[70236] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: What percentage of the Internet Traffic is junk?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steve Gibbard)
Wed May 5 19:13:12 2004
Date: Wed, 5 May 2004 15:59:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: Steve Gibbard <scg@gibbard.org>
To: David Schwartz <davids@webmaster.com>
Cc: Mike Damm <MikeD@irwinresearch.com>, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <MDEHLPKNGKAHNMBLJOLKOEGELOAA.davids@webmaster.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Perhaps now I'm the one being pedantic, but you're confusing "somebody"
with the owner of the resources involved in the sending.
What I said was, "presumably, if it's being sent that means *somebody*
wanted to send it."
Otherwise, we have to consider somebody doing what would otherwise be
legitimate web browsing from an untentionally open wireless access point
to be junk traffic, which is both very hard to figure out in any
large-scale analysis, and gives the numbers a very different meaning.
-Steve
On Wed, 5 May 2004, David Schwartz wrote:
>
>
> > I'm not sure that I'd agree with this statement. What
> > about the traffic from compromised sources? The pps
> > floods or spam emails are not being created with the
> > knowledge of the source, so it would be hard to say
> > that the source "wanted" to send it.
>
> Exactly. A great example is a web server struggling to continue to accept
> connections in the face of a spoofed SYN flood. The SYN/ACK packets are
> junk.
>
> The definition of "junk" is that the sender would not have wanted to send
> it or the receiver would not have wanted to receive it if either had had a
> chance to have the appropriate human or humans investiage the transaction in
> full detail.
>
> Traffic you are duped into sending by traffic you wish you hadn't received
> or cannot distinguish from legitimate traffic is junk.
>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Gibbard scg@gibbard.org
+1 415 717-7842 (cell) http://www.gibbard.org/~scg
+1 510 528-1035 (home)
