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So maybe we all agree to setup nodes with similar weights?
Yes, many 100 Weight nodes, or any other small number will do. Someone should manage the donation fund for that purpose specifically and verify that hallmarked nodes with paid out amounts are indeed running with the paid out Weight value.
I'm not sure if I understand the system properly.
Does the weight of a hallmarked node adjust if the balance on that account changes? If so, the attackers could misuse that by creating a new abomination in the form of "hallmarked zombies" with a higher weight and adjust their weight once the 'regular' hallmarked nodes try to adjust their weight. That will cost the attackers some money, but they already seem to be willing to spend some...
And if even if you need to create a new hallmark after the account has been funded with more Nxt this would be a feasible attack vector.
This would be a way to create points of failure...
If you leave the choice to prefer hallmarked nodes to clients, only the clients that avoid hallmarked nodes are safe in that scenario.
The agreement on a certain weight should then not be the way to fight the attackers (at least not at the moment).
This seems to be much more easy, scalable and "distribution network" like:
Once a node makes a request and doesn't get a response in 'x' time, it then needs to try another node until it receives a response. It should try nodes in increasing ping time order.
Wouldn't that be an easy way to get rid of the 'simple' zombies?
And I see a problem with that approach as well.
Well, hallmarks would work if everyone used them. Wait for a few hours and I'll release a version with disabled hallmarks.
I hope disabled hallmarks are the default. But as hallmarking needs some action and you can't force people to do that the only safe way seems to be to remove hallmarking until there's a workaround to deal with zombies without hallmarking. I consider anything that requires user action not very well at the moment.