News From The Picket Line
Yesterday’s ‘Net blackout was actually covered by the media, but their articles show that they don’t really understand what the blackout was all about.
Tina at the Agonist featured a USA Today report that had this paragraph as an explanation of the event: “Technology companies staged an online blackout to protest two related bills that would crack down on websites that use copyrighted materials and sell counterfeit goods.”
There are plenty of laws to deal with rogues web sites, but they aren’t apparently enough for the media conglomerates. The basic reason for opposing the laws is that the implementation would cost people a lot of money to break the basic structure of the ‘Net. Technical people tend to oppose doing expensive things that make matters worse.
The BBC had a Viewpoints section with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, Michael O’Leary of the MPAA, and Steve Tepp of the US Chamber of Commerce.
The basic claim from the conglomerates is that they can’t do anything about foreign web sites. That might be more believable if the BBC wasn’t also carrying a story about the Megaupload case. Apparently the US DoJ didn’t have a problem arresting a couple of people in New Zealand and closing a Hong Kong based site, so what is the real purpose of SOPA/PIPA?
If I were of a suspicious mind, I might think it sounds like an opportunity for the media companies to extort money from sites, with a threat to close them down if the money wasn’t forthcoming … but we all know they would never do anything like that ……
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As I mentioned on my site, Germany has a somewhat similar law to handle online piracy within Germany, which allows independent lawyers to file copyright infringement claims on behalf of copyright owners, where this is exactly what has happened — lawyers file bogus claims in order to extort money out of web site owners. SOPA/etc. set up a similar system here — the only way to get your domain name back is to sue, and in many cases it’d be cheaper to pay the extortion money than to sue.
As for actual pirates, they’re likely to go darknet if something like SOPA passes — i.e., remove themselves from the domain name system altogether. The technology to do this already exists (comment: I know Java. Just saying) but requires significant scale to make it perform adequately, scale which has not been forthcoming because Bittorrent etc. are faster (for now) and easier to use. SOPA etc. won’t make a bit of difference insofar as piracy is concerned. Which makes you wonder whether the entertainment industry is really that stupid, or whether something else is going on…
Hmm, testing one two three, is this darknet on? 😈
“If I were of a suspicious mind, I might think it sounds like an opportunity for the media companies to extort money from sites, with a threat to close them down if the money wasn’t forthcoming…”
I assumed that as a given. I also assumed Badtux’s parallel with Germany as a given. For many of us with limited assets, the threat of a lawsuit is enough to shut us down, even if what we’re doing is completely copyright-legal.
But apart from the obvious motivations, I believe there is a strong desire on the part of Big Media to control this “series of tubes” that they don’t understand, and to shut down a major competitor. (How many evenings do you spend at the movies in the theaters? OK, now how many do you spend in front of a computer?) And they really don’t give a flying f^<k about any rights (speech, petition, [virtual] assembly) you may claim the First Amendment gives you. To them, this is simply a matter of power and money.
Badtux has far more expertise than I in the matter, but from my own knowledge, I can imagine that in the very tall protocol stack that is the Web, a stealth layer might be inserted, high enough in the stack to serve to transmit and receive content (legal or otherwise), but low enough not to be readily visible from common tools like a browser. Anyone who is serious enough about piracy will hire IT people who can perform that insertion.
But the real issue is motivation. I believe it was Jerry Pournelle who once said something to the effect that when the price of software (I might add "or media") drops to about the cost of a good hardbound book, piracy will vanish. I believe that's a bit of wishful thinking, but I do think it would reduce the motive of RIAA and MPAA to push for draconian anti-piracy laws that give them effective control over the 'net. Until that price drop happens, they will just have to watch the freest of free markets at work…
First off, there is a frequent visitor who almost never arrives via the ‘official channels’, and several occasional visitors who show up from ‘unknown areas’, and that doesn’t even include all of the spooks I’ve hung around with. The Internet was initially designed to survive a nuclear event, so there is a lot of redundancy built into the structure and ‘service roads’ that are available if you know they are there.
Between the price of movie tickets and the price of ‘official’ DVDs the conglomerates are making piracy a paying concern. When they use Asian factories that pay below-subsistence wages, they are making their products available for copying.
The conglomerates created the problem, and they could solve it, but they won’t do it, because it would mean changing, and they would rather die than change. They will end up in bankruptcy, but it will be a result of their own incompetence and resistance to change, just like Eastman Kodak.
Actually, the Internet was *not* initially designed to survive a nuclear event. The thought wasn’t even on the roadmap until the Reagan years when the ARPANET researchers looked in alarm at the nut at the top and thought, OMG, what happens to our ARPANET if the bomb goes off?! (The answer — and I’ve read the paper, which is widely available in certain circles — is “Nothing good”, the terrestrial phone network would have survived better than the ARPANET of that era). Even then, the original NFSNET de-militarization of the network put pretty much all inter-carrier traffic through MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST, either of which would have been taken out by an atomic bomb on a strategic target and taken out most of the network with them though by 1992 that really wasn’t an issue anymore . It wasn’t until the widespread commercialization of the Internet in the late 1990’s with the explosion of private peering points, BGP, etc., that the Internet really became robust enough to survive a nuclear event.
But back to the issue of eliminating piracy on the Internet, governments can’t even eliminate spam, and spam is open over-the-air transmission of TCP packets via hoary old 1970’s telnet protocol directly from one computer to another, no encryption, no deception involved in the originating computer or destination computer. If all the efforts of thousands of researchers can’t stop spam, which is theoretically a *much* easier target to take out than the “black” sites, how in the world do they think they’re going to take out the “black” sites? This DNS hack certainly won’t do the job. It’s the sort of thing that the hackers who create the software behind these “black” sites would simply view as a challenge and figure a way to route around, and there’s some ways of doing this which simply are impossible to stop once you have sufficient scale…
And regarding ways of doing that, well. Time to practice my Java on non-work projects some more, heh.
I should have been clearer.
First off the problem that the project actually solved was communications during a nuclear exchange, but it was not related to physical destruction. The real problem was the effect of a nuclear detonation on radio communications. The wired system was the test bed for different techniques, some of which were integrated into the military communications system before it switched to reliance on satellites.
The Northern Lights are nice, but radio communications turn to crap when they are visible. Even when they aren’t active, communications in the HF to LVHF bands that the military used for primary communication in the period after World War II were really unreliable in the Arctic, when the early warning system was deployed.
You would see the problem instantly if you looked at diagram of the system, because you learned the solution, even though you work with wired networks and this was a radio system.
Frankly, I think the biggest hurdle was getting the military to accept the concept of going around obstacles, rather than attempting to attack them. One of the essentially unclassified things we did in the Arctic was study radio propagation and various techniques for dealing with the problems. Once they figured out about routing, things got significantly better.
The Fail-Safe system required communications, so this was a top priority, and the work on what became the ‘Net pointed at the interim solution which is still there now that everything has primarily switched to satellites.
The fact that the ‘test bed’ didn’t actually have a military application is the reason it was available to become what it is today. It was the concepts, not the physical structure that was important.
That should be the new slogan to combat these things – End SPAM, and then get back to us.
From reading the paper on “what happens to the Internet if there’s a nuclear explosion?” it appears that there was a parallel hardline system that was based on telco protocols rather than on Internet protocols that *was* basically nuke-proof. Telco protocols have some interesting characteristics… they have delivery guarantees, performance guarantees, and are based on virtual circuits from point A to point B rather than on packet switching. In short, they’re much better suited for the military’s needs — if your fighter needs to get redirected in mid-air to intercept a Soviet bomber, that information needs to get to you *now*, not whenever a packet manages to wend its way through a packet switching network. My guess is that this is one reason why DARPA shrugged and let the ARPANET be privatized, it wasn’t useful for their purposes.
It actually makes you wonder about the Bell System, Western Electric, Bell Labs, and some of the things that were happening to the POTS world at that time that had the coincidental side-effect of making the network much more robust, perhaps even robust enough to survive a nuclear blast at least for some functionality (because virtual circuits could be re-established via a different route if one node went black, and could be prioritized, it would theoretically be possible to re-establish communications via a different route even though the majority of people were locked out of the system so that high priority traffic could use the few remaining backbone connections). The Internet didn’t reach any similar level of robustness until the early ‘oughts after all the private peering arrangements came to fruition. And even there, because traffic isn’t prioritized on the Internet, taking out a couple of backbones basically will render the network so slow as to be useless…
The military assumption was always that wired systems could be taken out, which is why they relied on radio networks. The problem was really one of automating the radio networks.
The military had wired systems [The Air Force was The Phone Company in Alaska for decades, because they built and maintained those systems for their own use, and then opened up excess capacity for civilian use. Private enterprise wasn’t interested.] They are generally used for unclassified voice communications, with a few exceptions.
Most of the characteristic features of the ‘Net aren’t used by the military, which is why the military has been so bad at Internet security. People are just to used to having everything sent encrypted automatically by the transmitters, and decrypted by the receivers, with automatic checks to ensure the message was received correctly.
Actually, after initial launch and a flight vector, there is minimal communication in the American system, while the Soviet air defense forces needed constant communication to find a target. Soviet aircraft didn’t have a lot of navigational aids to make it more difficult for defections. All navigators were KGB, and they were only ones with accurate maps. Very strange way to run an air force. Their command and control was extremely vulnerable because of their overly centralized system.