This is probably a purely a rhetorical question, and a means to vent. As background, I have just noticed a single user use a very disportionate number of requests against one of the Google Earth Grid Layers (MGRS), it look’s like they set it to refresh every 10 seconds, and for a while did browse around the globe, after that it stuck on one view and just happily refreshed away for 20 hours.
So what is the response to this type of thing (and I have no idea of the identity of users)?
- Blacklist at firewall level – effectively cutting them off from using nearby ever again.
- Blacklist them from that feature permanently
- Impose a temporally ban
- Add a throttling to the service for everyone, such as a quota or rate limiting – difficult to get the sweat spot
- Google Earth offers <maxSessionLength> which could be used to curtail the long term effect, but this would have a minor effect on legitimate users
- similar to last but only start adding it once they trigger some limit
So far (and only in a handful of cases) have done either 1 or 2. In the example that has triggered this post have done 1. but might change it to 3.
(the api and coordinate converter have their own dynamic limit, essentially 4. )
