I'm not going to argue that providing a VPN service is in any way illegal. But please don't tell me that the majority of the customer base (if there actually is any, we'll see) is going to use this for legitimate purposes. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. (I'll' limit the rest of this to music): I am so sick of this stupid argument. It's illegal to download copyrighted works (without owner consent, etc), and everyone knows it. If you want to tell the RIAA/BMG/Sony something, just stop listening to their music instead of giving them a target. There's lifetimes worth of free music out there, go listen to some of that if you really want to tell the big record companies something. "I love your product so much, I'm willing to steal it!" is the only message you're sending here. Listen to some internet radio. Like what you hear? Go buy the album which is probably available at places like CD Baby, and very likely has been released by the artist themselves. No evil record companies required, only "good people" get the money. /rant. That's the first time (as far as I remember) that I've gotten into this argument. Hopefully the last.

Ahh, I figured as much. I tried searching for it before but I didn't have BGP in there, so my search for "network announcement AS" resulted in "OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network Announcement", lol. My modified search landed me on http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_BGPDetailedMessagingOperationandMessageFormats.htm which I think will help me out. I think I remember reading this years ago, didn't the PDF used to be free?

I was wondering about this. I don't know very much about networking, but what prevents an individual from initiating this problem? Do the routers only accept these messages from 'trusted' sources? Obviously this must be the case or there would be people taking advantage of it.