That's a cute response, David. I think everyone knows that I speak for
myself alone, and I shared your reaction to the Comcast system for its
educational value. Your reaction indicates that there is a segment of
the net neutrality movement that hates the ISPs not for what they do,
but for what they are; any attempt to placate this element by good
behavior is doomed to fail.
You raise an interesting objection on the Marxism front. Your thinking
isn't Marxist, of course. Marxism is an attempt to construct a
scientific study of society and make structural adjustments in the
interest of equity. Whether one agrees with the program or not, it's
intellectually rigorous and respectable. I think your critiques of the
modern Internet service provider are more religious than economic, so
you're more like the Amish than the Marxists. Amish accept technical
progress up to a certain point - handsaws and horse-drawn carriages are
fine - but reject the automobile and electricity. This is analogous to
your end-to-end doctrine, which seeks to curb experimentation in network
services beyond "best-effort" delivery. Curiously, the Amish seem to be
accepting the cell phone.
Your comment that the Internet is not designed for botnet notification
and removal is true, however: The Internet as we know it doesn't have a
mechanism for authenticated personal communication. This is one of the
problems that Comcast needs to address in the botnet mitigation system.
It turns out that the notification part may be harder than the detection
part, and that's a sad commentary on the Internet's design. If we were
designing a network today, it strikes me that authenticated
communication would be one of the first things to do. Maybe Comcast
should use SMS to notify customers when they're infected since the
Internet isn't quite up to the task.
So there you are David, standing out on a limb. Vint made a perfectly
sensible comment on the system, highlighting the weakness in the
notification chain, and you're yelling "DPI! Evil!" after Jason said
there's no DPI to it. Sad.
RB
[ All right boys and girls. Nap time.
This thread is closed for now.
-- Lauren Weinstein
NNSquad Moderator ]
- - -
David P. Reed wrote:
I'd be interested if Yoo, Livingood, Woundy and Day are planning to
stand behind Bennett's words and statements. In fact, I'd be really
interested to invite Brian Roberts into this discussion to understand
how well Bennett represents his company's interests.
On 10/10/2009 06:08 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:
This explains a lot: the Internet was designed to work according to
the general principle that every attached computer must host botnet
services, whether it wants to or not, and anyone who messes with that
principle is a threat to the revolution who must be sanctioned and
criticized.
I said nothing of the sort. In particular,
a) the point was about the Internet Access Provider in question
undertaking to spy on traffic, perform arbitrary (statistically
unverified and quasi-secret) analyses that have no evidentiary value,
no scientific "false positive" "false negative" etc. value - the
studies that would justify their probative value is not presented.
b) I said nothing about the attached computers, certainly nothing
about what they "must" do. In fact, if anything, Comcast is imposing
restrictions on what they "must" do or not do. It's similar in kind
to saying users must not run "servers".
c) I said nothing about a "threat to the revolution", "sanctions". I
did say that I did not think the implementation and mechanism were
either necessary (in the sense of being the only or one of the best)
solutions, or the proper role of Comcast. It *is* quite interesting
that the reference to "the revolution" etc. is an attempt to paint my
comment as political ideology. That was called "red-baiting" in the
McCarthy era. It still is used that way by some. In any case, I'm
sure your fans enjoy it, Richard.
Naively, I once thought the Internet was designed to work in the
interests of all its users, and now I discover that some users are
more important than others: the Internet was designed to host botnets.
Actually, it was designed to show how to provide connectivity across
networks and across administrative domains, providing a universal
overlay over a wide variety of networks. The result (which was the
hope of the concept, not the particular implementation, though it
worked better than expected) was that a wide variety of really cool
uses were invented that depended on a universal, transparent,
"neutral" network.
As a metaphor, it is kind of like "free speech" and "free assembly",
indeed. It isn't the same thing.
You heard it here from the inventor of UDP, end-to-end arguments, and
Internet addressing.
Actually, I said it as a human being. I didn't *invent* those things.
In each case, a group of thoughtful engineers and thinkers produced
the ideas, honed them, discussed them, wrote about them, and made them
work. They worked and work *quite well*, and I have certainly pointed
to them repeatedly as good ideas. Do I think they are the only ideas
- hardly. However, I think they set a standard for comparison of new
ideas, just as the Bell System technology set a standard of comparison
for communications engineering when I started on this.
Being accused of being an ideologue *by an ideologue* is a curious
experience.
Thanks for clearing that up, David.
Since you created what you claim I said out of the "whole cloth" - I
doubt it was clear for anyone else. But in your own paranoid mind, I
guess you've created some "clarity". I wish it well.
RB
David P. Reed wrote:
I don't see where Comcast is being transparent about *how* they do
this, or giving customers a chance to opt-in or -out.
If I send a lot of email, why does that make me a "bot"? Maybe I
just send a lot of email.
If the contents of my communications are being "scanned", why is
that legal? Why does Comcast care?
I might choose (if it were explained to me what was happening and
what the risks are to my privacy or being accused of a crime or
hauled off as a "suspected child pornographer" because I sent
pictures of my naked child) to have this service, or not.
But to be honest, in most markets, Comcast is the only real choice,
and imposing their "features" on me might not be what I want, even
if they "market" it as a *good thing*. If there were serious
competition (multiple providers, and no special "franchise" deals
with local governments that block new competitors, perhaps customers
would have a choice. However, most do not have other choice for
highspeed Internet, except Hobson's: "take that or nothing at all").
I'm really not impressed by these moves by Comcast. Livingood
already sent out an email saying that they redirect DNS service to a
service that sends certain names to hosts that do not have those
names registered, but which will respond with advertising-only
websites.
This is not the way the Internet is designed to work.
Comcast supposedly cleaned up its act. Now it's backsliding -
forcing secret and invasive services on customers. On day one,
they will "love it" (especially in the Comcast-authored press release).
[ I am personally willing to give Comcast the benefit of the
doubt for the moment on this project and see where it leads.
It could potentially be useful, but it would also be easy for
Comcast to overplay its hand.
A number of possible issues:
- How intrusive will monitoring be? Will packet payloads be
scanned?
If so, this likely is immediately a serious privacy problem.
- How often will their scanning operations trigger firewall
or other protective alerts that users already have
installed?
- False positives? Non-evil bots and other innocent
applications falsely categorized as evil bots?
- Legit e-mail sending daemons categorized as spam senders?
Notifications: The implication is that they plan a browser pop
up. That may mean interfering directly with the TCP/IP
stream. True, this shouldn't happen frequently to any given
user for such security notices, but once Comcast has such a
capability (if that is indeed their methodology) the
inclination to use it for other less critical purposes as well
could be strong.
I think the success of this project will depend largely on how
transparent Comcast is about exactly what they're doing and
how they react to any problems that their system may cause.
If Comcast takes a "We can't tell you exactly what we're doing
because that would reveal too much to the bad guys" approach
then we potentially could have a significant dilemma on our
hands.
-- Lauren Weinstein
NNSquad Moderator ]
--
Richard Bennett
Research Fellow
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Washington, DC
