Re: a record?
On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 12:01:00AM +0100, Peter Dambier wrote: Moving sshd from port 22 to port 137, 138 or 139. Nasty eh? don't do that! Lots of (access) isps around the world (esp here in Europe) block those ports (in and out), so if you ever need emergency access to your system from a network you don't know, you'll find yourself blocked. Kind Regards, Frank Louwers -- Openminds bvbawww.openminds.be Tweebruggenstraat 16 - 9000 Gent - Belgium
Re: [Latest draft of Internet regulation bill]
--On November 14, 2005 11:04:46 AM -0500 Sean Donelan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Blaine Christian wrote: We are talking about an infrastructure that does not lend itself very well to market forces. In many places FFTH and/or DSL from a single carrier are becoming the only options. I would not count a 500ms satellite hop as an option grin. The cable industry claims 97% of the households passed in the US. Why don't you consider it an option? Many would argue that ICP+ILEC == Aforementioned duopoly. IOW, if the only choices are the local ILEC and the local Franchise Cable Operator (Incumbant Cable Provider) then you still have a very limited set of market forces that can be brought to bear. True competition requires the ability for multiple providers to enter into the market, including the creation of new providers to seize opportunities being ignored by the existing ones. If two companies can act as gatekeeper for the entire market in a given area, that is not an environment where market forces carry much meaning. Owen -- If this message was not signed with gpg key 0FE2AA3D, it's probably a forgery. pgpU6hdIydiqj.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: the iab simplifies internet architecture!
On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Randy Bush wrote: It's a two way street; vendors need to listen to the ops folks. because they want to sell their equipment and software to the operators? yes, including improving (in various ways) their existing equipment and software to make the customer happier. Ops folks need to participate in the IETF. because they want to sell what? clue? seems unmarketable. So that they can affect the protocols that are going to be implemented at a stage where they can still be modified to suit their needs, scenarios, requirements, etc. Options for changing the protocols are somewhat more limited (though not zero) when the specs and code (those that don't address the needs of a particular set of operators as-is, in any case) have already shipped. -- Pekka Savola You each name yourselves king, yet the Netcore Oykingdom bleeds. Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings
What do we mean when we say competition? (was: Re: [Latest draft of Internet regulation bill])
--- Owen DeLong [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
True
competition requires the ability
for multiple providers to enter into the market,
including the creation
of new providers to seize opportunities being
ignored by the existing ones.
Technically, lots of other providers CAN enter the
market - it's just very expensive to do so. If there
are customers who are not receiving service from one
of the incumbent providers, a third party is certainly
welcome to {dig a trench | build wireless towers | buy
lots of well-trained pigeons for RFC 1419 access} and
offer the services to the ignored customers.
The problem is that the capital expenditures required
in doing so are very, very high, and most companies
don't see the profit in doing so.
If two companies can act as gatekeeper for the
entire market in a given
area, that is not an environment where market forces
carry much meaning.
Actually, here's where I'd disagree: market forces are
exactly the thing which is keeping other providers
OUT. It's too expensive for them to buy their way
into these areas, and during all of the time when
access was mandated to be (relatively) cheap by law,
very few third parties actually built their own
infrastructure all the way to homes. There are some
competitive cable plants in some cities (I remember
Starpower/RCN doing this in DC), but I'm not aware of
any residential phone providers who built all the way
out to houses exclusively on their own infrastructure.
This IS the market at work. If you want it to be
different, what you want is more, not less regulation.
That may or may not be a good thing, but let's just
be very clear about it.
David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise:
http://www.listentothefranchise.com
__
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com
Re: the iab simplifies internet architecture!
Ops folks need to participate in the IETF. because they want to sell what? clue? seems unmarketable. So that they can affect the protocols that are going to be implemented at a stage where they can still be modified to suit their needs, scenarios, requirements, etc. Options for changing the protocols are somewhat more limited (though not zero) when the specs and code (those that don't address the needs of a particular set of operators as-is, in any case) have already shipped. i think ops folks have leverage in slightly different ways. for commondity products, i expect you are right. for high end products, i have found that when i ask a vendor for certain features, and am willing to give them money, they tend to treat those feaure requests with favor. features may or may not be reflected as IETF or other SDO based specifications. in fact, recent events lead me to believe that marketing groups from vendors, having done some market/customer research, are presuring the engineeering groups to push certain specs in the IETF. To have the actual customers show up at the IETF and attempt to influence the specs directly will put the engineering folks in a bind. ... believe the customer or the marketing department? if a vendor ships code that does not meet my needs or is harmful to my operations, i will either dump the vendor or encourage them to build to my needs, regardless of the IETF. --bill -- Pekka Savola You each name yourselves king, yet the Netcore Oykingdom bleeds. Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings
Re: What do we mean when we say competition? (was: Re: [Latest draft of Internet regulation bill])
Technically, lots of other providers CAN enter the
market - it's just very expensive to do so. If there
are customers who are not receiving service from one
of the incumbent providers, a third party is certainly
welcome to {dig a trench | build wireless towers | buy
lots of well-trained pigeons for RFC 1419 access} and
offer the services to the ignored customers.
Technically anything is possible, I could walk on the moon if I had
enough $$.
The problem is that the capital expenditures required
in doing so are very, very high, and most companies
don't see the profit in doing so.
That is the exact problem with a [mon|du]opoly. The incumbents drive
the price so low (because they own the network) that it drives out an
potential competition.
We don't need 8 fiber networks overlaid to every home in the US to
provide competition. We need a single high quality wholesale only
fiber network which is open to use by all carriers. I don't want
200' telephone poles down my street with 10 rows of fiber. It doesn't
make sense.
Actually, here's where I'd disagree: market forces are
exactly the thing which is keeping other providers
OUT. It's too expensive for them to buy their way
into these areas, and during all of the time when
access was mandated to be (relatively) cheap by law,
very few third parties actually built their own
infrastructure all the way to homes. There are some
competitive cable plants in some cities (I remember
Starpower/RCN doing this in DC), but I'm not aware of
any residential phone providers who built all the way
out to houses exclusively on their own infrastructure.
Again, because of the monopoly held by the incumbents keeping the
price low enough that you can't afford to build your own infrastructure.
We don't need competition in the infrastructure business, we need
competition in the bandwidth business. That can only happen if the
infrastructure is regulated, open and wholesale only. The RBOCs
should be split up into a wholesale *only* division (owns the poles,
wires, buildings,switches) and a services *retail* division (owns the
dialtone, bandwidth, customers ). The wholesale division should
sell service to the retail division at a regulated TELRIC based price
which will allow the wholesale division to make enough money to build/
maintain the best infrastructure in the world. Any competitive
service provider can buy the same services at the same price as RBOC
Retail. Regulated such that wholesale profit can't subsidize retail
services. In high density areas there may be alternate
infrastructure providers that can sell to CSPs and in rural america
there will be one infrastructure provider and many CSPs
This IS the market at work. If you want it to be
different, what you want is more, not less regulation.
That may or may not be a good thing, but let's just
be very clear about it.
More regulation of the physical infrastructure (the expensive piece)
and less regulation of the bits to foster competitive solutions and
bring along new innovations. The future innovations are not going
to revolve around new types of fiber. They will revolve around what
can be done with high bandwidth to everyone.
--
Matthew S. Crocker
Vice President
Crocker Communications, Inc.
Internet Division
PO BOX 710
Greenfield, MA 01302-0710
http://www.crocker.com
Cisco locksmith [OT]
Dear Cisco, Since your postmaster account doesn't answer (probably for good reason) and no one has noticed internally, your locksmith thingy is broke. |/opt/httpd/root/data/mmbprod/post/locksmith (expanded from: [EMAIL PROTECTED]) - Transcript of session follows - Could not open file /opt/httpd/httpd-ent/logs/locksmith 554 5.3.0 unknown mailer error 13 If anyone from Cisco is listening
Re: What do we mean when we say competition?
--- Matthew Crocker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That is the exact problem with a [mon|du]opoly. The incumbents drive the price so low (because they own the network) that it drives out an potential competition. So you're complaining that the problem with lack of competition is that the prices are too LOW? As a consumer, I'm thrilled with low price, and would only change providers for a well-defined benefit or a lower price. We don't need 8 fiber networks overlaid to every home in the US to provide competition. We need a single high quality wholesale only fiber network which is open to use by all carriers. I don't want 200' telephone poles down my street with 10 rows of fiber. It doesn't make sense. So should the government charter such a build? My understanding is that Verizon and SBC (maybe others, but I don't know about them) are currently working on doing a FTTH build at this time. Presumably, as they're private companies doing it, they'd like to be able to be the ones that obtain the primary benefit. Do you think that a municipal build/new monopoly build as you describe would be cheaper or better than what SBC or Verizon are doing? If so, you should be able to convince some cities of the math. Again, because of the monopoly held by the incumbents keeping the price low enough that you can't afford to build your own infrastructure. This is such an astounding comment that it needed to be singled out: most of the complaints about monopolies are that they artifically RAISE prices. We don't need competition in the infrastructure business, we need competition in the bandwidth business. That can only happen if the infrastructure is regulated, open and wholesale only. The RBOCs should be split up into a wholesale *only* division (owns the poles, wires, buildings,switches) and a services *retail* division (owns the dialtone, bandwidth, customers ). The wholesale division should sell service to the retail division at a regulated TELRIC based price which will allow the wholesale division to make enough money to build/ maintain the best infrastructure in the world. Any competitive service provider can buy the same services at the same price as RBOC Retail. Regulated such that wholesale profit can't subsidize retail services. In high density areas there may be alternate infrastructure providers that can sell to CSPs and in rural america there will be one infrastructure provider and many CSPs Aren't you pretty much describing the '96 telecom act? The result has been the glut of inter-city fiber, and a dearth of advanced access services at the rural/suburban edge. Saying we don't need competition in infrastructure, only in bandwidth ignores the fact that infrastructure upgrades are required to support increased bandwidth. In addition, why treat L0/1 infrastructure in a different way than L2/3 infrastructure? This IS the market at work. If you want it to be different, what you want is more, not less regulation. That may or may not be a good thing, but let's just be very clear about it. More regulation of the physical infrastructure (the expensive piece) and less regulation of the bits to foster competitive solutions and bring along new innovations. The future innovations are not going to revolve around new types of fiber. They will revolve around what can be done with high bandwidth to everyone. First, I wouldn't be so sure to rule out new improvements in fiber or other physical transmission media as important - as an example, I think the widespread adoption of 802.11 has been part of a huge shift in the way people use the Internet. That said, I agree that the biggest innovations are likely to be applications, not media. So let me take the devil's advocate position: why should prices be raised so that multiple ISPs can get a layer-2/3 connection to customers without having their own layer-1 infrastructure? Is there some service which is provided which wouldn't be cheaper/simpler to mandate that the incumbent provide? The content providers and innovators you mention should be able to work with the customers of any ISP, right? I guess what I'm saying is that competition is a virtue only when it leads to either improved or cheaper service. Do you think that there are improvements to service that alternative providers could make which justify the cost of the regulation you describe? David Barak Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: http://www.listentothefranchise.com __ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com
Re: What do we mean when we say competition? (was: Re: [Latest draft of Internet regulation bill])
The RBOCs should be split up into a wholesale *only* division (owns the poles, wires, buildings,switches) and a services *retail* division (owns the dialtone, bandwidth, customers ). The wholesale division should sell service to the retail division at a regulated TELRIC based price which will allow the wholesale division to make enough money to build/ maintain the best infrastructure in the world. This is more or less what BT has done in the UK by splitting off all the field engineering into a separate company called Openreach. UK already has had a thriving digital radio network and digital TV network for several years. They are already starting to shut down analog TV transmitters. We have lept ahead in deployment of broadband with a variety of providers in most cities. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned here? More regulation of the physical infrastructure (the expensive piece) and less regulation of the bits to foster competitive solutions and bring along new innovations. The future innovations are not going to revolve around new types of fiber. They will revolve around what can be done with high bandwidth to everyone. I doubt if even the RBOC executives understand this fundamental distinction. --Michael Dillon
Re: the iab simplifies internet architecture!
It's a two way street; vendors need to listen to the ops folks. because they want to sell their equipment and software to the operators? yes, including improving (in various ways) their existing equipment and software to make the customer happier. somehow, the vendors hear from their customers. the problem is that isp operators are a small portion of the market. so having enterprise, re, gummint, ... at nanog is good as it impacts a larger target area in the vendors. when we all agree and mount max pressure, we maybe have a 50% success ratio. Ops folks need to participate in the IETF. because they want to sell what? clue? seems unmarketable. So that they can affect the protocols that are going to be implemented at a stage where they can still be modified to suit their needs, scenarios, requirements, etc. and what success ratio have we had with this? 10%? look at the poster child for operator success at the ietf, ipv6. it took seven years to get rid of tla/nla etc. it took eight+ to get rid of site-local, yet it keeps rearing its head. and we still don't have squat for routing. randy
Anyone with clue @ Godaddy.com please hit me off-list.
Thanks. -Drew
Re: What do we mean when we say competition?
That is the exact problem with a [mon|du]opoly. The incumbents drive the price so low (because they own the network) that it drives out an potential competition. So you're complaining that the problem with lack of competition is that the prices are too LOW? As a consumer, I'm thrilled with low price, and would only change providers for a well-defined benefit or a lower price. Low prices of the monopoly is driving out viable competition. Once competition is gone the prices WILL be raised. Competition brings innovation of products and services, not just lower prices. So should the government charter such a build? My understanding is that Verizon and SBC (maybe others, but I don't know about them) are currently working on doing a FTTH build at this time. Yes Verizon/SBC are building FTTH in limited areas. They are doing it with profit from their government granted monopolies and with FCC assurances that they will be able to maintain the monopoly on new fiber builds. So, in a sense the government is chartering a FTTH build. They just are doing it in such a way as to kill competition and eventually hurt the nations economic development. Short term it is a good thing, long term it is economic suicide. Presumably, as they're private companies doing it, they'd like to be able to be the ones that obtain the primary benefit. Do you think that a municipal build/new monopoly build as you describe would be cheaper or better than what SBC or Verizon are doing? If so, you should be able to convince some cities of the math. Yes, and I have there are 4 muni fiber builds around me of which I am building a PON deployment over 2 of them. I am a *little* service provider, couple hundred megs of bandwidth, couple million $/year in revenue. I just picked up/installed my phone switch so now I can offer voice/data over the PON. So, in my small market (Western MA) I can provide a competitive service to Verizon/Comcast in certain muni- built fiber networks. I'm also a CLEC building out COs to provide ADSL2+, g.SHDSL service in areas (new products/services). It is slow going because of limited budgets but I'm having a hell of a lot of fun while doing it :) Again, because of the monopoly held by the incumbents keeping the price low enough that you can't afford to build your own infrastructure. This is such an astounding comment that it needed to be singled out: most of the complaints about monopolies are that they artifically RAISE prices. Oh, you can bet that pricing will be raised. As a monopoly you use your monopoly advantage to squash the competition. You do this by driving the price down. Once the competition is cleared from the market you are free to raise pricing at will. The only thing that is saving us at this point is 'The Act' which is systematically getting dismantled by the RBOCs. My only hope is Congress grows a pair and comes out with a sane telecom act in 2006. Aren't you pretty much describing the '96 telecom act? The result has been the glut of inter-city fiber, and a dearth of advanced access services at the rural/suburban edge. Saying we don't need competition in infrastructure, only in bandwidth ignores the fact that infrastructure upgrades are required to support increased bandwidth. In addition, why treat L0/1 infrastructure in a different way than L2/3 infrastructure? The spirit of The Act maybe but not the implementation. Congress had a good idea, they just left that damn word in there (i.e. 'impairment') which is what all of the fighting has been about. As a CLEC I am no longer impaired when I don't have access to Verizon dark fiber. So now I have to build my own which required HUGE capital, taller telephone poles, uglier streets it is impractical to have 1 fiber networks in the markets that I serve (rural, suburban). This IS the market at work. If you want it to be different, what you want is more, not less regulation. That may or may not be a good thing, but let's just be very clear about it. More regulation of the physical infrastructure (the expensive piece) and less regulation of the bits to foster competitive solutions and bring along new innovations. The future innovations are not going to revolve around new types of fiber. They will revolve around what can be done with high bandwidth to everyone. First, I wouldn't be so sure to rule out new improvements in fiber or other physical transmission media as important - as an example, I think the widespread adoption of 802.11 has been part of a huge shift in the way people use the Internet. That said, I agree that the biggest innovations are likely to be applications, not media. So let me take the devil's advocate position: why should prices be raised so that multiple ISPs can get a layer-2/3 connection to customers without having their own layer-1 infrastructure? Is there some service which is provided which
RE: a record?
Isn't it just good security practice to limit telnet/SSH access to only a few choice hosts/subnets? I know I'd never allow the 0/0 net access to a signon screen, even if it is SSH. If you're on vacation and need to access something, call your NOC, and have them temporarily allow your dynamic address for SSH. When a hacker finds an open SSH host, they think two things - This host is important to someone, and that they need more doughnuts... Chuck -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Frank Louwers Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 3:03 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: a record? On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 12:01:00AM +0100, Peter Dambier wrote: Moving sshd from port 22 to port 137, 138 or 139. Nasty eh? don't do that! Lots of (access) isps around the world (esp here in Europe) block those ports (in and out), so if you ever need emergency access to your system from a network you don't know, you'll find yourself blocked. Kind Regards, Frank Louwers -- Openminds bvbawww.openminds.be Tweebruggenstraat 16 - 9000 Gent - Belgium
Re: a record?
On Nov 15, 2005, at 12:52 PM, Church, Chuck wrote: Isn't it just good security practice to limit telnet/SSH access to only a few choice hosts/subnets? I know I'd never allow the 0/0 net access to a signon screen, even if it is SSH. If you're on vacation and need to access something, call your NOC, and have them temporarily allow your dynamic address for SSH. When a hacker finds an open SSH host, they think two things - This host is important to someone, and that they need more doughnuts... That is an excellent idea. As soon as I hire a NOC for my personal boxes, I'll get right on that. But, since I Am Not An Isp, I doubt that is going to happen soon. Remember, not every box on the Internet is supported by a whole network of resources (physical and human). -- TTFN, patrick
espanix.net gone
I can't reach http://www.espanix.net/ for a while now. And I guess that the espanix.net range accidentally has been removed from advertising ... show ip bgp 193.149.1.201 % Network not in table No one seems to transit AS6895 volounterly anymore. Maybe someone can point the espanix guys that they only see themselves these days. F.
Re: IAB and private numbering
Geoff, On Nov 13, 2005, at 9:14 AM, Geoff Huston wrote: This particular /8 allocation is described by IANA as 007/8 Apr 95 IANA - Reserved in http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4- address-space while a whois query to the ARIN database reveals: $ whois 7.0.0.0 ... RegDate:1997-11-24 Updated:1998-09-26 ... So in this case who is telling the truth? IANA or ARIN? Well, IANA's registry claims data from 4/95 and ARIN's registry claims data from 9/98. I know which I would think would be telling the truth. Would we want to change whois output to include the 'pub/priv' flag? or conflicting data flag? Nah. The right answer is to synchronize the data somehow. The data could either be replicated or a referral could be provided. Not rocket science. I think I can state authoritatively (:-)) that the IANA is aware of (at least some of) the discrepancies and has address registry data synchronization on its priority list. Rgds, -drc
RE: What do we mean when we say competition?
That is the exact problem with a [mon|du]opoly. The incumbents drive the price so low (because they own the network) that it drives out an potential competition. So you're complaining that the problem with lack of competition is that the prices are too LOW? As a consumer, I'm thrilled with low price, and would only change providers for a well-defined benefit or a lower price. Low prices of the monopoly is driving out viable competition. Once competition is gone the prices WILL be raised. I hear this claim a lot, but it's very hard to believe. Surely raising the prices will just bring the competition back. It's basically just a damned if you do, damned if you don't. If the prices are high, then monopoly is hurting the consumer. If prices are low, then monopoly is hurting the competition. Competition brings innovation of products and services, not just lower prices. Right, except this destroys your previous point. If competitors can bring innovation and not just low prices, then low prices shouldn't drive out competitors. The flip side of the everything is bad argument is that everything is good. Specifically: 1) Low prices are good for consumers. 2) High prices are good for competitors. 3) Prices don't matter that much to competitors because they can bring innovation, not just better pricing. DS
Re: IAB and private numbering
I think I can state authoritatively (:-)) that the IANA is aware of (at least some of) the discrepancies and has address registry data synchronization on its priority list. Thank you - as you are aware I've documented what I have seen in terms of discrepencies at http://draft-huston-ipv4-iana-registry.potaroo.net The /8s that merit some further consideration in terms of resolving potentially inconsistent views of the IPv4 address world include 7.0.0.0/8, 46.0.0.09/8, and 191.0.0.0/8, as well as a wealth of other smaller details. regards, Geoff
STILL Paging Google...
Still no word from google, or indication that there's anything wrong with the robots.txt. Google's estimated hit count is going slightly up, instead of way down. Why am I bugging NANOG with this? Well, I'm sure if Googlebot keeps ignoring my robots.txt file, thereby hammering the server and facilitating s pam, they're doing the same with a google other sites. (Well, ok, not a google, but you get my point.) On 11/14/05 2:18 PM, Coyle, Brian sent forth electrons to convey: Just thinking out loud... Have you confirmed the IP addresses of the Googlebot entries in your log actually belong to Google? /paranoia :) The google search URL I posted shows that google is hitting the site. There are results in there that point to pages that postdate the robots.txt that should have blocked 'em. (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awiki.fastmail.fm) On 11/14/05 2:09 PM, Jeff Rosowski sent forth electrons to convey: Are you trying to block everything except the main page? I know to block everything ... No; me too. See http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html The above page says that User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*? will block all standard-looking dynamic content, i.e. URLs with ? in them. On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Matthew Elvey wrote: Doh! I had no idea my thread would require login/be hidden from general view! (A robots.txt info site had directed me there...) It seems I fell for an SEO scam... how ironic. I guess that's why I haven't heard from google... Anyway, here's the page content (with some editing and paraphrasing): Subject: paging google! robots.txt being ignored! Hi. My robots.txt was put in place in August! But google still has tons of results that violate the file. http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi doesn't complain (other than about the use of google's nonstandard extensions described at http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html ) The above page says that it's OK that #per [[AdminRequests]] User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*?* is last (after User-agent: *) and seems to suggest that the syntax is OK. I also tried User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*? but it hasn't helped. I asked google to review it via the automatic URL removal system (http://services.google.com/urlconsole/controller). Result: URLs cannot have wild cards in them (e.g. *). The following line contains a wild card: DISALLOW: /*? How insane is that? Oh, and while /*?* wasn't per their example, it was legal, per their syntax, same as /*? ! The site as around 35,000 pages, and I don't think a small robots.txt to do what I want is possible without using the wildcard extension.
Re: What do we mean when we say competition? (was: Re: [Latest draft of Internet regulation bill])
--On November 15, 2005 6:28:21 AM -0800 David Barak [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
--- Owen DeLong [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
True
competition requires the ability
for multiple providers to enter into the market,
including the creation
of new providers to seize opportunities being
ignored by the existing ones.
Technically, lots of other providers CAN enter the
market - it's just very expensive to do so. If there
are customers who are not receiving service from one
of the incumbent providers, a third party is certainly
welcome to {dig a trench | build wireless towers | buy
lots of well-trained pigeons for RFC 1419 access} and
offer the services to the ignored customers.
The problem is that the capital expenditures required
in doing so are very, very high, and most companies
don't see the profit in doing so.
OK... Let me try this again... True competition requires
that it be PRACTICAL for multiple providers to enter the
market, including the creation of new providers to seize
opportunities being ignored by the existing ones.
If two companies can act as gatekeeper for the
entire market in a given
area, that is not an environment where market forces
carry much meaning.
Actually, here's where I'd disagree: market forces are
exactly the thing which is keeping other providers
OUT. It's too expensive for them to buy their way
into these areas, and during all of the time when
access was mandated to be (relatively) cheap by law,
very few third parties actually built their own
infrastructure all the way to homes. There are some
competitive cable plants in some cities (I remember
Starpower/RCN doing this in DC), but I'm not aware of
any residential phone providers who built all the way
out to houses exclusively on their own infrastructure.
No... Actually, the lack of market forces in the beginning
is what allows the incumbent providers to have an advantage.
The incumbent providers received huge subsidies from the
government to build the existing infrastructure, and, continue
to receive said subsidies (universal service). New providers,
OTOH, are being forced to build parallel infrastructure
and collect USF taxes while not receiving USF subsidies.
In some cases, rather than build parallel infrastructure,
they have the option of leasing infrastructure from
the incumbent providers, but, that has it's other lack-of-
market force problems.
If it were equally expensive for the existing providers and
the new providers, there would be no lack of competition.
The fact that the existing providers have an economic
advantage as a result of subsidies is not a market force,
it is the lack of a level playing field preventing
market forces from acting.
This IS the market at work. If you want it to be
different, what you want is more, not less regulation.
That may or may not be a good thing, but let's just
be very clear about it.
Nope... What I want is LESS subsidy to incumbents and
a recognition that infrastructure built with public funds
belongs to the public. Said infrastructure should be equally
open to all service providers on equal terms, regardless
of who holds the contract to maintain it.
Imagine instead of today's scenarios, an environment where
SBC didn't think they OWNed the pipes, but, instead, the
city's owned the copper in the street and contracted with
entity that doesn't sell direct end-services to maintain said
infrastructure for the city. Then, all RBOCs/ILECs/CLECs
paid the same price to the City through said entity for
the same services, whether dry copper connection, dark
fiber, OC-X, etc. The city would have a term to the contract
and would put it up for rebid periodically.
That would be market forces at work and not MORE regulation.
What we have today is an attempt to reduce regulation without
recognizing the need to correct the damage already done
by regulation.
Owen
--
If this message was not signed with gpg key 0FE2AA3D, it's probably
a forgery.
pgpgNN760pctr.pgp
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Re: [Latest draft of Internet regulation bill]
On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 11:31:17AM -0500, Sean Donelan wrote: On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Steven M. Bellovin wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sean Donelan writes: On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Blaine Christian wrote: We are talking about an infrastructure that does not lend itself very well to market forces. In many places FFTH and/or DSL from a single carrier are becoming the only options. I would not count a 500ms satellite hop as an option grin. The cable industry claims 97% of the households passed in the US. Why don't you consider it an option? Do they claim to pass 97% with two-way cable? The cable industry claims 91% of households passed with two-way cable. And zero in my area. And you can't start a telco COOP in this state since the iLEC has encouraged laws to make that not legal. The two major iLECs in this state (Verizon, SBC) are not doing their FIOS nor their Project Lightspeed in the state last i knew. So much for fancy technology. The only [major] providers that are doing high speed to the home are Comcast and Charter. Neither the local cable franchise nor the local iLEC care to service my area. There is a local WISP that just started up that covers the space where my home is.. it appears they have a single T1 so you have to hope that nobody else wants to watch some other TV episode at the same time.. (since everyone is jumping on the pay-per-view or downloadable tv bandwagon in the past few weeks/months). - jared -- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from [EMAIL PROTECTED] clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.
Re: What do we mean when we say competition?
--On November 15, 2005 7:25:54 AM -0800 David Barak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- Matthew Crocker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That is the exact problem with a [mon|du]opoly. The incumbents drive the price so low (because they own the network) that it drives out an potential competition. So you're complaining that the problem with lack of competition is that the prices are too LOW? As a consumer, I'm thrilled with low price, and would only change providers for a well-defined benefit or a lower price. I think what is really represented there is that because they own an existing network that was built with public subsidy and future entrants have no such access to public subsidy to build their own network, it reduces the costs to the incumbent provider well below those of any potential competition. Thus, faced with competition, they can afford to reduce prices until competition cannot survive, then, go back to charging whatever they think they can get away with. We don't need 8 fiber networks overlaid to every home in the US to provide competition. We need a single high quality wholesale only fiber network which is open to use by all carriers. I don't want 200' telephone poles down my street with 10 rows of fiber. It doesn't make sense. So should the government charter such a build? My understanding is that Verizon and SBC (maybe others, but I don't know about them) are currently working on doing a FTTH build at this time. Presumably, as they're private companies doing it, they'd like to be able to be the ones that obtain the primary benefit. Do you think that a municipal build/new monopoly build as you describe would be cheaper or better than what SBC or Verizon are doing? If so, you should be able to convince some cities of the math. The government should recognize that the existing build has actually been paid for mostly by public subsidy anyway and as such, should require the ILECs to split into two separate divisions. One division would be a wholesale only infrastructure delivery company that would maintain the physical infrastructure. As part of this, ownership of the physical infrastructure in place would be transferred to an appropriate local civil body (city, county, district, etc.) and said body should have an initial 5 year contract with the infrastructure portion of the ILEC to provide existing services on a provider- neutral basis (same price to all ILECs, Clecs, etc.). At the end of that 5 year contract, the maintenance of the infrastructure should be up for bid, and, if the existing ILEC infrastructure portion can't win the bid, they are out of luck. I realize there are tons of reasons this won't happen, not the least of which being that the government stupidly gave the infrastructure ownership to the ILECs in the first place and doesn't really have the authority to take it back. Again, because of the monopoly held by the incumbents keeping the price low enough that you can't afford to build your own infrastructure. This is such an astounding comment that it needed to be singled out: most of the complaints about monopolies are that they artifically RAISE prices. Right, but, faced with potential competition, they are notorious for temporarily lowering prices well below sustainable levels in order to eliminate said competition. We don't need competition in the infrastructure business, we need competition in the bandwidth business. That can only happen if the infrastructure is regulated, open and wholesale only. The RBOCs should be split up into a wholesale *only* division (owns the poles, wires, buildings,switches) and a services *retail* division (owns the dialtone, bandwidth, customers ). The wholesale division should sell service to the retail division at a regulated TELRIC based price which will allow the wholesale division to make enough money to build/ maintain the best infrastructure in the world. Any competitive service provider can buy the same services at the same price as RBOC Retail. Regulated such that wholesale profit can't subsidize retail services. In high density areas there may be alternate infrastructure providers that can sell to CSPs and in rural america there will be one infrastructure provider and many CSPs Aren't you pretty much describing the '96 telecom act? The result has been the glut of inter-city fiber, and a dearth of advanced access services at the rural/suburban edge. Saying we don't need competition in infrastructure, only in bandwidth ignores the fact that infrastructure upgrades are required to support increased bandwidth. In addition, why treat L0/1 infrastructure in a different way than L2/3 infrastructure? Nope. The '96 telecom act did nothing to take the last mile infrastructure out of the hands of the existing ILEC. This IS the market at work. If you want it to be different, what you want is more, not less regulation. That may or may not be a good thing, but let's just be very clear about it.
Re: STILL Paging Google...
Hi there, Looking at your robots.txt... are you sure that is correct? On the sites I host.. robots.txt always has: User-Agent: * Disallow: / In /htdocs or wherever the httpd root lives. Thus far it keeps the spiders away. GoogleSpider also will obey: NOARCHIVE, NOFOLLOW, NOINDEX placed within the meta tag inside of the html header. -M. With the above for robots.txt I've had no problems th Still no word from google, or indication that there's anything wrong with the robots.txt. Google's estimated hit count is going slightly up, instead of way down. Why am I bugging NANOG with this? Well, I'm sure if Googlebot keeps ignoring my robots.txt file, thereby hammering the server and facilitating s pam, they're doing the same with a google other sites. (Well, ok, not a google, but you get my point.) The above page says that User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*? will block all standard-looking dynamic content, i.e. URLs with ? in them. On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Matthew Elvey wrote: Doh! I had no idea my thread would require login/be hidden from general view! (A robots.txt info site had directed me there...) It seems I fell for an SEO scam... how ironic. I guess that's why I haven't heard from google... Anyway, here's the page content (with some editing and paraphrasing): Subject: paging google! robots.txt being ignored! Hi. My robots.txt was put in place in August! But google still has tons of results that violate the file. http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/robotcheck.cgi doesn't complain (other than about the use of google's nonstandard extensions described at http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html ) The above page says that it's OK that #per [[AdminRequests]] User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*?* is last (after User-agent: *) and seems to suggest that the syntax is OK. I also tried User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*? but it hasn't helped. I asked google to review it via the automatic URL removal system (http://services.google.com/urlconsole/controller). Result: URLs cannot have wild cards in them (e.g. *). The following line contains a wild card: DISALLOW: /*? How insane is that? Oh, and while /*?* wasn't per their example, it was legal, per their syntax, same as /*? ! The site as around 35,000 pages, and I don't think a small robots.txt to do what I want is possible without using the wildcard extension.
Re: paypal down!
On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Steven Kalcevich wrote: www.paypal.com Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, [EMAIL PROTECTED] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Works for me. Same BS splash advertising that always comes up. Damn that is annoying. Chris -- ~~~ Chris Owen~ Garden City (620) 275-1900 ~ Lottery (noun): President ~ Wichita (316) 858-3000 ~A stupidity tax Hubris Communications Inc ~ www.hubris.net ~ ~~~
RE: paypal down!
On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Steven Kalcevich wrote: www.paypal.com Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, [EMAIL PROTECTED] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Works for me. Same BS splash advertising that always comes up. Damn that is annoying. Yes, but it *is* up. Same here. Probably one of the rotation web servers had an issue or something minor. -M
RE: STILL Paging Google...
Still no word from google, or indication that there's anything wrong with the robots.txt. Google's estimated hit count is going slightly up, instead of way down. Why am I bugging NANOG with this? Well, I'm sure if Googlebot keeps ignoring my robots.txt file, thereby hammering the server and facilitating s pam, they're doing the same with a google other sites. (Well, ok, not a google, but you get my point.) Why would they read/respond on NANOG to an application problem? (seriously) -M
Re: STILL Paging Google...
Why would they read/respond on NANOG to an application problem? (seriously) I'm waiting for the GoogleBot to respond. - Nic.
Re: paypal down!
On Nov 15, 2005, at 9:45 PM, Hannigan, Martin wrote: www.paypal.com Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, [EMAIL PROTECTED] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Works for me. Same BS splash advertising that always comes up. Damn that is annoying. Yes, but it *is* up. Same here. Probably one of the rotation web servers had an issue or something minor. Or there's a chance that you've got a trojan/malware install on the computer. I had someone contact me the other day with a nearly identical complaint, Why have PayPal and eBay been down all day? They were alternately getting a 404 or 503 for those sites, but everything else worked. Their hosts file had entries for ebay, google, a number of banks, common phishing targets. Even more fun was when I deleted the hosts file, after his next reboot it pulled an updated hosts file with new working IPs from somewhere. I'm guessing the malware phishers don't have a five-nines array of redundant proxies yet. :)
RE: What do we mean when we say competition? (was: Re: [Latest draft of Internet regulation bill])
--On November 15, 2005 6:28:21 AM -0800 David Barak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK... Let me try this again... True competition requires that it be PRACTICAL for multiple providers to enter the market, including the creation of new providers to seize opportunities being ignored by the existing ones. The worse the existing provider it is, the more practical it is to compete with them. If they are providing what people want at a reasonable price, there is no need for competition. If they are not, then the it becomes practical for multiple providers to enter the market. If you assume that the cost to develop existing infrastructure is not insanely less than the cost to develop new infrastructure, the isolation from competition comes directly from the investment. For example, if Bill Gates took a few billion dollars out of his pocket and launched 80 satellites to provide wireless Internet access, it would be damn hard to compete with him if he wasn't trying to recover those few billion dollars. But if you spend a few billion, you get a few billion worth. Anyone else can spend the same amount and get the same advantage. If he already has the satellites and is providing the service other people want at a low price, then other competitors will lose. But so what? Consumers win. And competition doesn't exist to benefit the competitors. If he already has the satellites but is not providing the service other people want or isn't charging a reasonable price, or both, then anyone else can make the same infrastructure investment for a comparable cost. If he's not satisfying demand, the demand is still there, and he's just losing some of the benefits his infrastructure could be giving him. No... Actually, the lack of market forces in the beginning is what allows the incumbent providers to have an advantage. There is only a lack of market forces if the incumbent is meeting the needs of the consumers. And if they are, there is no need for a competitor. Nope... What I want is LESS subsidy to incumbents and a recognition that infrastructure built with public funds belongs to the public. Said infrastructure should be equally open to all service providers on equal terms, regardless of who holds the contract to maintain it. Imagine instead of today's scenarios, an environment where SBC didn't think they OWNed the pipes, but, instead, the city's owned the copper in the street and contracted with entity that doesn't sell direct end-services to maintain said infrastructure for the city. Then, all RBOCs/ILECs/CLECs paid the same price to the City through said entity for the same services, whether dry copper connection, dark fiber, OC-X, etc. The city would have a term to the contract and would put it up for rebid periodically. That would be market forces at work and not MORE regulation. How would governments owning the infrastructure and setting the rules not be more regulation? And how would designing a system that favors one set of business models and effectively prohibits others that would otherwise be viable not be more regulation? Competition in business models, infrastructure technology, and the like is just as important (if not more so) as competition in price and services within a given model. What happens if the government builds a copper infrastructure and someone else wants to build fiber? How can they compete with the subsidized infrastructure you propose (what else can you mean when you say the city's owned the copper)? What we have today is an attempt to reduce regulation without recognizing the need to correct the damage already done by regulation. You can't correct the damage. It's not possible. All you can do is pick winners and losers *again*. The previous chosen winners and losers don't really exist anymore in their previous form -- all you can do is more damage. DS
RE: paypal down!
On Nov 15, 2005, at 9:45 PM, Hannigan, Martin wrote: www.paypal.com Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, [EMAIL PROTECTED] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Works for me. Same BS splash advertising that always comes up. Damn that is annoying. Yes, but it *is* up. Same here. Probably one of the rotation web servers had an issue or something minor. Or there's a chance that you've got a trojan/malware install on the computer. No chance. Do you have the attributions wrong here? Even your own website says that 404's are 70% burp-factor - which I would tend to agree with for the most part. Not enough httpd spurned, reloads, bad pages, etc. http://www.404lab.com/404/yikes.asp And oddly enough, no mention of the possibility of malware. Time to update. :-) -M
Re: What do we mean when we say competition?
On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Owen DeLong wrote: I think what is really represented there is that because they own an existing network that was built with public subsidy and future entrants have no such access to public subsidy to build their own network, Some people may think public subsidy implies using taxpayer funds such as giving incentivies to companies to build factories, job training programs, re-locate corporate headquarters or even build sports stadiums. Are you refering to the exclusive franchises granted to various cable and telephone companies in parts of the country as the subsidy? Or are you refering the the High Cost Support funds which used to be implicit internal transfers in the old Bell System (not taxpayer funds), or now explicit transfers through the Universial Service Fund? Or are you referring to the US Department of Agriculture Rural Utilities Service financing which assists non-RBOC rural telephone and utility companies? Competitors have been given access to the legacy telephone copper plant (but generally not the cable coaxial plant) in most of the country. The legacy copper outside plant is quickly being replaced by post-1996 outside plant. Soon there may be little or no pre-1996 outside copper plant left. Ownership of inside wiring was transfered to the property owner a couple of decades ago. Several municipalities in the US have spent taxpayer funds, or taxpayer backed, to build a municiple outside plants. What's interesting is there is relatively little competitive activity or demand for access in locations (i.e. rural) with the largest government incentives, while there is a lot of demand in areas (i.e. urban) which had minimimal or no government incentives and were funded by shareholders and other investors. The RBOCs and MSOs have been selling off their rural assets to other companies for any years. So what is it exactly you think taxpayer funds paid for and should now own?
RE: paypal down!
Or there's a chance that you've got a trojan/malware install on the computer. Slight correction to my earlier post - just to be clear. Not just 404's, failed pages in general. My failure scenarios were wider than 404. -M
RE: paypal down!
It appears they're really down. I just tried 'em, and the IP address that comes back really does resolve to Ebay's holdings Or someone scammed a whole /19 to make the whole thing up, in which case I have to hand it to 'em! Compromising one host is dandy, but a whole netblock is pretty damned festive! (AS11643 is reporting it, which again appears to be correct) Perhaps it is what it is and they're having karma problems. Scott -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kevin Day Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 10:58 PM To: Hannigan, Martin Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: paypal down! On Nov 15, 2005, at 9:45 PM, Hannigan, Martin wrote: www.paypal.com Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, [EMAIL PROTECTED] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Works for me. Same BS splash advertising that always comes up. Damn that is annoying. Yes, but it *is* up. Same here. Probably one of the rotation web servers had an issue or something minor. Or there's a chance that you've got a trojan/malware install on the computer. I had someone contact me the other day with a nearly identical complaint, Why have PayPal and eBay been down all day? They were alternately getting a 404 or 503 for those sites, but everything else worked. Their hosts file had entries for ebay, google, a number of banks, common phishing targets. Even more fun was when I deleted the hosts file, after his next reboot it pulled an updated hosts file with new working IPs from somewhere. I'm guessing the malware phishers don't have a five-nines array of redundant proxies yet. :)
RE: paypal down!
It's a server (or farm) in the rotation. First 2 tries to get to eBay and PayPal failed from home but the 3rd worked. I managed to complete a payment on items I won, so the whole process from eBay to PayPal worked without any error code after those first 2. Joe Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Scott Morris Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 10:27 PM To: 'Kevin Day'; 'Hannigan, Martin' Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: paypal down! It appears they're really down. I just tried 'em, and the IP address that comes back really does resolve to Ebay's holdings Or someone scammed a whole /19 to make the whole thing up, in which case I have to hand it to 'em! Compromising one host is dandy, but a whole netblock is pretty damned festive! (AS11643 is reporting it, which again appears to be correct) Perhaps it is what it is and they're having karma problems. Scott -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kevin Day Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 10:58 PM To: Hannigan, Martin Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: paypal down! On Nov 15, 2005, at 9:45 PM, Hannigan, Martin wrote: www.paypal.com Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, [EMAIL PROTECTED] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Works for me. Same BS splash advertising that always comes up. Damn that is annoying. Yes, but it *is* up. Same here. Probably one of the rotation web servers had an issue or something minor. Or there's a chance that you've got a trojan/malware install on the computer. I had someone contact me the other day with a nearly identical complaint, Why have PayPal and eBay been down all day? They were alternately getting a 404 or 503 for those sites, but everything else worked. Their hosts file had entries for ebay, google, a number of banks, common phishing targets. Even more fun was when I deleted the hosts file, after his next reboot it pulled an updated hosts file with new working IPs from somewhere. I'm guessing the malware phishers don't have a five-nines array of redundant proxies yet. :)
Issue AS and Subnet Announcment on BGP - Conflict with a major TelCO - 30h+ of route flapping unresolved
Hi, I know somebody that is experiencing route flapping for more than a day now and we found out 10h ago that it was due to the announcement of his subnet by a major TelCO. Once that telco contacted, we got the run around for 10h now and no willingness from their part to fix the problem immediately. We're wondering what is the proper process to make the TelCo correct their behavior and cooperate? (ARIN Conflict Resolution Process, etc ... We found nothing about this situation) Thanks. ( For fun go take a look with http://bgplay.routeviews.org/bgplay/ ) - Subnet:209.222.224.0/20 Assign to: 14102 Valid announcers: 13768, 7271, 21548 -
Re: Issue AS and Subnet Announcment on BGP - Conflict with a major TelCO - 30h+ of route flapping unresolved
On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 11:46:35PM -0500, Alain Hebert wrote: Hi, I know somebody that is experiencing route flapping for more than a day now and we found out 10h ago that it was due to the announcement of his subnet by a major TelCO. Once that telco contacted, we got the run around for 10h now and no willingness from their part to fix the problem immediately. Well, a 'normal' solution (short term) would be to announce more specific announcements of your address space, then contact said Telco's upstream providers to have your prefix filtered from their connection(s). A nicely worded (polite) email/fax would go a long way with the NOC. This is of course, if they are not returning your calls, or as you say giving you the run around. I would also try to find a sympathetic body at the telco to help to properly resolve the issue, so you can go back to announcing only your aggregate netblock. We're wondering what is the proper process to make the TelCo correct their behavior and cooperate? (ARIN Conflict Resolution Process, etc ... We found nothing about this situation) ARIN will not step in here. They allocate resources, they do not police or enforce those resources. charles
Re: Issue AS and Subnet Announcment on BGP - Conflict with a major TelCO - 30h+ of route flapping unresolved
Thanks. ( There is more interesting details but I will reserve myself. (; ) We're already working on making contact with the upstreams, but you're right I forgot about making more specific announcement. Thanks again. Charles Gucker wrote: On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 11:46:35PM -0500, Alain Hebert wrote: Hi, I know somebody that is experiencing route flapping for more than a day now and we found out 10h ago that it was due to the announcement of his subnet by a major TelCO. Once that telco contacted, we got the run around for 10h now and no willingness from their part to fix the problem immediately. Well, a 'normal' solution (short term) would be to announce more specific announcements of your address space, then contact said Telco's upstream providers to have your prefix filtered from their connection(s). A nicely worded (polite) email/fax would go a long way with the NOC. This is of course, if they are not returning your calls, or as you say giving you the run around. I would also try to find a sympathetic body at the telco to help to properly resolve the issue, so you can go back to announcing only your aggregate netblock. We're wondering what is the proper process to make the TelCo correct their behavior and cooperate? (ARIN Conflict Resolution Process, etc ... We found nothing about this situation) ARIN will not step in here. They allocate resources, they do not police or enforce those resources. charles -- Alain Hebert[EMAIL PROTECTED] PubNIX Inc. P.O. Box 175 Beaconsfield, Quebec H9W 5T7 tel 514-990-5911 http://www.pubnix.netfax 514-990-9443
Re: paypal down!
On Nov 15, 2005, at 10:22 PM, Hannigan, Martin wrote:
No chance. Do you have the attributions wrong here? Even your own
website
says that 404's are 70% burp-factor - which I would tend to agree with
for the most part. Not enough httpd spurned, reloads, bad pages, etc.
http://www.404lab.com/404/yikes.asp
And oddly enough, no mention of the possibility of malware. Time to
update. :-)
Sorry, I guess I wasn't quite clear. No, I'm not suggesting that you
specifically have a trojan on your system(I know from your reputation
that's not happening :) ), or that I believed that malware was
definitively the cause for the original poster's problem either.
The point I was trying to make was malware does cause these exact
problems, and those attempting to support end users reporting these
problems need to keep trojans and other spyware in mind when
researching {big_important_site} is down!!!' complaints, when it
appears to be up from everywhere else you look.
One really strange example happened about 6 months ago. One of our
adult oriented customers started getting emails from people saying
that their adult site was showing up to lots of users when they tried
visiting a certain list of sites (PayPal, eBay, Google, CNN, Hotmail,
etc). These users could still access small sites fine, but when they
entered any of the larger sites in their browser, they got a rather
graphic page from porn site instead. We took down the page that the
viewers were being redirected to and put a Seeing this message
instead of the site you expected? Email us for help. After talking
to a few dozen people who wrote in, we finally figured it out. It
turns out that the common thing between all the people sending
complaints about this was that they were infected with an MSIE
Browser Helper Object that was redirecting traffic to any of these
sites to a HTTP proxy in Russia. This proxy was taking any request
and redirecting them to my client's URL. I'm guessing they were
sniffing for private info or inserting pops in the HTML or something,
and decided they were done. Why they didn't just kill the proxy
server instead of showing unsuspecting users adult materials isn't
really clear, unless it was meant to be some juvenile fun.
I'd be curious to see if anyone on the ISP side of things has made a
list of recent/common IP addresses and hostnames that malware
attempts to connect to or resolve, and looked for accesses in name
server logs and netflow records to get an idea of what percentage of
end-users end up hitting them. I'm willing to bet it's disturbingly
high.
-- Kevin
(And I can't take credit for 404lab, not my site at all) :)
Re: What do we mean when we say competition?
--- Owen DeLong [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --On November 15, 2005 7:25:54 AM -0800 David Barak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- Matthew Crocker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think what is really represented there is that because they own an existing network that was built with public subsidy and future entrants have no such access to public subsidy to build their own network, ... Sean's post correctly identified the problem with this assertion, so I won't The government should recognize that the existing build has actually been paid for mostly by public subsidy anyway and as such, should require the ILECs to split into two separate divisions. You mean the existing FIBER build was mostly paid by public subsidy? Do you have a reference for that? One division would be a wholesale only infrastructure delivery company that would maintain the physical infrastructure. As part of this, ownership of the physical infrastructure in place would be transferred to an appropriate local civil body (city, county, district, etc.) and said body should have an initial 5 year contract with the infrastructure portion of the ILEC to provide existing services on a provider- neutral basis (same price to all ILECs, Clecs, etc.). At the end of that 5 year contract, the maintenance of the infrastructure should be up for bid, and, if the existing ILEC infrastructure portion can't win the bid, they are out of luck. I don't know how familiar you are with what the government contracting process is like, but the word unpleasant comes to mind: it's long, hard, and cumbersome. Your model would substantially increase the amount of government contracting required, so you would need to be able to show a benefit to society of corresponding magnitude. Right, but, faced with potential competition, they are notorious for temporarily lowering prices well below sustainable levels in order to eliminate said competition. Are you alleging that the ILECs/RBOCs are providing services below cost? If so, call a regulator. If not, while the profits may be lower than desired by the ILEC/RBOC, it's certainlly sustainable The '96 telecom act did nothing to take the last mile infrastructure out of the hands of the existing ILEC. You are correct. However, the '96 telecom act did give lots of other companies the OPPORTUNITY to build their own last mile access. Your proposal actually drives toward a more monopolistic, regulated environment. However, for any given last-mile buildout, the people should retain title to the infrastructure(s) and management should be by a carrier-neutral party under contract to the people. (yes, practically speaking, s/people/government/, but, I use the term people to remind us that the government is supposed to be acting as our proxy for such things). If a company wants to deploy new infrastructure, they should have equal access to right-of-way to deploy it. However, such access should include a mechanism for transfer of ownership (with appropriate compensation) of said infrastructure to the people for carrier neutrality after some fixed period of time at the option of the people. So Verizon should be prohibited from building out FTTH? I assume that your approach of the Government owns all layer 1 would also include 802.11, GSM, CDMA, and all other network types, right? If not, why not? Now, the ILEC can continue to provide service at the same price, but, they no longer have a cost-basis advantage or the ability to delay, defer, interfere with CLEC installs on the same infrastructure. Any interference is currently unlawful, and all of the companies regulated under sections 271 and 272 have extensive procedures in place to prevent it. If you've got specific complaints about a specific company, you should be talking to a regulator. So, to summarize - far less than all of the ILEC/RBOC infrastructure was paid for with public funds. (as opposed to user fees), you'd argue for far greater government participation in the marketplace, and the removal of any competition for layer 0/1 services, in favor of competition at layers 2 and higher. Why is that good again? David Barak Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: http://www.listentothefranchise.com __ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: a record?
Moving sshd from port 22 to port 137, 138 or 139. Nasty eh? don't do that! Lots of (access) isps around the world (esp here in Europe) block those ports If you're going to move sshd somewhere else, port 443 is a fine choice. Rarely blocked, rarely probed by ssh kiddies. It's probed all the time by malicious web spiders, but since you're not a web server, you don't care. R's, John
RE: What do we mean when we say competition? (was: Re: [Latest draft of Internet regulation bill])
--On November 15, 2005 8:14:38 PM -0800 David Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --On November 15, 2005 6:28:21 AM -0800 David Barak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK... Let me try this again... True competition requires that it be PRACTICAL for multiple providers to enter the market, including the creation of new providers to seize opportunities being ignored by the existing ones. The worse the existing provider it is, the more practical it is to compete with them. If they are providing what people want at a reasonable price, there is no need for competition. If they are not, then the it becomes practical for multiple providers to enter the market. If you assume that the cost to develop existing infrastructure is not insanely less than the cost to develop new infrastructure, the isolation from competition comes directly from the investment. 1. The existing infrastructure is usually all that is needed for many of the services in question. Laying parallel copper as a CLEC is not only prohibitively expensive, in most areas, it's actually illegal. Usually, municipalities have granted franchise rights of access to right of way to particular companies on an exclusive basis. That makes it pretty hard for a competitor to enter the market if they can't get wholesale access to the existing copper. 2. The existing copper was actually deployed (at least in most of the united States) using public subsidies. The taxpayers actually paid for the network. The physical infrastructure should be the property of the people. The ownership claim of the telephone companies is almost as baseless as the Verisign clame that they own the data in whois. For example, if Bill Gates took a few billion dollars out of his pocket and launched 80 satellites to provide wireless Internet access, it would be damn hard to compete with him if he wasn't trying to recover those few billion dollars. But if you spend a few billion, you get a few billion worth. Anyone else can spend the same amount and get the same advantage. 3. Except when you consider that there are only so many orbital slots that can be maintained. (see 1 above as well). If Bill manages to launch N satellites and N leaves N/2 orbital slots available for other uses, then, it's pretty hard to launch another N satellites at any cost. If he already has the satellites and is providing the service other people want at a low price, then other competitors will lose. But so what? Consumers win. And competition doesn't exist to benefit the competitors. 4. But, what tends to happen instead is that Bill charges whatever he can get to recoup his billions until someone else launches their satellites (has expended the capital). Then, when they start to go after revenue, Bill drops his prices to something they can't sustain because they don't have his bankroll and have to recoup their costs. They go out of business and Bill either buys their satellites, or, they become space-junk. Bill brings his prices back up to previous levels, and, consumers lose and the competition loses too. Even if Bill doesn't actually do this, the knowledge that he could causes investors to view the new satellite company as a bad risk, so, Bill's monopoly position prevents investment into competitive entry into the market. Finally, since Bill doesn't have to worry about anyone else being actually able to launch competing satellites, Bill has no reason to innovate unless Bill can see a much higher profit margin at the end of said innovation. (look at today's Telco as a prime example of this form of complacency. Actually, telco's are very innovative, but, they focus on regulatory innovation instead of technical innovation). If he already has the satellites but is not providing the service other people want or isn't charging a reasonable price, or both, then anyone else can make the same infrastructure investment for a comparable cost. If he's not satisfying demand, the demand is still there, and he's just losing some of the benefits his infrastructure could be giving him. 5. But, if you want this analogy to match the current copper plant in the ground in most of the US, then, you have to also account for the fact that Bill received 30-45 of his 60 billion in investment in the form of public subsidies. Are you going to give all comers the same public subsidy (blank check)? Instead, you end up with exactly what we have today in the telcos. Semi-regulated monopolies that think they own an infrastructure built with taxpayer money. (see also 2 above) No... Actually, the lack of market forces in the
Re: What do we mean when we say competition?
--On November 15, 2005 11:23:50 PM -0500 Sean Donelan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Owen DeLong wrote: I think what is really represented there is that because they own an existing network that was built with public subsidy and future entrants have no such access to public subsidy to build their own network, Some people may think public subsidy implies using taxpayer funds such as giving incentivies to companies to build factories, job training programs, re-locate corporate headquarters or even build sports stadiums. Are you refering to the exclusive franchises granted to various cable and telephone companies in parts of the country as the subsidy? Or are you referring the the High Cost Support funds which used to be implicit internal transfers in the old Bell System (not taxpayer funds), or now explicit transfers through the Universial Service Fund? Or are you referring to the US Department of Agriculture Rural Utilities Service financing which assists non-RBOC rural telephone and utility companies? A combination of the franchises (which at least in San Jose, hardly what I would call rural) and the pre-1996 copper plant. Certainly, I can guarantee you that the copper in many neighborhoods in San Jose dates back to the 1970s. My neighborhood is one such area. According to my local Cable Maintenance guys, the icky-pick cable that passes for an F1 from my CO was laid in the 1960s and hasn't been replaced (except a few feet here and there thanks to the Comcast inept contractor and their rock-wheels). As I understand it, up until the divestiture, ATT received a certain amount of tax funding for each neighborhood they laid copper into. There is no indication in most of San Jose that the pre-1996 copper is going away any time soon. Finally, claiming that USF is just an explicit transfer is a fallacy. Look on your phone bill. Have you ever seen anyone who receives a credit on the USF or HCR lines on their bill? Everyone I've ever seen is a charge. So, either the phone companies are pocketing that money, or, there's some group of citizens somewhere who are receiving what my friends and I are putting into that pot. Competitors have been given access to the legacy telephone copper plant (but generally not the cable coaxial plant) in most of the country. The legacy copper outside plant is quickly being replaced by post-1996 outside plant. Soon there may be little or no pre-1996 outside copper plant left. Ownership of inside wiring was transfered to the property owner a couple of decades ago. Yes, but, the FCC is now reducing that access. Also, the fact that the current ILEC acts as gatekeeper for said access results in various anti-competitive practices being used by the ILEC to reduce service quality to competitive carriers. OTOH, if the ILEC was in a position of either operating the infrastructure, OR, competing with other providers, not doing both at the same time, I believe the behavior would be substantially different. As it stands today, the ILEC has a substantial incentive to provide better infrastructure response to it's in-house service provider than to competing service providers that don't own their own infrastructure. Several municipalities in the US have spent taxpayer funds, or taxpayer backed, to build a municiple outside plants. True. What's interesting is there is relatively little competitive activity or demand for access in locations (i.e. rural) with the largest government incentives, while there is a lot of demand in areas (i.e. urban) which had minimimal or no government incentives and were funded by shareholders and other investors. The RBOCs and MSOs have been selling off their rural assets to other companies for any years. Also true, but, in part, that is why those incentives are there. So what is it exactly you think taxpayer funds paid for and should now own? 1. Most of the existing pre-1996 copper last-mile infrastructure 2. The right-of-way 3. Most of the B-Boxes 4. At least an easment for access to the MDFs if not the MDFs themselves. 5. The ridiculous amount of money granted to Pacific Bell as a result of A-95-12-03 where they actually convinced the PUC that converting from D4/AMI to B8ZS-ESF required them to completely replace their inter-co infrastructure and that they only had to do this to accomodate ISDN. (At the time most of the D4/AMI infrastructure was deployed, the need for and superiority of B8ZS/ESF was well known and this was really just another example of Pacific Bell's passive aggressive attitude towards ISDN). I'm sure if I reviewed the last 10 years of rulings I could find other examples of Pacific Bell/Pacific Telesis/SBC receiving sbusidies disguised as rate-hikes from the California PUC. Owen pgpKr1IuQUNRS.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: What do we mean when we say competition?
I think what is really represented there is that because they own an existing network that was built with public subsidy and future entrants have no such access to public subsidy to build their own network, ... Sean's post correctly identified the problem with this assertion, so I won't And I provided a response to Sean's email, so, I won't repeat it here. The government should recognize that the existing build has actually been paid for mostly by public subsidy anyway and as such, should require the ILECs to split into two separate divisions. You mean the existing FIBER build was mostly paid by public subsidy? Do you have a reference for that? No... I'm talking about last-mile ifrastructure, not backbone. I'm much less concerned about the cost of new backbone _IF_ providers can get fair and equal access to public right-of-way. Most places have no fiber last-mile. Some do. Of those that do, I know that many were installed by cable companies and that there are in many of those places utility taxes that are being collected and passed along to at least partially fund said buildout. I know that Comcast signed a huge sweet-heart deal with the city of San Jose, for example before they started tearing up my neighborhood. They seem to have laid interduct to the curb and co-ax to the home. I haven't seen them bring any fiber anywhere yet, but, I presume that's what the interduct is for at some point. Mostly all they've delivered so far is damage. 4 sepearte loss-of-phone service incidents (they cut F1 (twice), F2 (once) and the cable in my street (once)). I'm not a Comcast subscriber and probably never will be, but, that doesn't prevent the city from taxing me to support this buildout. One division would be a wholesale only infrastructure delivery company that would maintain the physical infrastructure. As part of this, ownership of the physical infrastructure in place would be transferred to an appropriate local civil body (city, county, district, etc.) and said body should have an initial 5 year contract with the infrastructure portion of the ILEC to provide existing services on a provider- neutral basis (same price to all ILECs, Clecs, etc.). At the end of that 5 year contract, the maintenance of the infrastructure should be up for bid, and, if the existing ILEC infrastructure portion can't win the bid, they are out of luck. I don't know how familiar you are with what the government contracting process is like, but the word unpleasant comes to mind: it's long, hard, and cumbersome. Your model would substantially increase the amount of government contracting required, so you would need to be able to show a benefit to society of corresponding magnitude. Huh? I'm talking about doing this once every 5 years so that the infrastructure management company has to face some potential recourse if they do a lousy job. I'm not talking about switching contractors on a monthly basis or anything like that. Actually, I think a once every 5 year contract would be a lot less cumbersome than the number of PUC applications processed today. How familiar are you with THAT process? Right, but, faced with potential competition, they are notorious for temporarily lowering prices well below sustainable levels in order to eliminate said competition. Are you alleging that the ILECs/RBOCs are providing services below cost? If so, call a regulator. If not, while the profits may be lower than desired by the ILEC/RBOC, it's certainlly sustainable I'm alleging that the ILECs/RBOCs have lower costs than their competitors because they own an infrastructure that was paid for, at least in large part, by others. Further, they have an incentive to provide better service to themselves than to their competitors and do so. The '96 telecom act did nothing to take the last mile infrastructure out of the hands of the existing ILEC. You are correct. However, the '96 telecom act did give lots of other companies the OPPORTUNITY to build their own last mile access. Your proposal actually drives toward a more monopolistic, regulated environment. Not really. First, the '96 telecom act did nothing to remove Cities' ability to enter into exclusive franchise agreements for public right-of-way. Second, my proposal includes the idea of OPEN ACCESS to public right of way for anyone who wants to build infrastructure and the elimination of such franchise deals. So, my intent, at least, is to give equal access to the existing infrastructure for all comers while simultaneously making putting new infrastructure in public right-of-way more accessible to more providers. That having been said, the reality is that there is no rational cost-model where it makes sense to put parallel separate fiber/copper/whatever into every home/business/etc. The last mile is notoriously the highest cost with the lowest return. As such, it lends itself to natural monopoly regardless of other factors. Recognizing this fact and limiting the
RE: What do we mean when we say competition? (was: Re: [Latest draft of Internet regulation bill])
--On November 15, 2005 8:14:38 PM -0800 David Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --On November 15, 2005 6:28:21 AM -0800 David Barak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK... Let me try this again... True competition requires that it be PRACTICAL for multiple providers to enter the market, including the creation of new providers to seize opportunities being ignored by the existing ones. The worse the existing provider it is, the more practical it is to compete with them. If they are providing what people want at a reasonable price, there is no need for competition. If they are not, then the it becomes practical for multiple providers to enter the market. If you assume that the cost to develop existing infrastructure is not insanely less than the cost to develop new infrastructure, the isolation from competition comes directly from the investment. 1.The existing infrastructure is usually all that is needed for many of the services in question. Laying parallel copper as a CLEC is not only prohibitively expensive, in most areas, it's actually illegal. Usually, municipalities have granted franchise rights of access to right of way to particular companies on an exclusive basis. That makes it pretty hard for a competitor to enter the market if they can't get wholesale access to the existing copper. For now this may be true. But you'll set up another generation of the same problem if you continue to advocate subsidized infrastructure. At some point that infrastructure will be inadequate, and you will have done nothing to make it easier to build competitive new infrastructure. If munipalities granting monopolies is a problem, then stop such monopolies -- don't advocate them! 2.The existing copper was actually deployed (at least in most of the united States) using public subsidies. The taxpayers actually paid for the network. The physical infrastructure should be the property of the people. The ownership claim of the telephone companies is almost as baseless as the Verisign clame that they own the data in whois. It doesn't much matter and it can't be fixed. The static value of the infrastructure is basically depreciated to zero by now. The profits have been reaped. Don't justify future bad decisions on past inquities that can't be fixed anyway. Just start right from now on. For example, if Bill Gates took a few billion dollars out of his pocket and launched 80 satellites to provide wireless Internet access, it would be damn hard to compete with him if he wasn't trying to recover those few billion dollars. But if you spend a few billion, you get a few billion worth. Anyone else can spend the same amount and get the same advantage. 3.Except when you consider that there are only so many orbital slots that can be maintained. (see 1 above as well). If Bill manages to launch N satellites and N leaves N/2 orbital slots available for other uses, then, it's pretty hard to launch another N satellites at any cost. The present infrastructure in no way impedes the construction of future infrastructure. If it did, this would be a valid point. At best this just shows that the my analogy is not so good. If he already has the satellites and is providing the service other people want at a low price, then other competitors will lose. But so what? Consumers win. And competition doesn't exist to benefit the competitors. 4.But, what tends to happen instead is that Bill charges whatever he can get to recoup his billions until someone else launches their satellites (has expended the capital). Then, when they start to go after revenue, Bill drops his prices to something they can't sustain because they don't have his bankroll and have to recoup their costs. They go out of business and Bill either buys their satellites, or, they become space-junk. Bill brings his prices back up to previous levels, and, consumers lose and the competition loses too. This doesn't work in practice. It only does in theory. There are many, many reasons why. One is that service is often contracted for on a long term. Another is that spot competitors can compete in small areas when prices drop and you can't locally vary your prices forever because it's hard logistically. As soon as the prices go back up, the competitors come back. And the screwed customers don't. Even if Bill doesn't actually do this, the knowledge that he could causes investors to view the new satellite company as a bad risk, so, Bill's monopoly position prevents investment into competitive entry into the market. Right, and this is appropriate. Large investments in infrastructure should *not* be made if there's already adequate service. Better to invest in
Re: What do we mean when we say competition? (was: Re: [Latest draft of Internet regulation bill])
On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is more or less what BT has done in the UK by splitting off all the field engineering into a separate company called Openreach. Telia in Sweden did that (Skanova), now that they're privatised (partly) they're merging that unit back again, and it never was a really separate unit. Having a separate cable company with airtight divide to the service company is a must. Economy of scale says only one cable is needed to the consumer, but from there it seems there is enough different ways of doing things that it warrants a plenthora of companies to supply service, I would say at least three. Price of bw in Sweden which generally has at least 3 different ISPs colocating with telia in the larger phone stations, is at $25 per month plus tax for ADSL 8/1, personally I think that if we had a separate cable company this would actually be slightly lower, if not, we would at least have equal access to the premesis (currently something like 30% of the phonestations are claimed to be out of space by Telia, but they can still build-out new services themselves as they prioritize their own equipment). -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
