CircleID

Free, Slow, Censored Internet: A Bad Idea

2008-12-01T13:18:00-08:00

The FCC is looking for an organization to provide free, slow, and censored Internet access. The censorship apparently would include email as well as websites. According to an article in today's Wall Street Journal: "Outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for action in December on a plan to offer free, pornography-free wireless Internet service to all Americans, despite objections from the wireless industry and some consumer groups [nb. and from me]… The winning bidder would be required to set aside a quarter of the airwaves for a free Internet service [nb. the WSJ hasn't got that part quite right. More below]."

Here's what the FCC's NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rule Making) says:

"(a) The licensee of the 2155-2188 MH band (AWS-3 licensee) must provide as part of its free broadband service a network-based mechanism:

"(1) That filters or blocks images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography and, in context, as measured by contemporary community standards and existing law, any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents. For purposes of this rule, teens and adolescents are children 5 through 17 years of age;

"(2) That must be active at all times on any type [emphasis added] of free broadband service offered to customers or consumers through an AWS-3 network."

The NPRM is silent on which community's standards should be used to determine what is harmful to "teens and adolescents" (I'm glad my children weren't adolescents at five). But note that all services must be filtered for whatever it is that "otherwise[?] would be harmful". The FCC will be the ultimate judge, however, since they enforce the terms of a license and can determine whether or not to renew. They may think my blog is harmful; I think junk science is really dangerous; you may have still some other pet peeve.

This NPRM is a reworking of a proposal by venture-backed and politically-connected M2Z networks, which was setup to provide this free (actually ad-supported) service in return for the right to also use the spectrum for subscription service and may well be the only bidder if the auction goes forward on these terms.

Let's forget for a minute what an absolutely terrible idea it is for the government or its agent to determine what the content of our communication is allowed to be although this whole proposal SHOULD be junked just because of this. The principle DOES matter a lot but, in practice, no one is going to use the free Internet service.

The requirement is that the free service have a download speed of at least 768kilobits/second; this is the speed of the slowest DSL. This is not a mobile service where we might accept a slightly slow speed in return for mobility; it is meant to be primary residential access to bridge the digital divide. But, by the time this service actually exists, the web will not be usable at such a slow speed. Websites get designed for the capabilities of the top 50% of users; that's why dialup is now useless for surfing even though it used to work fine.

By contrast, the Vermont legislature specified that a service won't count as broadband at the end of 2010 unless it is at least 1.5Megabits/second AND realizing that this requirement must escalate, charged the Public Service Board with appropriate and timely upper revision. Nevertheless, this requirement stays the same in the NPRM for the full ten years of the license. 768Kbs will be as obsolete as your old 300 baud modem ten years from now; but it will be the only free service the licensee is required to offer.

The licensee has no incentive to offer better free service because it will also sell a higher-powered service. The NPRM does NOT specify that a quarter of the network capacity be used for the free service; it says "up to" an "as needed". If no one uses the free service, then no network capacity need be devoted to it.

It's nice to think that people who have no service will get it from M2Z; don't hold your breath. The licensee is required to build out to 50% of the population within four years and 95% within ten. The licensee will, of course, build first where the people are and where there are plenty of other service options. The areas without adequate Internet access now might get it in ten years—and might not. Even the poor in the urban service areas won't be helped much. They can't use the service without a computer and a modem which M2Z estimates will initially cost $200. In urban areas DSL at this pathetically low speed is usually available for $12.95/month or less and without a requirement to purchase equipment.

There's another interesting gotcha in the proposed regs: the paid service must be open to all devices and applications which is good. The free service, however, has no requirement that it be open to all applications. In theory the provider could charge Google, for example, to be accessible to the free users—assuming there are some which I don't think'll be the case.

It's good that the FCC recognizes that previous spectrum auctions haven't gotten the US to the point where it has the connectivity it needs. There's nothing wrong with the concept of a "free" Internet service paid for by advertisers; in fact, I'm confident that such a service will be one of the offers that surface in the newly deregulated white spaces. The spectrum at issue is unused and that's a waste. This proposal, however, should be rejected once on civil liberties grounds and again because the promise of free Internet access is meaningless and unhelpful.

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The Web's Benevolent Dictators

2008-12-01T11:45:00-08:00

Jeffrey Rosen has a great article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend titled Google's Gatekeepers. In it he deals with the question of whether we are becoming too overly dependent on a few big web companies like Google—and whether it's wise over the long run for us to trust their team of (currently) very nice, well-meaning people who are trying hard to do the right thing when faced with government censorship demands and surveillance pressures. He writes:

Today the Web might seem like a free-speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social-networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even eBay.

He quotes Columbia Law professor Tim Wu who says: "To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king… One reason they're good at the moment is they live and die on trust, and as soon as you lose trust in Google, it's over for them."

Tim is not the first person to make this point. Danny O'Brien at EFF wrote and spoke about this issue at great length over the summer. I re-quote:

It's like if I was to concede that a benevolent dictatorship is a far more effective model for a political system than a liberal democracy. The problems you hit in that context is when the dictatorship slides from benevolence (or effectiveness), or you need a new dictator in a hurry. I love having Steve Jobs at Apple: I just can't quite believe the odds that the next Steve Jobs will be at Apple too, and the one after that. I want to move my data seamlessly where the best ideas and implementation move.

One effort to place collective limits on the absolute power of the web giants, and to create a framework for greater transparency and accountability, is the Global Network Initiative, with which both Danny and I have been involved. But the GNI is just one step. Danny also advocates a more grassroots solution if people want the same independence online as they have in the physical world (or at least in democracies):

If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we've come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC3 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.

I've been writing, speaking and attempting to think about these issues as well, in particular, what are the implications when you go beyond the democracies of North America and Western Europe? What are the concrete implications in the Middle East? In China? At the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit last month, I tried to provoke my web industry audience to rethink common American assumptions that the internet plus capitalism will inevitably equal democracy, without too much need to worry about the details. Here's the video of my talk, with slides overlaid:

Isaac Mao came right after me, talking about his idea of "sharism." Unfortunately he was asked to shorten his talk because the conference was running behind schedule and Al Gore had to catch a flight:

How do we create viable grassroots, distributed alternatives to Google and Twitter so that if they get shut down, or turn evil, we're not left in the lurch—or in jail? At the iCommons Summit in Sapporo in August, I gave a longer version of the my O'Reilly talk, and called on the global free culture community to work together to make sure that there are enough grassroots, distributed, non-proprietary spaces for people to communicate and express themselves so that we won't be so dependent on the web's benevolent dictators.

The question I have not yet managed to answer is: how do we succeed in breaking our dependence on the benevolent dictators? Or how can we help at least some of our web and telecoms dictators evolve from being monarchies to something more accountable, transparent, and participatory? Figuring out the answer should, it seems to me, be a major priority of free speech activism in the 21st century, and thus a major priority for the foundations and governments who fund them.

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Linux Now Officially IPv6 Compliant

2008-12-01T10:58:00-08:00

The Linux kernel has had preliminary support for IPv6 since kernel version 2.1.8 in 1996, but only in the last week has the Linux Foundation officially stated that all major Linux distributions are now compliant with the US Department of Defense's requirements for IPv6 compatibility. This plan was set in motion in 2003 and specified that by mid-2008, all US government computing and networking equipment should be IPv6-capable.

The research was carried out by the Linux Foundation's IPv6 Working Group, led by Venkata Jagana from IBM, in association with HP, Red Hat, Novell and other companies.

Read full story: Heise Online

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FCC Pushing for Free Internet Plan, Called Most Controversial Issue in December

2008-12-01T10:16:00-08:00

Outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for action in December on a plan to offer free, pornography-free wireless Internet service to all Americans, despite objections from the wireless industry and some consumer groups.

The proposal to allow a no-smut, free wireless Internet service is part of a proposal to auction off a chunk of airwaves. The winning bidder would be required to set aside a quarter of the airwaves for a free Internet service. The winner could establish a paid service that would have a fast wireless Internet connection. The free service could be slower and would be required to filter out pornography and other material not suitable for children.

Read full story: Wall Street Journal

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Voluntary Collective Licensing of Brand-Sharing Domain Names

2008-11-30T11:49:00-08:00

The essay outlines a market-driven and value-adding solution to brand use in domain names. The solution relies heavily on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's remedy to music file sharing. I propose its adoption for new registrations and renewals.

Brand sharing in domain names is here to stay; desperate attempts to stop it through legal action are ineffective and will do nothing but destroy value. However, brand owners seem to be more concerned about protecting brands rather than maximizing brand value and shareholder return. This may be because the lawyers advising corporate branding departments steer them in the wrong direction, or it may be that the departments arrived at their mistaken beliefs all on their own.

A viable solution to brand sharing must have the following elements:

Brand name and trademark holders must be fairly compensated for the commercial use of their IP.
Value must be created for at least one party, either the domain or brand owner, without causing harm to the other side.
The market, not government intervention, must be the driving force.
Administering the solution must be easy and transparent.
Voluntary participation by trademark owners must underpin the system.

The solution concept:

Brand holders form several "collective societies" through domain name registrars, making it possible to have brand-sharing domains (in exchange for a reasonable payment at the time of registration and renewal).
The only additional registration restriction, besides the typical ISP restrictions—no hate promotion, and no illegal activity—is a ban on e-commerce without a mutually accepted affiliate relationship.
Money gets distributed among rights-holders based on the number of domain names registered. One potential sticking point is that, although it is legal to have more than one entity using the mark in the bricks-and-mortar environment, only one legal owner can be assigned to an online trademark. Nevertheless, one solution is for the legal ".com" owner of the mark to be the sole voluntary participating recipient of registration payments.

Below are the sources of potential value creation for the various stakeholders:

For domain owners
a. Reduced uncertainty of potential litigation by IP claimants.

b. The ability, because of brand sharing, to focus on remixing brand-related content that goes beyond technologically driven mash-ups of publicly available content. This will give domain owners the ability to innovate and to capture some of the content's value.

c. Enhanced reputation among their peers. Thus, companies should explicitly promote such reputations.
For brand owners

i.By means of remixing, fresh content to satisfy restless, attention-deficient visitors who seek customization/personalization, leading to more fresh content, and recommendations from friends. Who else besides independent entities can provide all this? The old school of "control and command" structure and a "one size fits all" approach to Web site design must change in favor of creative remixing. Companies should realize that most of the smart people are not working for them (see Lakhani, et al). Thus, instead of stifling innovation they can benefit from the innovation of others. Moreover, competition among domain owners is good for brand owners.

ii.Benefit from the display of their brand's logo on brand-sharing sites.

iii.Targeted traffic received from brand-sharing sites.

Thus, brand owners are paid brand usage fees, benefit from reduced value destruction as domain becomes more efficient, save on legal fees, and strengthen branding by means of active remixing and increased targeted traffic. Hence, the more remixed brand-sharing registrations, the more money brand owners make.
For the industry:

a.Enhanced industry reputation, with resulting benefits for domain owners and Internet users.

b.Decreased value-destroying domain tasting, thanks to the greater expense of domain registration and renewal.
Internet users benefit from improved user experience through a decrease in sterile parking pages and the value creation of remixing.

Thus, collective licensing adds value to all parties. However, this can only be achieved when brand owners realize that their current IP protection strategy is value destroying to their shareholders and that there is tremendous value in openness. Nevertheless, any solution requires cooperation with domain name owners, which requires a stimulus package from the domain name community, such as from the Internet Commerce Association (ICA).

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Hackers Penetrated Pentagon Computer Systems, Called Most Severe on US Military Network

2008-11-30T10:43:00-08:00

Computer hackers suspected of working from Russia successfully penetrated Pentagon computer systems in one of the most severe cyber attacks on US military networks, according to reports.

The electronic attack was so serious that Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chief of staff, briefed President George W Bush and Robert Gates, the defense secretary. "This one was significant, this one got our attention," said an official, speaking anonymously.

Read full story: Telegraph.co.uk

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US Online Video to Reach 88% of Internet Users, Says New Report

2008-11-30T10:09:00-08:00

The online video audience is expected to reach 190 million people by 2012, 88% of the Internet user population, according to the recent report by market research firm, eMarketer. The future of the video industry depends largely on how stakeholders navigate technical challenges, infrastructure upgrades, the migration to mobile, and ongoing consumer resistance to ads and payments.

"After some false starts with ill-fated transactional experiments, online video content owners and distributors are pursuing a strategy that closely follows the standard TV business model," says Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst.

Read full story: External Source

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IPv6… the Year NAT-Enforced IPv4 Dam Showed Seepage

2008-11-28T12:43:00-08:00

We don't give enough credit to people who will sacrifice themselves trying to plug the IPv4 dam with some NAT-putty. They even dream of a NAT66 filled afterlife. The growing IPv6 traffic trickle was given evidence at the recent RIPE 57 meeting in Dubai in a number of presentations, including a most edifying Google presentation (see Global IPv6 statistics by Lorenzo Colliti, and the related CircleID post). Noteworthy to see France with a 0.65% IPv6 penetration, largely courtesy of free.fr, a major ISP offering an extremely successful triple play service based on their customer premise freebox which they decided to also IPv6 enable. And, oh yes, 95% of French IPv6 traffic is native. In the meantime it felt good to see the US and Canada doing quite well with a 0.45% penetration. Major difference with France is that here in North America 95% of the traffic was 6to4. Most likely the popularity of Mac's and the Airport Extreme has something to do with it. When ranked by operating system, Mac OS leads in IPv6 penetration with 2.44% followed by Linux and Vista while XP and Windows 2000 are negligible.

The rather modest showing of IPv6 powerhouse Japan with only 0.15% IPv6 penetration was rather surprising and warrants some further analysis. The other real surprise was to see Russia claiming the overall number one ranking with 0.76% penetration!

Besides access and OS support, the third variable in the equation is the IPv6 routing between ISP's and their respective Autonomous System Numbers. There was a lot of speculation about the "brokenness" of IPv6. Google measurements show 0.09% of clients lost and 150ms extra latency; some way to go but not that bad and improving. Major tier1 ISP's including AS6453 are dual stack and peer with each other in both IPv4 and IPv6; we also see a growing number of IP transit customers upgrading their connections to dual stack.

When the fourth variable, IPv6 accessible content, will be in place the dam burst will come tantalizingly closer. IPv6 accessible websites and e-mail are not commonplace yet but slowly growing. And interesting phenomena happen to CDN's when issuing AAAA addresses to content: immediate increases in IPv6 traffic are visible!

2009 will see the seeping become leaking, 2010 will witness the first serious cracks, 2011 will see the dam buckle, 2012…

In the meantime I wish you all a happy and IPv6 filled New Year.

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Localizing Cybercrime

2008-11-28T11:02:00-08:00

It's where you advertise your services, and how you position yourself that speak for your intentions, of course, "between the lines". There's a common misunderstanding that in order for a malware campaigner or scammer to launch a localized attack, they need to speak the local language. This misconception is largely based on the fact that a huge number of people remain unaware on how core strategic business practices have been in operation across the cybercrime underground for the last couple of years.

Outsourcing the localization process (translation services for spam/phishing/malware campaigns) has been happening for a while, courtesy of DIY (do-it-yourself) services ensuring complete anonymity of their customers. Interestingly, the translators may in fact be unaware that the advertising channel the service is using is directly attracting everyone from the bottom to the top of the cybercriminal food chain. Sometimes, it's services like these that open a new market segment covering an untapped opportunity (the following service makes a point that it charges less than their competitors):

"We offer our services in translation. We are only competent translators profile higher education. Service is working with all types of texts. Languages available at this time of Russian, English, German. Average translation of the text takes up to 10 hours (usually much faster) through the full automation of the order and payment. Just want to note that we do not keep any logs on IP and does not require registration. In addition you can remove your order from the database after his execution. In addition to running more than 1000 translations already, we can use all the lessons learned to be more effective in our services. Prices vary depending on the complexity of the topic covered.

Prices and deadlines:
* Standard - the deadline is not more than 24 hours. Prices depend on the direction and guidance from the 'Order'.
* Term - work on your translation begins precedence. The price of the 50% more than the standard translation. Prices also depend on the direction and guidance from the 'Order'.

The cost of the transfer depends on the amount of work. The workload is measured in symbols. In calculating the characters are shown letters and numbers. Punctuation do not count. Minimum order 100 characters."

I'm particularly curious how a contractor (translator) would react to a situation where a large scale malware campaign in several different languages, tells a fake story that the contractor might have recently translated for them. While services position themselves as legitimate companies and their customers, the "usual suspects", request localized versions of text for spam/phishing/malware campaigns, and the contractors will continue to allow cybercriminals the opportunity to build more authenticity within their campaigns.

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Microsoft Aggressively Investing in Supersize Cloud Data Centers

2008-11-27T11:06:01-08:00

Software giant Microsoft is fighting rival Google for a place in the clouds. The company thinks that more and more software services will take over or replace the tasks currently being handled by Microsoft applications on business and home PCs. In the past two weeks alone, Microsoft has unveiled several key products it thinks will accelerate the process of transition to cloud computing, or software services delivered over the internet.

To counter this, it will set up 20 new data centers over the next 20 years at a cost of a billion dollars each. Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft's VP of global foundation services, speaking to the US media, said "We're going to reinvent the infrastructure of our industry."

Read full story: Heise Online

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World Bank Removes CIO Following Recent Cyberattacks

2008-11-27T07:34:00-08:00

According to recent reports, The World Bank has effectively removed a vice president who served as its chief information officer while struggling to deal with a series of embarrassing cyberattacks. The World Bank Group's network, which had been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, is one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation.

Servers in the institution's highly restricted Treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software, and the invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July, sources say. At least six major breaches have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month.

Read full story: FOX News

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Microsoft Files New Cybersquatting Lawsuit

2008-11-27T07:09:00-08:00

A Florida company has been charged with cybersquatting in a new lawsuit filed Wednesday. Twenty three domain names have been listed in the suit containing Microsoft's trademarks or misspellings of the names. The domain names which are registered to an entity called Domain Investments, include windoesmobile.com, wwwhotmajl.com, microsoft-games.com and zunedrivers.com. Many of the websites under the domains listed include advertising for various products and services. The suit is one of several typosquatting and cybersquatting suits filed by Microsoft.

Read full story: PC World

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The FCC White Space Regulations: Pretty Good at First Look

2008-11-26T13:33:00-08:00

My prediction is that LTE and WiMAX are toast. The new great thing will be WRANs (wireless regional area networks). WRAN's will extend and eventually subsume WiFi.

The detailed regulations which implement the FCC decision to free the spectrum formerly known as TV white spaces have now been released. They look pretty good from the point of view of someone who believes the unlicensed use of this spectrum has the potential to make a huge difference in the way the world communicates.

Once radios are built to these regulations and get through FCC testing, wireless broadband at cable speeds—10 Megabits per second (Mbps) downlink initially and increasing—ought to be rapidly available at competitive prices in more and more of the country—especially in rural areas where good broadband is often hard to get but where white spaces abound. Give this just a year to start having an effect.

Slightly longer range but in about two years both mobile voice and data will be widely available at a quarter of the price of today's prices for the two combined in "unlimited" offers. The download speeds for mobile will be better than 5 Mbps. If I'm right (many knowledgeable people do and will disagree with me), LTE is DOA and WiMAX will be eclipsed before getting to critical mass. That's bad news for at&t and Verizon who are betting on LTE and for Sprint with its bet on WiMAX.

Here are some of the highlights of the announcement:

Fixed radios in this spectrum are allowed a power output of up to 4 watts EIRP (effective isotropic radiated power, if you really wanted to know). This is the same power output as the most common radios used by wireless ISPs (WISPs) today BUT these are usually operating at much higher frequencies so they have an effective radius of less than 10 miles and don't go through leaves, trees, and walls very well. Operating in the white space frequencies should give these new radios an effective radius of up to 30 miles. That's a huge economic difference to a WISP installing radios.

Personal/portable devices are restricted to 100 milliwatts EIRP (a milliwatt is a thousandth of a watt). I would have liked to see that number a little higher but it'll do for starters. A rough calculation with some help from my friends and a good tutorial by Barry McLarnon indicates that, in good conditions, these should be able to communicate in about a five mile radius of a fixed radio acting as a base station. These personal/portable devices are going to end up in mobile phones, in USB dongles, and built in to laptops, PDAs, and GPSes the way WiFi is today.

For the sake of comparison, 100 milliwatts is about twice the power of most laptop WiFi radios today and the power goes further than WiFi because of the characteristics of the spectrum. On the other hand, this is much less power than mobile phones are allowed to use and mobile phones do operate in similar frequencies. On the third hand—soon I'll be an economist—mobile phone usually operate at 100 milliwatts or less to preserve their batteries and avoid interfering with each other even though GSM phones are allowed a full 2 watts.

Since these devices are portable, they don't have to be installed. Going out to houses and installing radios is a huge expense for WISPs. If they can just mail you a cheap radio or count on it already being in your laptop, the price of wireless data goes down and its utility goes up because you can wander around the house, yard, or neighborhood with it. Soon (couple of years+) roaming agreements'll let you go everywhere with this connection. This is the way of the future but a few more milliwatts allowed power would help.

The fixed devices and some of the mobile devices need to know here they are. This can be accomplished with a GPS chip or an installer of a fixed device telling the device where it is; portable devices which act as clients to smarter devices don't need to know where they are; otherwise they, too, need GPS capability. GPS chips are cheap so this shouldn't be much of a problem. The devices communicate with a geo-database (which you can bid on supplying to the FCC if you want) to make sure they are not using frequencies which are in use by licensed TV stations or wireless microphones; the devices also have to register their own locations and characteristics in the database and can be shutdown or ordered to shutdown if they misbehave. All of the devices need to listen for licensed users or wireless microphones which they might be interfere with and leave them alone. This is an intentional belt and suspenders approach.

How "portable" can a fixed device be? That's an important question since fixed devices are allowed forty times as much power as portable ones. The regulations just define them as "A TVBD [nb. TV Broadband Device] that transmits and/or receives radio communication signals at a specified fixed location. Fixed TVBDs may operate as part of a system, transmitting to one or more fixed TVBDs or to personal/portable TVBDs." They obviously anticipate they might move or they wouldn't need to have a GPS in them. The receive antennas for fixed devices, however, must be outdoors and at least 10 meters above the ground while the transmit antennas may not be more than 100 meters above the ground. The latter could be a problem in an area of high trees.

So, you ask, what standard will all these devices follow? The FCC paid a fair amount of attention to the 802.22 project of the IEEE although they did not completely defer to it. NO standard is mandated which is a good thing; there is plenty of room for innovation. More on 802.22 in an upcoming post…

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Criminals Regain Control of Srizbi Botnet, Spam Volume Rising

2008-11-26T12:58:00-08:00

Experts are that the spam volumes may spike significantly over the next few days now that one of the world's largest networks of compromised computers used for blasting out junk email has been brought back to life, reports Brian Krebs of the Washington Post.

"The Srizbi botnet, a collection of more than half a million hacked PCs that were responsible for relaying approximately 40 percent of all spam sent worldwide, was knocked offline two weeks ago due to pressure from the computer security community."

Source: Paul Ferguson / SpamCop.net

Related Links:
Spam Volumes Expected to Rise with Botnet Resurrection (Washington Post, 11/26/2008)
Massive Botnet Returns from the Dead, Starts Spamming (Computerworld, 11/26/2008)
Spam is Inching Up... (Fergie's Tech Blog, 11/26/2008)

Update:
Estonian ISP Cuts Off control Servers for Srizbi Botnet (NetworkWorld, 11/27/2008)

Read full story: Washington Post

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Feds Urged to Deploy DNSSEC and Signing of the Root Zone

2008-11-25T16:04:00-08:00

Security experts and leading vendors are urging the U.S. federal government for the rapid adoption of DNSSEC and signing of the root zone. In recent weeks, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has received 30-plus comments in favor of securing DNS root zone data. These comments are from the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Society as well as ISPs and domain name operators such as PayPal, Akamai Technologies, NeuStar, Comcast and Afilias.

Read full story: Network World

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How Fast is Internet Traffic Growing?

2008-11-25T15:26:00-08:00

It depends on whose numbers you like. Andrew Odlyzko claims it's up 50-60% over last year, a slower rate of growth than we've seen in recent years. Odlyzko's method is flawed, however, as he only looks at public data, and there is good reason to believed that more and more traffic is moving off the public Internet and its public exchange points to private peering centers. Nemertes collects at least some data on private exchanges and claims a growth rate somewhere between 50-100%.

The rate of growth matters to the ongoing debates about Internet regulation. If Odlyzko is right, the rate of growth is lower than the rate at which Moore's Law makes digital parts faster and cheaper, so no problem, routine replacement of equipment will keep up with demand (leaving out the analog costs that aren't reduced by Moore's Law.) If Nemertes is right, user demand outstrips Moore's Law and additional investment is needed in network infrastructure. Increased investment needs to be covered by government subsidies or by the extraction of additional value from the networks by their owner/operators. Subsidy isn't going to happen while the economy teeters on the edge of collapse, so the high growth conclusion argues against regulations designed to preserve the legacy service model. It's a vital question.

A couple of new data points emerged this week. Switch and Data, operator of PAIX public exchange points in Palo Alto and New York, says its traffic grew 112% last year:

International networks are making the decision to peer in the United States to reduce transit time between countries and accelerate the performance of U.S. and other global websites in their home markets. This is important due to the explosive growth of Web 2.0 with its bandwidth intensive websites for social networking, rich digital content, and business software applications. Exchanging traffic directly between content and end user networks also significantly reduces Internet transit expense which has been a rapidly growing cost for companies as their traffic volumes soar.

At the Switch and Data New York peering center, traffic was up an astonishing 295%.

Combining these numbers with what we know about the Content Delivery Networks that deliver as much as half of the Internet's traffic, I think we can reasonably conclude that comprehensive measurement of Internet traffic would support the theory that traffic still grows at an increasing rate. One side effect of the increased use of CDNs and private peering is less certainty about the overall state of Internet traffic. Studies confined to public data are less and less useful, as many researchers have been saying for years.

At any rate, there's considerable uncertainty about this question at the moment, which argues that the Internet needs a Nate Silver to pierce the fog of conflicting polls.

Network inventor Richard Bennett originally posted this article to his Broadband Politics blog.

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Net Neutrality, Policy & Regulation

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Does Your House Need a Tail?

2008-11-25T13:39:00-08:00

Thus far, the debate over broadband deployment has generally been between those who believe that private telecom incumbents should be in charge of planning, financing and building next-generation broadband infrastructure, and those who advocate a larger role for government in the deployment of broadband infrastructure. These proposals include municipal-owned networks and a variety of subsidies and mandates at the federal level for incumbents to deploy faster broadband.

Tim Wu and Derek Slater have a great new paper out that approaches the problem from a different perspective: that broadband deployments could be planned and financed not by government or private industry, but by consumers themselves. That might sound like a crazy idea at first blush, but Wu and Slater do a great job of explaining how it might work. The key idea is "condominium fiber," an arrangement in which a number of neighboring households pool their resources to install fiber to all the homes in their neighborhoods. Once constructed, each home would own its own fiber strand, while the shared costs of maintaining the "trunk" cable from the individual homes to a central switching location would be managed in the same way that condominium and homeowners' associations currently manage the shared areas of condos and gated communities. Indeed, in many cases the developer of a new condominium tower or planned community could lay fiber along with water and power lines, and the fiber would be just one of the shared resources that would be managed collectively by the homeowners.

If that sounds strange, it's important to remember that there are plenty of examples where things that were formerly rented became owned. For example, fifty years ago in the United States no one owned a telephone. The phone was owned by Ma Bell and if yours broke they'd come and install a new one. But that changed, and now people own their phones and the wiring inside their homes, with your phone company owning the cable outside the home. One way to think about Slater and Wu's "homes with tails" concept is that it's just shifting that line of demarcation again. Under their proposal, you'd own the wiring inside your home and the line from you to your broadband provider.

Why would someone want to do such a thing? The biggest advantage, from my perspective, is that it could solve the thorny problem of limited competition in the "last mile" of broadband deployment. Right now, most customers have two options for high-speed Internet access. Getting more options using the traditional, centralized investment model is going to be extremely difficult because it costs a lot to deploy new infrastructure all the way to customers' homes. But if customers "brought their own" fiber, then the barrier to entry would be much lower. New providers would simply need to bring a single strand of fiber to a neighborhood's centralized point of presence in order to offer service to all customers in that neighborhood. So it would be much easier to imagine a world in which customers had numerous options to choose from.

The challenge is solving the chicken-and-egg problem: customer owned fiber won't be attractive until there are several providers to choose from, but it doesn't make sense for new firms to enter this market until there are a significant number of neighborhoods with customer-owned fiber. Wu and Slater suggest several ways this chicken-and-egg problem might be overcome, but I think it will remain a formidable challenge. My guess is that at least at the outset, the customer-owned model will work best in new residential construction projects, where the costs of deploying fiber will be very low (because they'll already be digging trenches for power and water).

But the beauty of their model is that unlike a lot of other plans to encourage broadband deployment, this isn't an all-or-nothing choice. We don't have to convince an entire nation, state, or even city to sign onto a concept like this. All you need is a neighborhood with a few dozen early-adopting consumers and an ISP willing to serve them. Virtually every cutting-edge technology is taken up by a small number of early adopters (who pay high prices for the privilege of being the first with a new technology) before it spreads to the general public, and the same model is likely to apply to customer-owned fiber. If the concept is viable, someone will figure out how to make it work, and their example will be duplicated elsewhere. So I don't know if customer-owned fiber is the wave of the future, but I do hope that people start experimenting with it.

You can check out their paper here. You can also check out an article I wrote for Ars Technica this summer that is based on conversations with Slater, Wu, and other pioneers in this area.

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Canadian Report Tells ISPs to Deal with Hate Sites

2008-11-25T09:45:00-08:00

A report calling for reforms to Canada's Human Rights Commission is calling for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to form their own monitoring body to more speedily deal with hate material hosted on their servers.

The report calls for the Human Rights Act to be amended to remove provisions that have the government body censor hate speech, while at the same time calling for ISPs to invoke their terms of service to knock down hate websites.

The major Internet service providers (ISPs) should consider the creation of a hate speech complaint line and the establishment of an advisory body, composed of individuals with expertise in hate speech law, that would give its opinion as to whether a particular website hosted by an ISP has violated section 13 of the CHRA or the "hate propaganda" provisions of the Criminal Code.

If this body were to decide that the complaint is well founded, the ISP host would then shut down the site on the basis of its user agreement with customers.

There is a more complete write-up on the Telecom Trends blog.

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More under: Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation

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Facebook Wins $800M Against Spammer. So What?

2008-11-25T08:09:00-08:00

In a widely reported court case, Facebook won an $800M default judgment and injunction against a Montreal man named Adam Guerbuez, who has a long and sordid history. But it probably won't make any difference.

The problem is that he's in Canada. The $800M is for violations of the CAN SPAM act, but Canada doesn't have any laws comparable to CAN SPAM. (Indeed, they have no laws against spam at all, other than the weakly enforced PIPEDA privacy law.) This means that should Facebook try to enforce the injunction in Quebec, he'd have a reasonable shot arguing that what he did wasn't against Canadian law, hence it's not collectible.

Facebook's original complaint also invoked Federal and state computer tampering laws, but the judgment doesn't refer to them. The judgment also enjoins Guerbuez from ever using Facebook again, so if he does, Facebook can go back to court, get him cited for contempt, and try to enforce that in Canada. They'd have a better chance doing that, but who knows how long it will take.

As has become increasingly apparent, the key to legal success against spammers is close international cooperation, since the various pieces of illegal spamming operations, botnet infections, botnet spamming, order collection, and making and delivering goods are often spread all over the world. You'd expect Canada and the US to work well together here, but for some reason, the coordination so far has been less than impressive.

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More under: Law, Spam

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High-Profile Botnet Shutdowns Giving Rise to Virtual Malware Next Year, Experts Predict

2008-11-25T07:51:00-08:00

Virus writers are likely to unleash increasingly sophisticated strains of malware next year in an attempt to bounce back from some high-profile botnet shutdowns in 2008, according to new predictions from managed security provider MessageLabs.

The company predicted that hackers will launch new attacks in which malware will exist as a virtualisation layer running directly on the hardware and undiscoverable by the operating system.

Read full story: VNUnet

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