Ed Felten: What Hollywood wants to do to P2P users

Ed Felten dissects the prepared testimony of Media Defender’s Randy Saaf at Thursday’s Berman-Coble bill hearings.

That’s a denial of service attack, folks. The attack operates not by exhausting the target’s bandwidth, but by exhausting the number of connections it can make simultaneously. Connection-exhaustion attacks are a well recognized from of denial of service; other examples of such attacks include so-called “SYN flooding.”