grip on that stuff now.
Correct. Most of the DMCA is actually quite reasonable.
The average ISP would be *OUT OF BUSINESS* if they had to filter and monitor all the email and web traffic they receive. 17 USC 512 was added as part of the DMCA, and basically says "The ISP doesn't have to monitor their users if they take action if somebody else notifies them of a copyright infringement". And as much as we Slashdotters collectively complain about the copyright nazis at RIAA and MPAA issuing 17 USC 512 takedown requests to ISPs, the alternative should scare everybody even worse:
Do you really *WANT* your ISP checking every single packet you send/receive in case it *might* contain something copyrighted? They'd want to, in order to cover their posteriors, if they didn't have the 17 USC 512 safe harbor.
It's only 17 USC 1201 (the circumvention clauses) that's *really* broken in the DMCA, and Boucher's correction is exactly correct. If the data you get out of it would be yours via "fair use", you're off the hook. If it's outside "fair use", you're still in trouble. And that's how it should be.
" Why can't we push all the pornography into a single.xxx TLD (or even better a specific set of IP ranges) and provide a simple, effective means of simple filtering."
There's a draft IETF RFC that addresses this very question:
The problem is that the DNS is a global namespace and there's no consensus on what should go in a.xxx domain - remember that there are places where uncovered female *FACES* are considered sinful. Read Don Eastlake's draft, and understand why it's not as easy as you think....
"I doubt however it's going to make a dent in the Super Computer top 100"
Actually, it probably will. Looking at the Top500 before the announcement, SGI already had several boxes in the top 100. The vendors they're looking to displace are, by and large, HP and IBM, which together comprise most of the top 100 (only 36 of the top 100 aren't HP or IBM boxen). NEC only has 7 in the top 100, and 5 of those are the SX series boxes, a different series than the Earth Simulator system, which appears to have been a one-off box (as opposed to the IBM gear, which are all SP boxes, or the HP systems, which are AlphaServers from the Dec/Compaq line).
"As an aside the open critical component in a supercomputer is memory, fast memory, whith out that it matters not a jot how quickly your processors work. So what is the memory bandwidth of this baby?"
SGI cites 12.8GB/sec aggregate memory bandwidth. Per CX brick. So the total bandwidth on a 512-CPU system would be some 32 times that (reduced somewhat by the 4x4x32 hypercube interconnect on the Numaflex). SGI claimed 152 GBytes/sec I/O throughput on the older 3800 systems.
And yes, that's a single-system-image. But you knew that.:)
Re:Too many moves, too many critical paths
on
Root Zone Changed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Quite correct - there's only a little bit of procedurally/technically fiddly about it.
Your average root nameserver gets hit for about 100M queries per day (or on the order of 1,500 per second). See http://www.caida.org/~kkeys/dns/ for details. A root nameserver is expected to get pounded on by *mostly* invalid queries (see http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0210/wessels.html). The Wessels data was *normal production* workload, not during a DDoS.
All the usual considerations regarding BGP multihoming and hardware redundancy apply. There's reasons why the servers are Sun E10K or large IBM boxes or similar big iron, and why people who have just a T-1 from Barney's ISP, Bait, and Tackle Shop need not apply.
Of course, there's nothing in the above that can't be solved by applying clue and dollars. However...
Ever priced a E10K? And noticed that most of the root nameservers are basically donated by their hosts? That's where the politically fiddly comes in - the number of places that are clued enough to run a root DNS, network connected well enough to be worth it, and willing to donate the resources to do it, is a lot smaller than you might expect...
You agree to [...] indemnify [...] American Airlines [...] from and against any and all *CLAIMS*,... , *suits*,... including [...] taxes [...] resulting from your use of the Site,
Which means "You agree to not sue or file claims against AA for anything, including taxes, resulting from use of the site".
. Microsoft shall not retaliate against OEM,... because it is known to Microsoft that the OEM is or is contemplating:
1. developing, distributing, promoting, using, selling, or licensing any software that competes with Microsoft Platform Software or any product or service that distributes or promotes any Non-Microsoft Middleware;
Seems to me that this covers a company Y that wants to ship a RedHat-based system, since they are distributing software (RedHat) that competes with Microsoft Platform Software (Windows).
Slashdot Mirror
Note that we're talking about the 2,000 or so cases a year where the criminals are smart enough that 10 minutes of detective work doesn't break it wide open - they're sneaky enough that we have to spend $50K in resources to nail them to the wall.
A criminal running a $10M/year drug ring is probably *smarter* than the average businessman who has a $10M/year business - the guy working the legal side of the fence doesn't have to worry about keeping it all under wraps, laundering the money, etc....
Never invited 15 friends to a barbeque?
Never tried to announce a new baby to more than 10 people?
Never sent out "I'm moving, my new snail mail address is..."?
I guess if you don't have more than 10 friends, you'd never need to bcc more than 10 people. But if that's the case, I feel sorry for you.
Hint: The *OTHER* end of your hypothetical T-1 is in somebody's wiring closet. And you'd have to go to OC-12 (622 mbits/sec) or maybe OC-48 before you severely challenged the current level of traffic sniffers.
Ahh.. but you see, that's the scary part. The Supreme Court has to wait for an appeal to be filed before it can rule on it.
And it's hard to file an appeal if you've been dissapeared and don't have access to legal counsel.
Seen on the Politech mailing list today - this guy can't file a writ of habeus corpus or anything.
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,58382
>Intel programmer Mike Hawash, detained as a witness by federal authorities
>in what appears to be a terrorism probe, will be held until at least the
>end of April, according to a court order released on Monday afternoon.
And:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/loc
http://www.portlandtrib
http://www.freemikehawash.org
Would you rather find out about the flaws *now*, or discover that the flaw caused a defective porno-star-in-a-can that had teeth in inappropriate places?
Messages. G. Vaudreuil. December 2000. (Format: TXT=23405 bytes)
(Obsoletes RFC1830) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD)
Complain to your vendor. The BDAT ESMTP extension has been out for a while now - RFC3030 is an update of RFC1830, from 1995.
For the record, a number of vendors, Sendmail included, don't support BDAT yet because of a rather annoying corner case. It's unclear what you should do if you are a mail gateway, accept a message via BDAT, and then find that the mail server that you need to pass it along to doesn't support BDAT. Or to quote section 3 of RFC3030:
So we have options (1) and (2) that *may* work sometimes and have no existing standard method of implementation, and option (3) to drop back 10 and punt. Gives you warm-and-fuzzies about its reliability, doesn't it?
The problem is that 47 USC 227(a)(2) clauses (A) and (B) are basically legalistic wrapping saying "a fax machine is something that sends and receives faxes".
;)
If a fax machine is receiving something, the something being received is a fax.
If you say that your comupter receiving e-mail is receiving a fax, then e-mail is a fax. Trying to claim otherwise blows your argument - if it's not a fax, then it isn't receivable as a fax transmission, and whether your computer is a fax machine is irrelevant (notice that making a *voice* call to a fax machine to sell things is totally legal, if useless....)
The worst part is that in order to make it stick at all, you have to take a *very* lenient interpretation of "recieving a fax".
For example - the spammer can *easily* wiggle out if he sends to your mail server rather than directly to your home computer - because the mail server doesn't "transcribe onto paper" as a normal integral part of receiving e-mail.
And the legal argument is dead meat otherwise - focusing on the part where your computer with the printer downloads the mail is a non-starter, as that's not an "unsolicited" transmission. You called the ISP and asked to download the mail...
And by the time you stretch the definitions enough to make it stick, the camel has gotten a lot more than just his nose into the tent.
OK. If an e-mail address is a phone number, you just bought all the telephone regulations - this includes stuff like who your long distance carrier is.
So.. is your e-mail to your mom inter-LATA or intra-LATA, and who is your long-distance e-mail carrier?
And don't think the telcos woulnd't jump at the chance here - consider what they've already done to DSL.....
"The phone number was the null string, since there was no phone involved in sending."
:)
*bzzt* Thank you for playing.
If no phone was involved, how do you make a legal case for using the telephone facsimile machine laws to control it?
Just because an IP address is understood to be the internet equivalent of a phone number does *NOT* make it so in the legal sense.
Again, *BE CAREFUL* here - for instance, there's laws against unattended phones re-dialing more than a certain number of times if there's no answer.
If IP addresses were legally phone numbers, your mail system would probably be breaking the law every time it re-tried delivery of mail to a host that's down.
It's this sort of "unintended consequence" that makes writing laws so difficult.
No.. *EVERYBODY* is in trouble. The legal reasoning is along these lines:
1) Junk Fax are a subset of all fax.
2) To make spam e-mail legally a junk fax, you first have to rule that all e-mail are fax.
3) Having done that, *all* e-mail is then bound by *ALL* the laws regarding FAX - including a *phone humber* at the top of *each page*. You don't get to pick-and-choose.
This is pretty well understood in other legal fields - if you try to get around (for example) IRS regs by declaring yourself a non-profit, you get stuck with all the regs for non-profits....
The statute specifically says *PHONE NUMBER*. An IP address is not a phone number, nor is a hostname.
Here's my canned reply for these:
....
;)
I would like to see citations (especially case law) that specifically address your claim that 47 USC 227(a)(2)(B) is applicable in this case. In particular, such legal advice as I've seen states that this is *NOT* applicable to E-mail in general, and for this statute to be applicable, there would need to be a finding of fact that E-mail is legally a FAX. If E-mail *was* ruled to be legally fax, then you would have to comply with all the legal requirements that would entail.
In particular, I suggest that you also read 47 USC 227(d)(1)(B),
which states:
(d) Technical and procedural standards
(1) Prohibition
It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States -
(A)
(B) to use a computer or other electronic device to send any
message via a telephone facsimile machine unless such person
clearly marks, in a margin at the top or bottom of each
transmitted page of the message or on the first page of the
transmission, the date and time it is sent and an
identification of the business, other entity, or individual
sending the message and the telephone number of the sending
machine or of such business, other entity, or individual.
Be careful what you ask for, you may get it....
(Hint - was *your* e-mail stamped with the originating phone number at the top of each page?
It's not set to hit the streets for a month - it could still get canned, delayed, misplaced, pulled because of some software patent owned by Microsoft, or any other number of things.
And probably I've missed the chance for FP because I hit the preview button....
Mary Kate and Ashley???
Mountain Dew was not intended to be used nasally.
It's actually possible to wander into a Barnes&Noble and be unable to identify all the books in a series. This is especially true if it's an extended universe and/or not all the books are in the store at the moment. For instance, I recently found the *FIRST* book in the Wheel of Time series in Waldenbooks. And of course, it didn't have any blurbs on what the next 9 books were.
Then there's series where "the order they were written", "chronological order" and "order to read them in" are 3 different things. See Bradley's Darkover books or Lackey's Valdemar books for examples.
Don't forget his collaboration with Terry Pratchett:
"Good Omens".
Very funny book - anything that starts with a nun misplacing the Antichrist is almost certainly going to have some severe sillyness to it. But unlike Douglas Adams, where the sillyness dictates the plot, "Good Omens" has sillyness that just naturally fits in - often making deep statements in the process.
For instance, they toss off a comment that demons find themselves bored, because their job is to torment humans. Unfortunately, humans have free will and demons don't - and humans are *so* much better at inventing new ways to be mean and nasty to each other that the demons are left on the sidelines.
I read that the first time and chuckled. Then I backtracked and said "oooh.. that's actually a lot more profound than it seemed...".
Great read all around. Don't hesitate, just do it.
Actually, the Areceibo dish with its current transmitter and receiver should be able to hear a copy of itself from anywhere within the Milky Way (except possible for the small wedge hidden by the galactic core). And those could be upgraded if we really felt the need/desire to do so.
We're *well* within the ability technically to make ourselves heard. The problem is being noticed. With that many stars in the galaxy, everybody's transmitting with a -3 AC penalty.
We've not found a *sustainable* way to *stay* in outer space.
NASA is seriously looking at mothballing the ISS because the Russians are broke.
We don't have the technological ability to get a manned mission to the moon anymore.
And that's just pure engineering that we *understand*. We don't understand ecology to the point of being able to make designs/predictions. Also, I suspect that you don't realize how *BIG* an ocean is. Sure, we may be able to launch several tons into orbit. But...
The sharks disappear. The resulting explosion in second-tier predators causes a drop in plankton-eaters. The resulting plankton bloom makes the various "red tide" outbreaks look tiny. The whole thing might take 5-10 years tops. If we can't stop it *before* it goes critical, what makes you think we can deal with it *after*?
Sure. We might be able to launch a few guys into orbit. That doesn't mean we know how to clean the algae out of a swimming pool the size of the North Atlantic without killing ourselves in the process.
Large-scale ecological collapse sucks, and we don't have the ability to deal with it. We couldn't stop the Dust Bowl in the central US in the 1930s once it got started (if we had more clue we might have prevented it, but once it got established.. yow). We don't have *THAT* much of a better grip on that stuff now.
Correct. Most of the DMCA is actually quite reasonable.
The average ISP would be *OUT OF BUSINESS* if they had to filter and monitor all the email and web traffic they receive. 17 USC 512 was added as part of the DMCA, and basically says "The ISP doesn't have to monitor their users if they take action if somebody else notifies them of a copyright infringement". And as much as we Slashdotters collectively complain about the copyright nazis at RIAA and MPAA issuing 17 USC 512 takedown requests to ISPs, the alternative should scare everybody even worse:
Do you really *WANT* your ISP checking every single packet you send/receive in case it *might* contain something copyrighted? They'd want to, in order to cover their posteriors, if they didn't have the 17 USC 512 safe harbor.
It's only 17 USC 1201 (the circumvention clauses) that's *really* broken in the DMCA, and Boucher's correction is exactly correct. If the data you get out of it would be yours via "fair use", you're off the hook. If it's outside "fair use", you're still in trouble. And that's how it should be.
" Why can't we push all the pornography into a single .xxx TLD (or even better a specific set of IP ranges) and provide a simple, effective means of simple filtering."
t s/ draft-eastlake-xxx-03.txt
.xxx domain - remember that there are places where uncovered female *FACES* are considered sinful. Read Don Eastlake's draft, and understand why it's not as easy as you think....
There's a draft IETF RFC that addresses this very question:
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/internet-draf
The problem is that the DNS is a global namespace and there's no consensus on what should go in a
"I doubt however it's going to make a dent in the Super Computer top 100"
:)
Actually, it probably will. Looking at the Top500 before the announcement, SGI already had several boxes in the top 100. The vendors they're looking to displace are, by and large, HP and IBM, which together comprise most of the top 100 (only 36 of the top 100 aren't HP or IBM boxen). NEC only has 7 in the top 100, and 5 of those are the SX series boxes, a different series than the Earth Simulator system, which appears to have been a one-off box (as opposed to the IBM gear, which are all SP boxes, or the HP systems, which are AlphaServers from the Dec/Compaq line).
"As an aside the open critical component in a supercomputer is memory, fast memory, whith out that it matters not a jot how quickly your processors work. So what is the memory bandwidth of this baby?"
SGI cites 12.8GB/sec aggregate memory bandwidth. Per CX brick. So the total bandwidth on a 512-CPU system would be some 32 times that (reduced somewhat by the 4x4x32 hypercube interconnect on the Numaflex). SGI claimed 152 GBytes/sec I/O throughput on the older 3800 systems.
And yes, that's a single-system-image. But you knew that.
Quite correct - there's only a little bit of procedurally/technically fiddly about it.
Your average root nameserver gets hit for about 100M queries per day (or on the order of 1,500 per second). See http://www.caida.org/~kkeys/dns/ for details. A root nameserver is expected to get pounded on by *mostly* invalid queries (see http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0210/wessels.html). The Wessels data was *normal production* workload, not during a DDoS.
All the usual considerations regarding BGP multihoming and hardware redundancy apply. There's reasons why the servers are Sun E10K or large IBM boxes or similar big iron, and why people who have just a T-1 from Barney's ISP, Bait, and Tackle Shop need not apply.
Of course, there's nothing in the above that can't be solved by applying clue and dollars. However...
Ever priced a E10K? And noticed that most of the root nameservers are basically donated by their hosts? That's where the politically fiddly comes in - the number of places that are clued enough to run a root DNS, network connected well enough to be worth it, and willing to donate the resources to do it, is a lot smaller than you might expect...
You trimmed too much. Try this:
... , *suits*,... including [...] taxes [...] resulting from your use of the Site,
You agree to [...] indemnify [...] American Airlines [...] from and against any and all *CLAIMS*,
Which means "You agree to not sue or file claims against AA for anything, including taxes, resulting from use of the site".
. Microsoft shall not retaliate against OEM, ... because it is known to Microsoft that the OEM is or is contemplating:
1. developing, distributing, promoting, using, selling, or licensing any software that competes with Microsoft Platform Software or any product or service that distributes or promotes any Non-Microsoft Middleware;
Seems to me that this covers a company Y that wants to ship a RedHat-based system, since they are distributing software (RedHat) that competes with Microsoft Platform Software (Windows).