Re: At night, the ice weasels come...

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 11:24 PM 11/29/1997 EST, Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
>What will Cottrell do if someone uses his anonymizer(R)[TM] to connect to
>someone's web server many times in a row, requesting the same pages, and
>the admins of said server whine about "denial of service" attacks?

The Anonymizer has blocking capability to take care of web pages
whose administrators don't want anonymous users.  I don't know if
the Anonymizer automatically blocks sites that are getting pounded on,
but it can at least stop the problem after it gets noticed.
The Terms Of Service are at http://www.anonymizer.com/terms.html ;
"Abusers of the Anonymizer can expect no anonymity."
Of course, the Anonymizer maintains minimal information about its users,
so it's not clear whether you'll just lose your $15 account or 
get hunted down by dogs.

Of course, if the Anonymizer is using caching, nobody'll know to whine,
except for pages which are designed to subvert the dominant paradigm
by being uncacheable and different every time, and they deserve
Darwin's attention anyway.

Free anonymizer users aren't much risk, with 30 second delays,
assuming the anonymizer still places some limits on how many total
page hits per second or kbps it'll do for free.
Paid anonymizer users probably have more potential to cause damage,
since they're not time-limited, and using automated systems for
high-speed requests is against terms of service.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
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