http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-09/ff_estonia_bots

When Bots Attack
By John Robb Email 08.23.07 | 2:00 AM
Feature
Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe
Washington Ignores Cyberattack Threats, Putting Us All at Peril

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If you want to bring down a country’s information infrastructure and you don’t want anyone to know who did it, the weapon of choice is a distributed denial of service attack. Using rented botnets, you can launch hundreds of thousands — even millions — of infobombs at a target, all while maintaining total deniability. In this hypothetical scenario, a single attack launched by China against the US lasts only a few hours, but a full-scale assault lasting days or weeks could bring an entire modern information economy to its knees.

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This has been seen already in the wild. But the fix is on the horizon … IPv6.

In the meantime, one has to examine the paradigms and the mems around the Internet. Questioning the Internet service Providers and what actually are they providing.

Clearly, the all you can eat buffet for 19.99, 29.99, 39.99, 49.99 per month leads to “stuffing yourself”. That probably has to change.

Unlimited email with no postage leads to spamming. ISPs that deal with the end user probably have to move to a charging model with micropayments. That makes spam uneconomical.

Unlimited byte transfer rates leads to similar excesses. BitTorrent and other P2P hogs that literally take over the local loop. So probably like the power company, we will probably have to pay for MegaBytes by a similar micropayment. That make caps and shaping unnecessary.

So perhaps the basic monthly charge for internet access is X per month with say 30k of email messages and 100 gigs of transfer. Additional use gets charge extra.

With that type of a meme, botnets would be quickly cleaned up or cut off.

imho!

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