February, 2008

Overheard: ISPs are not the Internet police

The industry’s trade body, the ISPA, has spent months in discussions with music and movie companies about ways of preventing illegal filesharing, but buoyed by recent success in France, the major record labels and Hollywood studios have lobbied the government hard for faster action. Richard Wray, Filesharing law ‘unworkable’

If you asked yourself “What recent success in France?” like I did, here you go.  Short version? There are less than a dozen ISPs in France. All the stakeholders got together and agreed that service providers in France will issue warning messages to customers who are downloading files illegally — and if the customer ignores the message, he loses Internet access.  An independent authority, supervised by a judge, will be in charge.  

Overheard: Flow control

The price of memory has decreased to the point where it is now possible to maintain flow state at the input port rather than trying to control flows at the output queue. Larry Roberts as quoted in Jim Duffy’s article ‘Net pioneer Roberts touts ‘Fast Flow Routing’

 Larry Roberts is one of the designers and developers of the ARPANET. He also founded Anagran, a company that sells the Anagran FR-1000 Flow Router.  The list price for the FR-1000 is $70,000.

According to the Anagran website:

Conventional wisdom for the past 40 years had concluded that while potentially enormously powerful, flow technology was too expensive to implement in a commercial product due to the amount of memory required to maintain state information on every flow. However, the steep and rapid decline in memory cost over the past decade has actually made keeping flow state virtually insignificant from a cost standpoint. In fact, flow technology is not just feasible, but is now an extremely cost-effective and efficient way to optimize flows.

Had to look it up: A flow is a single meaningful end-to-end activity over the network.

Video: The technology of spying

 Retired AT&T technician Mark Klein explains why the NSA has to spy on everybody.

Overheard: IC3

The mission of the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is “to serve as a vehicle to receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints regarding the rapidly expanding arena of cyber crime.”

The IC3 gives the victims of cyber crime a convenient and easy-to-use reporting mechanism that alerts authorities of suspected criminal or civil violations. For law enforcement and regulatory agencies at the federal, state, local, and international level, IC3 provides a central referral mechanism for complaints involving Internet related crimes.

Overheard: Dry Martini pseudowires

One of the earliest drivers for pseudowire standards came from the need to run virtual circuit services such as frame relay and ATM over IP.Tom Nolle, Pseudowires: Reality vs. Hype

I need to read more about how pseudowires fit into Cisco’s AToM (Any Transport over MPLS.)  Luca Martini is now an exec at Cisco.  Here’s more about ”Dry Martini.” 

Where the original Martini pseudowire work was intended primarily for transparent LAN services and virtual LAN services over the WAN, Dry Martini was expected to map Layer 2 services over optical wavelengths, ATM virtual circuits, Sonet cross-connects or other transport options, without requiring MPLS going out to endpoints. Ironically enough, although the work was an extension to MPLS, it eliminated the need to use Layer 3 MPLS to the client. As a result, Dry Martini became known as Transport MPLS.

Overheard: Vishing for dollars

“Do we really need another fish-related buzzword? I’m beginning to wonder if the security community will ever find another classification of security problems that doesn’t involve the act of feeding oneself. I can’t decide which is worse, this or spear phishing. I suppose it’s the latter, as it’s often used incorrectly to describe any targeted email attack - even those not attempting to coax PII out of hapless users. Once we get into crustaceans and invertebrates, I quit.” Michael Cloppert , Vishing

Let’s see…there’s phishing, spear phishing, SMiSHing, Rock Phish and now vishing. Did I miss any?

Overheard: A new meaning for “power walking”

A new energy-capturing knee brace can generate enough electricity from walking to operate a portable GPS locator, a cell phone, a motorized prosthetic joint or an implanted neurotransmitter. With each stride the leg accelerates and then decelerates, using energy both for moving and braking. It’s sort of like the way that some hybrid-electric cars produce electricity from braking. Randolph E. Schmid, Device generates power from a knee’s swing

(Photo Credit: Greg Ehlers/Simon Fraser University)

Overheard: Goodbye Netscape

In the unlikely event that you know someone who is still using Netscape, this would be a good time to point him or her towards Firefox, Safari, Opera, OmniWeb, or Internet Explorer 7, depending on the OS. And as you surf the ‘Net on March 1, stop and observe a moment of silence for the passing of what was once a hallowed name on the Internet. Eric Bangeman, AOL ending all support for Netscape on March 1

Even though users can still download Netscape 9, AOL will no longer provide any support at all for the browser. That includes security patches and bug fixes, too. AOL recommends fans of Netscape turn to Firefox, and if they’re especially nostalgic for the Netscape look and feel, install the Netscape theme and extensions for the popular open-source browser.

Overheard: Crowd-sourcing security with PhishTank and OpenDNS

We proved the success of this model with PhishTank. People-powered security is absolutely the best approach to tackling Internet security issues. David Ulevitch, as quoted in Free Web Filtering Service Taps User Input

OpenDNS — which boasts nearly 4 million users worldwide — already has created nearly 40 different categories of Websites for its new Web filtering service. Among some of these categories are adware, alcohol, auctions, blogs, chat, drugs, ecommerce/shopping, gambling, malware, P2P/file sharing, weapons, and webmail

Overheard: Search industry uses every part of the pig but the squeal

It was said of the Chicago stockyards that they used every part of the pig except the squeal. The same can be said of the Internet search industry. Cameron Sturdevant, Redirecting Aging DNS Infrastructure