It's absolutely a misuse and causes all kinds of assumptions which the RFCs make about how people write their software to become invalid. It's also a simple an

It's absolutely a misuse and causes all kinds of assumptions which the RFCs make about how people write their software to become invalid. It's also a simple and state-free way of influencing other devices on the network. Arbor is an interesting example - when doing DDoS mitigation, an approach which doesn't require a lot of resources or statefulness is extremely useful. On one hand, I want to agree with you: this is terrible and makes everyone else's life harder. On the other hand, maybe its TCP's resource requirements that are at fault.