Carsten, The discussion is not getting far afield: it’s on point. And it’s a hugely germane topic for network operators.
Regarding your claim “You consented to receiving packets when connecting to the Internet“, I counter with what is in virtually every ISP’sAUP for customers: Unauthorized port scanning is expressly prohibited. In fact, when I Google that precise phrase along with “Acceptable Use Policy” I get thousands of hits. I strongly suspect that this is probably also a violation of the U.S. Computer Abuse and Fraud Act, which criminalizes anyone who “Intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains … information from any protected computer.” A great many VA plug-ins attempt to — and often do — extract information they’re not authorized to. -mel > On Jun 20, 2022, at 1:11 PM, Carsten Bormann <c...@tzi.org> wrote: > > On 2022-06-20, at 19:36, goemon--- via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> wrote: >> >> On Mon, 20 Jun 2022, Carsten Bormann wrote: >>>>> On 2022-06-20, at 14:14, J. Hellenthal <jhellent...@dataix.net> wrote: >>>>> Yeah that's another thing, "research" cause you need to learn it let's >>>>> have them do it too, multiply that by every university \o/ >>> there was some actual research involved. >>> >>> I agree that there should be a very good reason to expend a tiny bit of >>> everyone’s resources on this. >>> >>> I do not agree that this externality makes any research in this space >>> unethical. >> >> Consent is what makes it unethical. > > You consented to receiving packets by connecting to the Internet. > > Now there is a limit to that consent (e.g., when these packets have an actual > material negative effect), and here we enter an area where all simple > schematic approaches fail — you really have to think about outcomes instead > of expounding fundamentalist stances. > >>> You signed up for this when you joined the Internet (er, stuck with the >>> IPv4 Internet, I should probably say). >> >> "If you dont like the unsolicited email, just hit delete" ? >> >> How about ... NO. > > How about: It’s really hard to properly apply analogies. > > Unsolicited email wastes people’s time, and actually a lot of that. > (Responsibly performed) packet probes waste machine time, and very little so. > (If you are wasting human time on packet probes, you are holding it wrong.) > Totally different outcome, and hence totally different ethics. > > This “discussion" is getting a bit off-topic. > > Grüße, Carsten >
