Poul-Henning Kamp wrote an open letter to D-Link as a last-ditch attempt at getting them to show any interest in resolving the mess their badly configured software has caused (and is still causing).
I'm not entirely surprised, but still disappointed that they didn't learn from Netgears mistake in 2003.
I worry that the NTP Pool will get a similar problem at some point. I'd like the pool to be able to help the vendors (better than them abusing random servers!), but I need to setup a process and a system for vendors to use the pool in a way we can monitor and eventually disable (or point back to their own servers) if it ends up being a problem. One of these days ...
A simple solution might be vendor specific dns entries for the pool, i.e. something like netgear.pool.ntp.org
Re the pool getting overwhelmed by commercial servers, I certianly see a solution to the technical half -- set up a netgear.pool.ntp.org, etc. The hard part is the legal/social half -- what would require vendors to tell you about their use so that they you can create the alias?