Aleinikov, though Sergey, is no Brin, that's for sure. More seriously, he obviously did a stupid move. Whether it was malicious or not, I do not know. But the

Aleinikov, though Sergey, is no Brin, that's for sure. More seriously, he obviously did a stupid move. Whether it was malicious or not, I do not know. But the way the whole collection of servers goes down just because a single remote user has done something suspicious from a legal (not technical) point of view raises concerns, both of legal and technical nature. One issue is whether a distributed server system would have been able to withstand what is technically an attack from the legal authority. Another issue is whether there is a technical solution to a legal challenge, specifically, if it is possible to recognize an illegal action by technical means. And if it is advisable too (for example, I would hate to see watermarks in the source code or, more likely, udp/tcp packets, but I would hate it much more if a whole system went down). This kind of attack may be more efficient than a DOS attack. Can it be prevented?