> Believe it or not, blocking pings at the router prevents said router from responding to pings, and this eliminates 50% of the problem on symmetric connections

> Believe it or not, blocking pings at the router prevents said router from responding to pings, and this eliminates 50% of the problem on symmetric connections (and >50% on asymmetric connections). But if your downlink to clogged, it probably won't matter that much that your uplink is clear. I've self-DoSed when 'downloading Linux ISOs' because the downlink was 100% saturated and I couldn't do much anything else because the ACKs for TCP packets couldn't get down easily (this was for something as basic as SSH sessions that suddenly got laggy when typing). I had to tell the software in question to only use ~90% of my downlink speed (DSL at the time).