Re: Consolidation of Email Platforms Bad for Email?
This is being portrayed a little too "either/or", that if you get spam
etc from $BIGEMAIL you, service provider, block them.
What goes on is multi-layer spam blocking using various tools rather
than host/server blocking except as a last resort.
So we'll block/toss/etc a lot of the malmail from $BIGEMAIL w/o
generally blocking their servers.
If we get a huge attack we have thresholds at which point we might
block them for two hours (whatever) hoping it stops on its own or
$BIGMAIL stops it.
But those are pretty high thresholds and obviously can cause problems
for our customers in delayed email but so can our mail servers being
pounded on. Those $BIGMAIL delivery servers have a lot more computrons
than we do.
Aside: What's astounding to me is how little any of this has changed,
other than consolidation perhaps -- remember when AOL's servers
pounding you with spam could bring you to your knees? I do -- in over
20 years.
--
-Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die| b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD | 800-THE-WRLD
The World: Since 1989 | A Public Information Utility | *oo*
Re: improved NANOG filtering
What's needed is 20 (pick a number) trusted volunteer admins with the
mailman password whose only capacity is to (make a list: put the list
into moderation mode, disable an acct).
Obviously it would be nice if the software could help with this
(limited privileges, logging) but it could be done just on trust with
a small group.
Another list to announce between them ("got it!") would be useful
also.
--
-Barry Shein
The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada
Software Tool & Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: How to wish you hadn't forced ipv6 adoption (was "How to force rapid ipv6 adoption")
>From the time we began to take the idea of an address runout seriously
in the early 90s to the actual address runout which would be just
about now new priorities arose such as spam which I'll say really got
going in the late 90s.
There were others such as the potential routing table explosion which
no doubt got passing notice from the start but I think it's safe to
say has been looming more and more as a potential big problem in
recent years.
And security & privacy which perhaps something like an IPv6 couldn't
much solve, most of that is higher in the stack, but then again maybe
not. Didn't OSI have some sort of L2 credentials passing?
That's all difficult to debate if for no other reason than one says
"security" and several different definitions and priorities pop into
people's heads ranging from low-level issues such as ddos and spoofing
and simple sniff and MITM avoidance to what it might mean to a bank
security officer or credit card undewriter or an individual at
risk. And spam and phishing and all that. Oh and toss intellectual
property rights management on the fire because it casts such a lovely
glow.
This has been a moving target and a canvas on which to paint each now
and evolving challenge of a technology which has grown into ubiquity.
Around 1992 when IPv6 was just picking up steam the net engineering
community was pretty happy if an email got delivered in well under a
minute and an FTP went smoothly. Words like congestion and route
flapping could take up entire career paths.
I think we need to stop replaying history like what if there weren't a
Russian winter and just press forward.
--
-Barry Shein
The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada
Software Tool & Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Data Center operations mail list?
FWIW I agree. On August 20, 2015 at 11:43 r...@gsp.org (Rich Kulawiec) wrote: It appears that this list is sending its outbound traffic via Amazon's cloud operation. This is a profoundly horrible idea, not through any fault of yours, but because Amazon's cloud operation is a massive, non-stop fountain of spam and Amazon personnel flatly refuse to lift a finger to do anything about it. As a result of this incompetence/negligence, some folks out there have taken defensive measures which may include firewalling, blocking, discarding, rejecting, etc. Thus this is not someplace that you want to try to send mail from if you really care about having it delivered. I recommend moving it elsewhere. And I'm perfectly willing to assist with that (either selecting another location or facilitating the move or both). ---rsk -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: RES: Exploits start against flaw that could hamstring huge swaths of
Wow this thread went off-track in nanoseconds. So which bind versions are ok? -b
Re: Dual stack IPv6 for IPv4 depletion
Yeah wow 127/8, that one always amazed me, 16M addrs because it was computationally cheap to test for ((0x7f addr) == 0x7f). I wonder what are the most 127.* addrs ever used by one site? I know there are some schemes which blackhole to 127.0.0.n incrementing n so the number of hits on each blackhole can be counted separately (more or less) but 16M? I doubt even 254 were used in those schemes very often. WWWT? (What Were We Thinking?) Oh well water under the bridge. On July 15, 2015 at 17:53 jfb...@gmail.com (Ricky Beam) wrote: On Wed, 15 Jul 2015 17:34:13 -0400, Owen DeLong o...@delong.com wrote: That covers multicast and RFC-1918. Are there any other IPv4 segmentations that you can think of? ... Given that we came up with 3 total segmentations in IPv4 over the course #1-3,#4 RFC-1918 is 3 segments and we recently added a 4th (for CGN). #5 Localhost (127/8) #6 Multicast (224/4) #7 Class E (240/4) #8 0/8 #9 255/8 (technically, part of class e, but it's called out specifically in various RFCs) -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Dual stack IPv6 for IPv4 depletion
On July 15, 2015 at 09:20 o...@delong.com (Owen DeLong) wrote: There are two ways to waste addresses. One is to allocate them to users who don
Re: ARIN just subdivided their last /17, /18, /19, /20, /21 and /22. Down to only /23s and /24s now. : ipv6
UUCP. Someone had to mention it. So I did. And BITNET I guess. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Roof space, co-lo...
A company has asked me if I could find anyone who could provide: 1. Roof space for a 1.2m dish 2. About 2U rackspace (i.e., not a whole rack minimum) 3. Modest (5-10mb) bandwith. 4. Cabling between the rackspace and roof dish 5. Power Prefer Boston/Cambridge area but would consider other venues. I don't know a lot more about it but I think the key request here is the roof space for the 1.2m dish and cabling to the boxes. I don't know which way the dish must face or anything like that if you do this for a living I will put you in touch and you can work it out. Respond to me: b...@theworld.com (some of you were Bcc'd on this) -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: gmail security is a joke
I can't write my autobiography because it'd contain the answers to too many security questions! -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: gmail security is a joke
On May 27, 2015 at 14:22 jo...@iecc.com (John R. Levine) wrote: The OP was correct, if they can send you your cleartext password then their security practices are inadequate, period. Unless I misunderstand what you're saying (I sort of hope I do) this is Security 101. As I've said a couple of times already, but perhaps without the capital letters, from a security point of view, generating a NEW PASSWORD and sending it in cleartext is no worse than sending you a one time reset link. Either way, if a bad guy can intercept your mail, you lose. A few moments' thought will confirm this has nothing to do with the way passwords are stored within the mail system's database. Sure, I agree, but that's not what the post I was responding to was discussing so caps wouldn't make much difference. But only the link can be secured by asking a security question before first use. For the cleartext password an attacker only has to wait for you to answer the question and hope you don't immediately change the password. I suppose asking a question on first use of a new cleartext password AND forcing you to change that password immediately is about the same as the link, particularly if it doesn't let you use that same password. But storing cleartext passwords, encrypted or not, is a bad and indefensible practice. I remember a common dial-up login protocol which required the server to encrypt initial interaction with the customer's password so you absolutely had to have their cleartext password if they were ever to log in again. What was it, PAP or CHAP or something like that. Ugh, we resisted that. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: gmail security is a joke
One weakness with sending a new cleartext password rather than a link is that a cleartext password (probably) has to be engineered to be easy to type in and maybe even remembered. Typically one uses some concatenation of CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) with common punctuations and/or digits otherwise chosen randomly so something like pom%mur or kiv_ler for 7 chars anyhow, maybe add a digit or two, pom%mur87. A link can be much more random, just some long (64 char or more) string of hexified nonsense for example since the user presumably just clicks it and doesn't have to read it or type it in or worse remember it. SOO...an attacker could study your cleartext password generation algorithm which for a shorter, simpler, already structured cleartext password will be more likely to be predictable all else being equal. Perhaps the algorithm itself is is even available if you use some identifiable software package such as an e-commerce suite, I can't imagine every person selling paisley socks writes their own password generation algorithm. Or by studying the passwords it generates (create an acct, send yourself a few hundred or thousand.) I'm not just a-whistlin' dixie (I never a-whistle dixie! :-), I'd consider that a serious potential weakness adding more concern to choice of algorithms. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: gmail security is a joke
On May 27, 2015 at 10:28 b...@herrin.us (William Herrin) wrote: On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 4:10 PM, Scott Howard sc...@doc.net.au wrote: On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 12:28 PM, Aaron C. de Bruyn aa...@heyaaron.com wrote: If they can e-mail you your existing password (*cough*Netgear*cough*), it means they are storing your credentials in the database un-encrypted. No, it doesn't mean that at all. It means they are storing it unhashed which is probably what you mean. Hi Scott, It means they're storing it in a form that reduces to plain text without human intervention. Same difference. Encrypted at rest matters not, if all the likely attack vectors go after the data in transit. It matters a lot. It means their entire username/password collection can be compromised by various means including by an insider. The usual practice is to store a hash which cannot be reversed (at least not without astronomical computation.) Then when a password is presented (e.g., for login) the hash is computed on that cleartext password and the hashes are compared. Getting a copy of the database of hashes and login names is basically useless to an attacker. It's not encrypted in this case, it's hashed and only the hash is stored. The hash cannot be reversed, only compared to a re-hash of the cleartext password when entered. The OP was correct, if they can send you your cleartext password then their security practices are inadequate, period. Unless I misunderstand what you're saying (I sort of hope I do) this is Security 101. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: gmail security is a joke
I am truly relieved that this was just a misunderstanding! -b On May 27, 2015 at 16:05 b...@herrin.us (William Herrin) wrote: On Wed, May 27, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: On May 27, 2015 at 10:28 b...@herrin.us (William Herrin) wrote: On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 4:10 PM, Scott Howard sc...@doc.net.au wrote: It means they are storing it unhashed which is probably what you mean. It means they're storing it in a form that reduces to plain text without human intervention. Same difference. Encrypted at rest matters not, if all the likely attack vectors go after the data in transit. It matters a lot. [...] The OP was correct, if they can send you your cleartext password then their security practices are inadequate, period. Am I speaking English? I thought I was speaking English. Unless I misunderstand what you're saying (I sort of hope I do) Yeah, I think you probably did since I was largely agreeing with you. What I was trying to say was that there wasn't a heck of a lot of difference between storing a user's password with reversible encryption and storing it in plain text. Both are supremely unsatisfactory. Reasonable security starts by not retaining the user's password at all. Keep only the non-reversible hash. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin her...@dirtside.com b...@herrin.us Owner, Dirtside Systems . Web: http://www.dirtside.com/
Re: gmail security is a joke
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. --Othello Act 3, Scene 3 -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Rasberry pi - high density
To some extent people are comparing apples (not TM) and oranges. Are you trying to maximize the number of total cores or the number of total computes? They're not the same. It depends on the job mix you expect. For example a map-reduce kind of problem, search of a massive database, probably is improved with lots of cores even if each core isn't that fast. You partition a database across thousands of cores and broadcast who has XYZ? and wait for an answer, in short. There are a lot of problems like that, and a lot of problems which cannot be improved by lots of cores. For example if you have to wait for one answer before you can compute the next (matrix inversion is notorious for this property and very important.) You just can't keep the pipeline filled. And then there are the relatively inexpensive GPUs which can do many floating point ops in parallel and are good at certain jobs like, um, graphics! rendering, ray-tracing, etc. But they're not very good at general purpose integer ops like string searching, as a general rule, or problems which can't be decomposed to take advantage of the parallelism. You've got your work cut out for you analyzing these things! -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Rasberry pi - high density
On May 9, 2015 at 00:24 char...@thefnf.org (char...@thefnf.org) wrote: So I just crunched the numbers. How many pies could I cram in a rack? For another list I just estimated how many M.2 SSD modules one could cram into a 3.5 disk case. Around 40 w/ some room to spare (assuming heat and connection routing aren't problems), at 500GB/each that's 20TB in a standard 3.5 case. It's getting weird out there. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: vendor spam OTD
As more and more legitimate companies exploit email as a free resource I think we're going to need to broaden the definition of spam. Email is already on the verge of useless. And a lot of that is just pitches from orgs one would, under old definitions, argue are not spam. So the question is whether spam, and we can quibble the word, only email which is UBE or is it email which is rendering the technology useless? I think we've mistakenly via UBE definitions given out free licenses to dump pollution in our drinking water. If you don't think that's a problem right now that's ok I'll be back in a year and two. I believe hearts and minds will change towards my way of thinking about this, it's just a matter of pain threshold. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Multi-gigabit edge devices as CPE [TOPIC DRIFT!]
On April 9, 2015 at 09:11 raphael.timo...@gmail.com (Tim Raphael) wrote: VyOS is a community fork of Vyatta and is still being developed very actively and it pushing ahead with many new features! It's pretty stable too imo. http://vyos.net/wiki/Main_Page SPEAKING of OSS routers... Does anyone know of a single OSS project which supports the usual BGP etc kind of things (routing) AND virtual hosting, the terminology is muddled, but one IP in, chooses among one or more IPs for load-balancing (not to be confused with device load-balancing), fail-over, round-robin, other policies? The typical web farm kind of thing, but for other kinds of services also like mail, imap, etc. I know one can piece together more than one project but then one has to get them to play together and learn their quirks and so forth. For example I don't think any Mikrotik (ok not strictly OSS but they seem nice) supports the virtual host stuff unless I'm missing it. I have some very old Alteons that do the virtual host stuff well enough but they are very long in the tooth (no IPv6, BGP is so old it's useless to the point of scary, etc.) P.S. No particular need for fancy WAN interfaces, ethernet presentations are fine. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Cisco/Level3 takedown
Warrior Nun Areala wears a black hat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_Nun_Areala -b On April 9, 2015 at 18:29 m...@beckman.org (Mel Beckman) wrote: Wrong. Batman, for example, wears a black hat. -mel via cell On Apr 9, 2015, at 11:17 AM, Randy Bush ra...@psg.com wrote: It does make one wonder why Cisco or Level 3 is involved, why they feel they have the authority to hijack someone else's IP space, and why they didn't go through law enforcement. This is especially true for the second netblock (43.255.190.0/23), announced by a US company (AS26484). vigilantes always wear white hats. randy
Re: BGP offloading (fixing legacy router BGP scalability issues)
On April 2, 2015 at 14:19 goe...@anime.net (goe...@anime.net) wrote: a number of years back i did have someone contact in chinese and the response was that the customer was doing nothing wrong. Ok, that's progress of a sort, what's the authoritative source of right and wrong, something beyond c'mon it's obvious!? -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: BGP offloading (fixing legacy router BGP scalability issues)
The essence of this discussion is IMHO a little...um...trite. Be that as it may how many of you have attempted to contact these providers in Chinese? Or do you all have good reason to believe that is never the problem? On April 2, 2015 at 11:05 goe...@anime.net (goe...@anime.net) wrote: On Thu, 2 Apr 2015, Mark Tinka wrote: Most of the spam I get comes from North America. Go figure. I'm not about to cut access to that continent off. Big difference is that north america is usually responsive to abuse notifications and sometimes has LEO who will listen. china is neither. -Dan -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: BGP offloading (fixing legacy router BGP scalability issues)
Sounds there's a need for a higher level of dialogue. Hey, if it can be done with Iran... These are identifiable companies not sub-rosa criminal gangs (as we get with spam) so there ought to be some hope. On April 2, 2015 at 21:10 col...@gt86car.org.uk (Colin Johnston) wrote: yes have tried chinese language communication as well. none of it works, they dont believe bad traffic is a big issue where it has been proved 100% is bad we do belive this is due to bad abuse practice not informing customers and also deliberately sending bad traffic to test exploits on a large scale. ssl bad cert signing in china is just a example of this culture shutting the door if it is shown unfriendly traffic makes sense to me colin Sent from my iPhone On 2 Apr 2015, at 20:50, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: The essence of this discussion is IMHO a little...um...trite. Be that as it may how many of you have attempted to contact these providers in Chinese? Or do you all have good reason to believe that is never the problem? On April 2, 2015 at 11:05 goe...@anime.net (goe...@anime.net) wrote: On Thu, 2 Apr 2015, Mark Tinka wrote: Most of the spam I get comes from North America. Go figure. I'm not about to cut access to that continent off. Big difference is that north america is usually responsive to abuse notifications and sometimes has LEO who will listen. china is neither. -Dan -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo* -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
Ok, then I no longer have any confidence that I understand what you were asserting. From: Scott Helms khe...@zcorum.com Odd how the graphing for the top 1000 Usenet servers showed exactly the pattern I predicted. On Mar 2, 2015 3:46 PM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: Anything based on NNTP would be extremely asymmetric without significant changes to the protocol or human behavior. We ran significant Usenet servers with binaries for nearly 20 years and without for another 5 and the servers' traffic was heavily asymmetric. On Mar 1, 2015 9:11 AM, Miles Fidelman mfidel...@meetinghouse.net wrote: With all due respect it's like people act purposely obtuse just to argue. If you're a Usenet server (and most likely client) then it'll be somewhat symmetric. Depending on how many nodes you serve the bias could easily be towards upload bandwidth as msgs come in once (ideally) but you flood them to all the other servers you serve once per server, the entire traffic goes out multiple times, plus or minus various optimizations like already have that msg oh for the love of all that is good and holy do I have to type the entire NNTP protocol spec in here just to make sure there isn't some microscopic crack of light someone can use to misinterpret and/or pick nits about??? What was the original question because I think this has degenerated into just argumentativeness, we're on the verge of spelling and grammar error flames. I don't know how anyone who claims to have run Usenet servers couldn't know all this, is it just trolling? -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo* -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Symmetry, DSL, and all that
On March 2, 2015 at 13:21 na...@ics-il.net (Mike Hammett) wrote: The most important point is yes, that no one cares. If people wanted it, it would be sold to them. End. of. story. That presumes you can predict what will be sold tomorrow, which is more what this discussion is about. If people wanted smartphones in 2006 they would have been sold to them, etc. Ooops, not really until the iphone launched in 2007. etc. Besides, the comment presumes a competitive market which it isn't, in almost all US markets last mile is a monopoly or very small N (like 2 or 3) oligopoly. You can choose between asymmetric service from the CATV company OR asymmetric service from your telco. Aha, you apparently want asymmetric service! Well I suppose that's settled! -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
From: Scott Helms khe...@zcorum.com /em shrug I can't help it if you don't like real world data. On Mar 3, 2015 2:25 PM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: Ok, then I no longer have any confidence that I understand what you were asserting. Generally when someone says they don't understand me I assume it's my fault for not being clear and try to clarify. Apparently you prefer to be rude. *Plonk* -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
On March 1, 2015 at 16:13 n...@foobar.org (Nick Hilliard) wrote: On 01/03/2015 03:41, Barry Shein wrote: On February 28, 2015 at 23:20 n...@foobar.org (Nick Hilliard) wrote: there were several reasons for asymmetric services, one of which was commercial. Another was that most users' bandwidth profiles were massively asymmetric to start with so it made sense for consumers to have more bandwidth in one direction than another. How could they have known this before it was introduced? because we had modem banks before we had adsl. And you are asserting that studies were done on user behavior over dial-up modems in order to justify asymmetric service? Well, maybe there was some observation and conclusions from those observations that people tended to download more than they uploaded, it's not inherently hard to believe. I'd've had questions about how well 56kb theoretical max predicted behavior at ~10x higher speeds of *DSL. But whatever you work with what you have. I still think a lot of the motivation was to distinguish residential from commercial products. We are talking about a product sold by regional monopolies, right? I say that was prescriptive and a best guess that it'd be acceptable and a way to differentiate commercial from residential service. Previously all residential service (e.g., dial-up, ISDN) was symmetrical. Maybe they had some data on that usage but it'd be muddy just due to the low bandwidth they provided. maybe it was symmetric on your modems; it wasn't on the modems I managed. Bandwidth or usage? Are you changing the subject? I was talking about bandwidth, bandwidth on dial-up modems was symmetric or roughly symmetric (perhaps 53kbps down and 33kbps up was common, effectively.) Which is why I said residential SERVICE ... was symmetrical. It was the combination of asymmetric, no or few IPs (and NAT), and bandwidth caps. let's not rewrite history here: IPv4 address scarcity has been a thing since the very early 1990s. Otherwise why would cidr have been created? Because Class A/B/C/(D) was obviously wasteful and inflexible compared to CIDR so it caught on. Yes some were projecting an eventual IPv4 runout 20+ years ago, and IPv4 was a cost factor particularly if you were planning on deploying millions of clients tho not a killer. At any rate NAT played well into the hands of any company which wanted to distinguish a residential from commercial IP service, only a tiny per cent could see their way around a non-static address via DDNS etc. Sure. once it became institutionalized and the market got used to it why not sell tiered bandwidth services at different price points, but that could have been true of symmetrical service also. my point is simply that there is often more to asymmetric services than extracting more money from the customer. Ok fine. But don't present it as if it never crossed the minds of telcos and cablecos that asymmetric service, no static ips, etc distinguished residential from commercial service. They do include all that with commercial services, right? Well there are these small business commercial services particularly from cablecos which are hybrids, asymmetric bandwidth with static IPs etc. It was a challenge early on, the internet particularly in those days just didn't distinguish such thing as residential vs commercial, bits were bits, other than raw link speed perhaps and even then some were buying 9.6kbps and 56kbps nailed-up leased lines for $1,000+/month while others got that kind of speed over dial-up modems for $20/mo (plus POTS) and faster (128kbps) over ISDN for around $100/mo or less. A very early way to distinguish was idle-out, if you weren't sending traffic you were dropped either from dial-up or your ISDN link shut down or whatever. And someone sending at you didn't (unless you had some exotic set-up) bring the link back up. Some sites would just drop your link if you were logged in more than so many hours straight (trust me on that) to see if anyone was really there to log back in, automating that was way into the few per cent. I had an ethernet switch at home with a built-in 56kbps modem which would keep a dial-up link up, keep redialing if it lost it. In theory it should have worked, in practice it was crap. But that was probably more like 1997 when consumer products catering to this stuff really started hitting the market (other than just modems.) So you couldn't run always available servers from those kinds of services, not even an SMTP incoming server unless you adapted to that, after a few minutes idle you went offline. Some of that was resource conservation but a lot of it was to differentiate residential from commercial service. You want to run a server host it somewhere that sells that or buy an always up link (e.g., leased line.) To some extent this is six vs half a dozen. One reason commercial
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
That's fine and very practical and understandable. But it's no reason for the net not to keep marching forward at its own pace which I think is more what's being discussed. I'm pretty sure that prior to 2007 (year of the first iphone launch) not many people were clamoring for full, graphical internet in their pocket either. Then all of a sudden they were. And *poof*, down went Nokia and Motorola and Blackberry and others (anyone remember WAP?) who no doubt had reasoned very carefully and responsibly that would never happen, or not nearly at the pace it did. Surely they had no desire to fall from their respective perches or spend money needlessly. Give people a few sports scores and the weather etc on their phones and they'll be pretty happy. Of course there were also quite a few directions and predictions which failed, we tend to forget those. Such as that users would never stand for widespread CGN, ftp couldn't be made to work properly, etc etc etc. We still hear these predictions and to be honest they have my sympathy but I can't deny the reality of a present where the vast majority of users are NAT'd and seem reasonably satisfied. Predicting the past is much easier than predicting the future, no doubt about it. -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo* On March 2, 2015 at 10:28 khe...@zcorum.com (Scott Helms) wrote: That's certainly true and why we watch the trends of usage very closely and we project those terms into the future knowing that's imperfect. What we won't do is build networks based purely on guesses. We certainly see demand for upstream capacity increasing for residential customers, but that increase is slower than the increase in downstream demand growth. In all cases but pure greenfield situations the cost of deploying DSL or DOCSIS is significant less than deploying fiber. Even in greenfield situations PON, which is a asynchronous itself, is much less expensive than active Ethernet. In short synchronous connections cost more to deploy. Doing so without a knowing if or when consumers will actually pay for synchronous connections isn't something we're going to do.
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
Anything based on NNTP would be extremely asymmetric without significant changes to the protocol or human behavior. We ran significant Usenet servers with binaries for nearly 20 years and without for another 5 and the servers' traffic was heavily asymmetric. On Mar 1, 2015 9:11 AM, Miles Fidelman mfidel...@meetinghouse.net wrote: With all due respect it's like people act purposely obtuse just to argue. If you're a Usenet server (and most likely client) then it'll be somewhat symmetric. Depending on how many nodes you serve the bias could easily be towards upload bandwidth as msgs come in once (ideally) but you flood them to all the other servers you serve once per server, the entire traffic goes out multiple times, plus or minus various optimizations like already have that msg oh for the love of all that is good and holy do I have to type the entire NNTP protocol spec in here just to make sure there isn't some microscopic crack of light someone can use to misinterpret and/or pick nits about??? What was the original question because I think this has degenerated into just argumentativeness, we're on the verge of spelling and grammar error flames. I don't know how anyone who claims to have run Usenet servers couldn't know all this, is it just trolling? -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
I'm always a little suspicious when this is all customers want is a cover for this is all customers will get. It's like the time I was tossed from a local all you can eat buffet (in the days of my admittedly huge appetite) the owner telling me yes, that is *ALL* you can eat, goodbye! Prescriptive trying to pass as descriptive. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
On February 27, 2015 at 14:50 khe...@zcorum.com (Scott Helms) wrote: I am absolutely not against good upstream rates! I do have a problem with people saying that we must/should have symmetrical connectivity simply because we don't see the market demand for that as of yet. It's push/pull. Lousy upstream bandwidth leads to remote siting of web hosting for example. From that we should conclude people don't want to host their websites at home? Similar statements have been made about remote backup. These glib declarations of what the market wants are just that, glib and not really based on much anything. Besides, it's a (rapidly) moving target. People once argued that 56kbps symmetric (dial-up) was plenty for the average user. Then when ISDN promised 128kbps many thought it was amazing and should be put into every home and we'd finally have the internet we dreamed of, a lot of it was deployed in Europe and Japan. As I remember EFF (and others) fought long and hard for broader deployment of 2B+D ISDN in the US. As some of us who looked into the technology kept pointing out it was an inherent loser, too expensive to deploy very widely and never intended or designed for raw bandwidth distribution. Its economics depended on the telcos owning per msg email fees (it was designed in another era) etc so it was more a give away the cameras and sell the film sort of technology, they had to own, i.e., be able to bill, the whole stack (email, etc.) as then perceived. There is a strong tendency to rationalize the current state of the technology. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
Can we stop the disingenuity? Asymmetric service was introduced to discourage home users from deploying commercial services. As were bandwidth caps. One can argue all sorts of other benefits of this but when this started that was the problem on the table: How do we forcibly distinguish commercial (i.e., more expensive) from non-commercial usage? Answer: Give them a lot less upload than download bandwidth. Originally these asymmetric, typically DSL, links were hundreds of kbits upstream, not a lot more than a dial-up line. That and NAT thereby making it difficult -- not impossible, the savvy were in the noise -- to map domain names to permanent IP addresses. That's all this was about. It's not about that's all they need, that's all they want, etc. Now that bandwidth is growing rapidly and asymmetric is often 10/50mbps or 20/100 it almost seems nonsensical in that regard, entire medium-sized ISPs ran on less than 10mbps symmetric not long ago. But it still imposes an upper bound of sorts, along with addressing limitations and bandwidth caps. That's all this is about. The telcos for many decades distinguished business voice service from residential service, even for just one phone line, though they mostly just winged it and if they declared you were defrauding them by using a residential line for a business they might shut you off and/or back bill you. Residential was quite a bit cheaper, most importantly local unlimited (unmetered) talk was only available on residential lines. Business lines were even coded 1MB (one m b) service, one metered business (line). The history is clear and they've just reinvented the model for internet but proactively enforced by technology rather than studying your usage patterns or whatever they used to do, scan for business ads using residential numbers, beyond bandwidth usage analysis. And the CATV companies are trying to reinvent CATV pricing for internet, turn Netflix (e.g.) into an analogue of HBO and other premium CATV services. What's so difficult to understand here? -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
Back in the USENET days we advertised that we carried acccess to all USENET groups. One day a customer called asking to speak to me and said he'd like to complain, we did NOT carry all USENET groups. I said ok which don't we carry, mistakes are possible, I'll add them. He got cagey. I said well how do you know we don't carry all groups if you can't seem to name which groups we don't carry? He continued to hem and haw. I said oh you mean like child porn? Well, he said, let's say that's so, it would still be fraudulent to claim you carry ALL groups if you don't carry those, right? I said wrong, if a druggist says he stocks all drugs that doesn't have to include illegal drugs. After offering him a reasonable refund i got him off the phone. As others have said let's hope that's all that's implied. On February 27, 2015 at 14:32 khe...@zcorum.com (Scott Helms) wrote: While I view that statement with trepidation, my first guess would one that isn't in violation of state or federal law. About the only things I can think off hand, ie stuff we get told to take down as hosters today, are sites violating copyright law and child pornography. I hope that we don't see any additions to that list. Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Bruce H McIntosh b...@ufl.edu wrote: On 2015-02-27 14:14, Jim Richardson wrote: What's a lawful web site? Now *there* is a $64,000 question. Even more interesting is, Who gets to decide day to day the answer to that question? :) -- Bruce H. McIntoshb...@ufl.edu Senior Network Engineer http://net-services.ufl.edu University of Florida Network Services 352-273-1066 -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
On February 28, 2015 at 18:14 clay...@mnsi.net (Clayton Zekelman) wrote: You do of course realize that the asymmetry in CATV forward path/return path existed LONG before residential Internet access over cable networks exited? You mean back when it was all analog and DOCSIS didn't exist? Sent from my iPhone On Feb 28, 2015, at 5:38 PM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: Can we stop the disingenuity? Asymmetric service was introduced to discourage home users from deploying commercial services. As were bandwidth caps. One can argue all sorts of other benefits of this but when this started that was the problem on the table: How do we forcibly distinguish commercial (i.e., more expensive) from non-commercial usage? Answer: Give them a lot less upload than download bandwidth. Originally these asymmetric, typically DSL, links were hundreds of kbits upstream, not a lot more than a dial-up line. That and NAT thereby making it difficult -- not impossible, the savvy were in the noise -- to map domain names to permanent IP addresses. That's all this was about. It's not about that's all they need, that's all they want, etc. Now that bandwidth is growing rapidly and asymmetric is often 10/50mbps or 20/100 it almost seems nonsensical in that regard, entire medium-sized ISPs ran on less than 10mbps symmetric not long ago. But it still imposes an upper bound of sorts, along with addressing limitations and bandwidth caps. That's all this is about. The telcos for many decades distinguished business voice service from residential service, even for just one phone line, though they mostly just winged it and if they declared you were defrauding them by using a residential line for a business they might shut you off and/or back bill you. Residential was quite a bit cheaper, most importantly local unlimited (unmetered) talk was only available on residential lines. Business lines were even coded 1MB (one m b) service, one metered business (line). The history is clear and they've just reinvented the model for internet but proactively enforced by technology rather than studying your usage patterns or whatever they used to do, scan for business ads using residential numbers, beyond bandwidth usage analysis. And the CATV companies are trying to reinvent CATV pricing for internet, turn Netflix (e.g.) into an analogue of HBO and other premium CATV services. What's so difficult to understand here? -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo* -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: symmetric vs. asymmetric [was: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality]
On March 1, 2015 at 09:46 ma...@isc.org (Mark Andrews) wrote: Home users should be able to upload a content in the same amount of time it takes to download content. It doesn't matter if they only do this occasionally. Without symetric speeds they can't do this. They are being given a slow path. Arguing otherwise is like saying that their time is not important. Yes, that capacity is sitting idle most of the time but so what! We really should be delivering connections where link speed is not the limiting factor. Yes, good point, the occasional argument would better apply to asymmetric up/down monthly bandwidth caps than bandwidth limitations. But I still think it's push/pull. I remember when downloading still images (dial-up days) was considered bandwidth hogging and only something very few people did. Of course no one did it, it took minutes to download even a rather small image and there was little market for image-oriented software (other than porn.) -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
On February 28, 2015 at 16:50 na...@ics-il.net (Mike Hammett) wrote: Spoken by someone that apparently has no idea how things work. Now there's a deep and insightful refutation. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com - Original Message - From: Barry Shein b...@world.std.com To: NANOG nanog@nanog.org Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2015 4:38:34 PM Subject: Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality Can we stop the disingenuity? Asymmetric service was introduced to discourage home users from deploying commercial services. As were bandwidth caps. One can argue all sorts of other benefits of this but when this started that was the problem on the table: How do we forcibly distinguish commercial (i.e., more expensive) from non-commercial usage? Answer: Give them a lot less upload than download bandwidth. Originally these asymmetric, typically DSL, links were hundreds of kbits upstream, not a lot more than a dial-up line. That and NAT thereby making it difficult -- not impossible, the savvy were in the noise -- to map domain names to permanent IP addresses. That's all this was about. It's not about that's all they need, that's all they want, etc. Now that bandwidth is growing rapidly and asymmetric is often 10/50mbps or 20/100 it almost seems nonsensical in that regard, entire medium-sized ISPs ran on less than 10mbps symmetric not long ago. But it still imposes an upper bound of sorts, along with addressing limitations and bandwidth caps. That's all this is about. The telcos for many decades distinguished business voice service from residential service, even for just one phone line, though they mostly just winged it and if they declared you were defrauding them by using a residential line for a business they might shut you off and/or back bill you. Residential was quite a bit cheaper, most importantly local unlimited (unmetered) talk was only available on residential lines. Business lines were even coded 1MB (one m b) service, one metered business (line). The history is clear and they've just reinvented the model for internet but proactively enforced by technology rather than studying your usage patterns or whatever they used to do, scan for business ads using residential numbers, beyond bandwidth usage analysis. And the CATV companies are trying to reinvent CATV pricing for internet, turn Netflix (e.g.) into an analogue of HBO and other premium CATV services. What's so difficult to understand here? -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo* -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
On February 28, 2015 at 17:20 na...@ics-il.net (Mike Hammett) wrote: As I said earlier, there are only so many channels available. Channels added to upload are taken away from download. People use upload so infrequently it would be gross negligence on the provider's behalf. And as I said earlier it's push/pull, give people lousy upload speeds and they won't use services which depend on good upload speeds. And given lousy upload speeds the opportunities to develop for example backup services in a world of terabyte disks is limited. At 1mb/s it takes approx 100,000 seconds to upload 1TB, that's roughly one week, blue sky. Doesn't seem like the basis for a good business plan tho obviously it's more complicated than that IRL. Maybe there are enough people with 10+mb/s upload speeds today to make a go of such a business, uploading a TB in 18 hrs might be within reason as one doesn't do that often assuming some sort of incremental backup. Until download speeds approximated video speed I'd imagine few people used streaming video, so NetFlix mailed DVD's via USPS. etc. - Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com - Original Message - From: Clayton Zekelman clay...@mnsi.net To: Barry Shein b...@world.std.com Cc: NANOG nanog@nanog.org Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2015 5:14:18 PM Subject: Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality You do of course realize that the asymmetry in CATV forward path/return path existed LONG before residential Internet access over cable networks exited? Sent from my iPhone On Feb 28, 2015, at 5:38 PM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: Can we stop the disingenuity? Asymmetric service was introduced to discourage home users from deploying commercial services. As were bandwidth caps. One can argue all sorts of other benefits of this but when this started that was the problem on the table: How do we forcibly distinguish commercial (i.e., more expensive) from non-commercial usage? Answer: Give them a lot less upload than download bandwidth. Originally these asymmetric, typically DSL, links were hundreds of kbits upstream, not a lot more than a dial-up line. That and NAT thereby making it difficult -- not impossible, the savvy were in the noise -- to map domain names to permanent IP addresses. That's all this was about. It's not about that's all they need, that's all they want, etc. Now that bandwidth is growing rapidly and asymmetric is often 10/50mbps or 20/100 it almost seems nonsensical in that regard, entire medium-sized ISPs ran on less than 10mbps symmetric not long ago. But it still imposes an upper bound of sorts, along with addressing limitations and bandwidth caps. That's all this is about. The telcos for many decades distinguished business voice service from residential service, even for just one phone line, though they mostly just winged it and if they declared you were defrauding them by using a residential line for a business they might shut you off and/or back bill you. Residential was quite a bit cheaper, most importantly local unlimited (unmetered) talk was only available on residential lines. Business lines were even coded 1MB (one m b) service, one metered business (line). The history is clear and they've just reinvented the model for internet but proactively enforced by technology rather than studying your usage patterns or whatever they used to do, scan for business ads using residential numbers, beyond bandwidth usage analysis. And the CATV companies are trying to reinvent CATV pricing for internet, turn Netflix (e.g.) into an analogue of HBO and other premium CATV services. What's so difficult to understand here? -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD | Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die | Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
RE: symmetric vs. asymmetric [was: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality]
On February 28, 2015 at 17:07 gward...@gwsystems.co.il (Gary Wardell) wrote: Actually, I think the incumbents do get it, at this point - at least Verizon does. FIOS is a pretty nice offering, and they offer some pretty high speeds, both up and down. Don't hold your breaths. Back around 2000 Verizon took about $2B in tax breaks to do something with fiber. A couple of years later someone in Congress noticed they hadn't done anything (other than took the tax breaks) and got on their case, do something or return the tax breaks (and probably other trouble.) So they formed a unit and spun up FiOS. It's not a business in the traditional sense, it was a way of staying out of jail (metaphorically speaking.) That's why it happened for a while and then came to a halt. Not that the unit didn't give it the old college try, you can do some interesting things with a coupla billion in cash and a mandate. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Policy Statement on Net Neutrality
On February 28, 2015 at 23:20 n...@foobar.org (Nick Hilliard) wrote: On 28/02/2015 22:38, Barry Shein wrote: Asymmetric service was introduced to discourage home users from deploying commercial services. there were several reasons for asymmetric services, one of which was commercial. Another was that most users' bandwidth profiles were massively asymmetric to start with so it made sense for consumers to have more bandwidth in one direction than another. How could they have known this before it was introduced? I say that was prescriptive and a best guess that it'd be acceptable and a way to differentiate commercial from residential service. Previously all residential service (e.g., dial-up, ISDN) was symmetrical. Maybe they had some data on that usage but it'd be muddy just due to the low bandwidth they provided. Another still was that cross-talk causes enough interference to prevent reverse adsl (i.e. greater bandwidth from customer to exchange) from working well. So SDSL didn't exist? Anyhow, *DSL is falling so far behind it's difficult to analyze what could have been. As were bandwidth caps. Bandwidth caps were introduced in many cases to stop gratuitous abuse of service by the 1% of users who persistently ran their links at a rate that the pricing model they selected was not designed to handle. You've been around the block a bit so I'm sure you remember the days when transit was expensive and a major cost factor in running an isp. It was the combination of asymmetric, no or few IPs (and NAT), and bandwidth caps. But of course they weren't happy with those few who found ways to use a lot of bandwidth but I thought we weren't talking about the few. Some operators used and continue to use asymmetric bandwidth profiles and bandwidth caps as methods for driving up revenue rather than anything else in particular. International cellular roaming plans come to mind as one of the more egregious example of this, but there are many others. Sure. once it became institutionalized and the market got used to it why not sell tiered bandwidth services at different price points, but that could have been true of symmetrical service also. But in the beginning these were ways to forcibly distinguish residential from more expensive commercial service. Forcibly as in not polling actual usage such as for lots of port 80/443 connections inbound or checking postal addresses for residential vs business as telcos used to do for voice service, etc. Maybe passively is a better term. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: REMINDER: Leap Second
I'm pretty sure University College, London (UCL) had a 360/195 on the net in the late 1970s. I remember it had open login to I guess it was TSO? I'd play with it but couldn't really figure out anything interesting to do lacking all documentation and by and large motivation other than it was kind of cool in like 1978 to be typing at a computer in London even if it was just saying do something or go away! I guess you had to be there. -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo* On January 26, 2015 at 03:36 bar...@databus.com (Barney Wolff) wrote: On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 06:42:51PM -0500, TR Shaw wrote: That made the transformers smaller/cooler and more efficient. I seem to remember a 195 as well but maybe it is just CRS. Google says the 360/195 did exist. But my baby was the 360/95, where the first megabyte of memory was flat-film at 60ns, which made it faster than the 195 for some things. It was incredibly expensive to build - we heard rumors of $30 million in 1967 dollars, and sold to NASA at a huge loss, which is why there were only two built. I used to amuse myself by climbing into the flats memory cabinet, and was amused again some years later when I could have ingested a megabyte without harm. Ours sat directly above Tom's Restaurant, of Seinfeld fame. Very early climate modeling was done on that machine, along with a lot of astrophysics.
Re: AS6713 (aka IAM / MOROCCO TELECOMS) peering contact
May I share some clue? The OP is probably not a native speaker of English. You don't play PC language games with people who you aren't *certain* are native speakers of English. Why? Because if you do I will show up at your door! I dunno, just don't do it, it's rude and stupid, imagine if you were trying to post in your college Arabic or French or whatever and got hit with subtleties like this instead of a simple answer. -b On December 27, 2014 at 14:35 clay...@mnsi.net (Clayton Zekelman) wrote: That is why the better pronoun choice would have been 'you', not 'he' or 'she'. Sent from my iPhone On Dec 27, 2014, at 1:47 PM, Javier J jav...@advancedmachines.us wrote: What if they don't identify as a he or a she? On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 6:46 PM, Clayton Zekelman clay...@mnsi.net wrote: What if the peering team member is a she? Should she not contact you if so? Sent from my iPhone On Dec 26, 2014, at 5:48 PM, Youssef Bengelloun-Zahr yous...@720.fr wrote: Hello, If someone from IAM peering team is watching, could he please get in touch OFF-list please ? Best regards. -- Youssef BENGELLOUN-ZAHR
Re: Got a call at 4am - RAID Gurus Please Read
That might be close enough. I need to set up a test system and play around with zfs and btrfs. Thanks. On December 11, 2014 at 21:29 mysi...@gmail.com (Jimmy Hess) wrote: On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 9:05 PM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: [snip] From my reading the closest you can get to disk space quotas in ZFS is by limiting on a per directory (dataset, mount) basis which is similar but different. This is the normal type of quota within ZFS. it is applied to a dataset and limits the size of the dataset, such as home/username. You can have as many datasets (filesystems) as you like (within practical limits), which is probably the way to go in regards to home directories. But another option is zfs set groupquota@groupname=100GB example1/blah zfs set userquota@user1=200MB example1/blah This would be available on the Solaris implementation. I am not 100% certain that this is available under the BSD implementations, even if QUOTA is enabled in your kernel config. In the past the BSD implementation of ZFS never seemed to be as stable, functional, or performant as the OpenSolaris/Illumos version. -- -JH -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Got a call at 4am - RAID Gurus Please Read
From: Randy Bush ra...@psg.com We are now using ZFS RAIDZ and the question I ask myself is, why wasn't I using ZFS years ago? because it is not production on linux, which i have to use because freebsd does not have kvm/ganeti. want zfs very very badly. snif. I keep reading zfs vs btrfs articles and...inconclusive. My problem with both is I need quotas, both file and inode, and both are weaker than ext4 on that, zfs is very weak on this, you can only sort of simulate them. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Got a call at 4am - RAID Gurus Please Read
Disk space by uid (by group is a plus but not critical), like BSD and EXTn. And the reason I put inode in quotes was to indicate that they may not (certainly not) be called inodes but an upper limit to the total number of files and directories, typically to stop a runaway script or certain malicious or grossly irresponsible behavior. From my reading the closest you can get to disk space quotas in ZFS is by limiting on a per directory (dataset, mount) basis which is similar but different. On December 11, 2014 at 16:57 r...@seastrom.com (Rob Seastrom) wrote: Barry Shein b...@world.std.com writes: From: Randy Bush ra...@psg.com We are now using ZFS RAIDZ and the question I ask myself is, why wasn't I using ZFS years ago? because it is not production on linux, which i have to use because freebsd does not have kvm/ganeti. want zfs very very badly. snif. I keep reading zfs vs btrfs articles and...inconclusive. My problem with both is I need quotas, both file and inode, and both are weaker than ext4 on that, zfs is very weak on this, you can only sort of simulate them. By file, you mean disk space used? By whom and where? Quotas and reservations on a per-dataset basis are pretty darned well supported in ZFS. As for inodes, well, since there isn't really such a thing as an inode in ZFS... what exactly are you trying to do here? -r -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Tech Laptop with DB9 [REALLY Equinox SST]
Executive Summary: Anyone have an updated linux driver for an Equinox/Avocent SST-128? I've used an Equinox SST-128 for serial ports for years. It's a PCI card with a cable to panels with up to 128 serial ports (RJ-45.) It's been very handy, never given me trouble, just plugging in a piece of CAT-5 has almost always worked (there are RJ-45 to DB9 and DB15 adapters.) Just connect some terminal emulator or similar to the device (something like /dev/ttyAG), I've used eterm for no deep reason other than it just worked, it's an odd fork or rewrite of xterm. But any vendor support is long gone. I think Equinox sold it to Avocent or changed their name and the newest Linux driver is about 5 years old and won't run on anything newer than, well, pretty old, SuSE 9.3, the newest didn't just build on 10.x and that's pretty old, 2.6 kernel. And of course the one system I was using it on just died, everything else here has too-new Linux, typically openSuSE 13.1. I'd hate to have to rebuild a 5+ year old linux just to run this one card. SO BEFORE I dig in and try to port the driver I was wondering if anyone else has done this already? -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Shipping bulk hardware via freight
I remember when we got our SGI Challenge XL delivered. It was around 1200lbs and the trucker refused to do an inside delivery even though we'd specified that, we were on the second floor (up one flight of stairs tho a few more to get to the stairs.) Their excuse was that we didn't have a proper way to do that. That is, there were three steps before the elevator and whatever else they think of not to do it. So rather than fuss with them and leaving the $500K system on the sidewalk outside I called: Death Wish Movers They're a company in Boston which specializes in moving big pianos and similar. The Travel Channel (I think it was) made a reality series about them briefly. Four guys showed up and decided they didn't even want to use the elevator, too small or something. They just hauled that thing up the stairs with your usual ONE...TWO...THREE...LIFT! ONE...TWO...THREE...LIFT!... I forget the cost but it wasn't a lot, maybe $300? Needless to say I recommend them. http://www.deathwishpiano.com -b
Re: [curiosity] Internet's first router, 1969
On November 6, 2014 at 01:57 israel.l...@lugosys.com (Israel G. Lugo) wrote: Old days... :) http://www.snotr.com/video/14338/In_Honor_Of_The_Internet_Turning_45_Today__Here_Is_Its_First_Router You'll probably love this: A Conversation with Steve Crocker (Chairman, ICANN, author RFC #1, etc) and Leonard Kleinrock (in the video linked above) a couple of weeks ago: http://la51.icann.org/en/schedule/mon-crocker-kleinrock I was there, it was fun. Or as Abraham Lincoln would say: For people who like this sort of thing this is probably the sort of thing they will like. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: A translation (was Re: An update from the ICANN ISPCP meeting...)
On October 24, 2014 at 19:34 d...@virtualized.org (David Conrad) wrote: Barry, On Oct 24, 2014, at 12:13 PM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: I believe this never-ending quest for more reliable domain registration data is being driven by intellectual property lawyers to lower the cost of serving those they see as infringers either by domain or web site content. I would agree that the intellectual property folks have interests in this area, however having sat through sessions on various illegal activities facilitated by domain names (e.g., trade in endangered species, child porn, illegal pharmacies, etc) as well as having been to anti-abuse meetings (e.g., MAAWG, APWG, RIPE abuse-wt, etc), I am fairly confident there are far more people interested in accurate registration data than merely intellectual property lawyers. Oh no! The Four Horsement of the Infocalypse! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse Sure, agree with me or you're a child porn enabler! I just tend to doubt this effort will help much. It's just selling some idealized vision of domain registration data. At any rate, I'm not against better data, my concern is more in the realm of: At what cost? Who has access? Who specifically bears the cost of all this goodness? I think I mentioned this but in LA I was in a near shouting match with an IP lawyer whose specialty was brands protection who couldn't understand why service providers were so difficult to deal with when asked for customer info, take downs, whatever they wanted. I said hey, you're being paid like $300/hour to deal with this, you're offering me zero. You imagine this is just your little request but it's not, it's a time sinkhole as you chase words that rhyme with your client's brand or other potential business. One of the more sordid aspects of the law is that one can enact more and more stringent and time-consuming reporting etc rules and at some point it's just a free ride. Suddenly the law REQUIRES service providers to expend whatever effort it takes to provide accurate and timely discovery information. Meanwhile Verizon and other big telcos are getting like $500 per for taps etc, to the tune of tens of millions per month? http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/09/23/attverizonsprint-are-paid-cash-by-nsa-for-your-private-communications/ or http://tinyurl.com/q74oa7u I'm not against the concept, but it needs balance and it's reasonable to advocate. That doesn't make someone a child-porn enabler. Goodness costs money. Heck, I heard even some network operators would like to have accurate registration databases and I don't think many of those folks are intellectual property lawyers. FWIW, my suggestion was to put the WHOIS data into the DNS (a new RR perhaps) under the control of whoever manages that DNS record and if someone needs more correct information then perhaps the registrars could provide it (perhaps for a fee) from the sales slips (so to speak.) You're too late: I believe there is a t-shirt that has the slogan F* that, let's just put it in the DNS... :) I suppose that's better than I've never heard anyone suggest this but you!, so I'll take it! It's just a sales record, not sure why some are trying to move heaven and earth to idealize the information and access to it. I disagree. Perhaps my age is showing, but I believe the whole point of the registration database is to provide contact information to allow someone to contact the registrant for whatever reason, e.g., hey, stop that!. It's the old problem, crooks don't hand out business cards. And, again, at what cost, and to whom? P.S. And of course the new WHOIS proposal involves creating classes of access to go along with improved correctness. That is one part of the outcome of ICANN's ongoing effort to try to fix the multiple decade long nightmare that is Whois, yes. It needs a public examination. This is a big change. It's reasonable to be suspicious that it will be turned into a privileged and expensive resource. So only bona-fide lawyers with paid-up bar dues will be able to get at the info because, you know, lawyers, esq. I'm not sure such a wild mischaracterization of the _166 page_ proposal for A Next Generation Registration Directory Service is actually helpful. The whole question of registration data is extremely complicated with a vast array of mutually contradictory requirements. As I understand it, the tiered access proposal was largely driven by the requirement to deal with the differing privacy requirements/laws/customs/etc. across the planet (e.g., the EU data privacy directives). As with anything that suggests non-trivial change, there is much that is controversial in the proposal, however I suspect it would be more useful if the controversy was based in actual reality instead
Re: A translation (was Re: An update from the ICANN ISPCP meeting...)
On October 27, 2014 at 15:34 d...@virtualized.org (David Conrad) wrote: Barry, On Oct 27, 2014, at 10:28 AM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: Oh no! The Four Horsement of the Infocalypse! Being dismissive of concerns related to illegal activities that make use of the DNS does not, of course, make those concerns go away. A number of folks make use of the registration database in attempting to address illegal activities, as such it seems to me that it would be useful if that database was accurate. Leading with child porn etc as a first-mentioned motivation strikes me as an attempt to snatch the moral high ground rather than discuss the issues -- oh and if you disagree with me you must be ok with child porn. I've chased child pornographers with LEO. By and large they are very, very careful about their identities. You're not going to just do a WHOIS query and jot down their address and phone number and pay them a visit. At any rate, we can all drive at 20MPH max and think of how many thousands of lives that would save every year...etc. Disagree? Do you want people to die?!? And so forth. That there's an intent or possibility to improve criminal investigations doesn't necessarily justify the means. And I still believe a lot of the energy behind the WHOIS rewrite has come from the intellectual property crowd (to reduce the cost of discovery) tho yes law enforcement loves better identity sources particularly if it's on someone else's budget. It's the old problem, Not really. crooks don't hand out business cards. Registration data is used to identify registrants, not crooks. As Mark Andrews pointed out, there are uses for identifying non-crook registrants. In rare cases, registrants are crooks and while I'd agree the sophisticated crooks will find ways around any requirements for accuracy, I believe there is value to having accuracy in the general case. You're still just repeating potential motivations rather than telling us how these changes will accomplish those goals, and at what cost. How is any of that being accomplished by limiting access to the WHOIS data? From page 21 of the Final Report: ...the EWG recommends abandoning today's WHOIS model -- giving every user the same anonymous public access to (too often inaccurate) gTLD registration data. Instead, the EWG recommends a paradigm shift whereby gTLD registration data is collected, validated and disclosed for permissible purposes only, with some data elements being accessible only to authenticated requestors that are then held accountable for appropriate use. (me: EWG = Expert Working Group) Ok, admittedly there's a lot more to the report than we're discussing here and the only fair way to review it is to read it which I recommend, again that URL: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/final-report-06jun14-en.pdf or http://tinyurl.com/kdjdu7c Don't get me wrong, I consider it by and large well-intentioned. But that doesn't mean we can't disagree on some recommendations. Or are you arguing we should simply remove Whois as a service available to the Internet? And, again, at what cost, and to whom? The cost obviously depends on the requirements and implementation. The whom is and will always be the registrant. However, for the vast majority of registrants with a handful of domains, the costs are likely to be in the pennies. Granted, for the domainers with huge portfolios, the costs may be significant, however that is a cost of doing that particular business. What about charging those with need for access to the data? Once we've limited access to authenticated requestors why not charge a fee for that authenticated access? That was part of my suggestion to put the public data in the DNS. Public data accessed via the DNS is free (for some value of free, but not usage charged.) And it has roughly the accuracy and precision we experience today. For more accurate data you can pay for a record request. Up to and including presenting a court order though I would hope that's not the common case. That is one part of the outcome of ICANN's ongoing effort to try to fix the multiple decade long nightmare that is Whois, yes. I don't see it as a nightmare. It very much reflects the spirit of the internet. Much of it is free and voluntary and worth more than you paid for it. It's only when some imagine some specific, valuable use that they might become frustrated. Shall we try to clean up google (et al) result accuracy also? It needs a public examination. This is a big change. Agreed! And, in particular, it would be nice if network operators, who I believe make non-trivial use of Whois examine that change and determine whether the changes meet their requirements and if not, dare I say, participate in ICANN to make sure it does. I don't think we're very far apart. We just have slightly
Re: A translation (was Re: An update from the ICANN ISPCP meeting...)
I think one missing or weak component are those who actually make this stuff work vs the pie-in-the-sky infringer/volume/policy crowd. I've sat in IPC meetings and suffice it to say there isn't much clue on that front and why should there be unless the go-fast/go-always crowd shows up? Sure it does tend to creep in as proposed policies escape and get the attention of the doers but the danger is by that time the infringer/volume crowd might be quite committed to their vision: Make PI=3.0 and full steam ahead. What's also often lacking is simply administrative and management insight but that's not particularly germaine to this group. But I did get into a minor shouting match with an IP lawyer last week in LA who just didn't understand why service providers won't drop everything we're doing to rush through their discovery needs, for free, without indemnification (or similar), or jurisdicational authority, on an as-needed basis. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: A translation (was Re: An update from the ICANN ISPCP meeting...)
ICANN touches. IPC: http://www.ipconstituency.org I think it safe to say that much (but not all) of the warfare that goes on at ICANN meetings is between the folks interested in protecting IPR (in this context, trademarks) and folks interested in selling oodles of domain names. and unlike that constituency, originated very little in the way of policy issues for which an eventual vote was recorded. I am, in fact, unaware of any policy issues originated out of the ISPCP or BC (but again, I'm not too familiar with these groups). From a purely technical policy perspective, this may be considered to be ... unfortunate. That is, many of the folk on this mailing list undoubtedly have a view on what ICANN does yet those views are not relayed in a way the ICANN community can hear. in other words, the bc and ispc were, and for the most part, imho, remain captive properties of the intellectual property constituency. Here, Eric is suggesting the intellectual property folks are driving policy issues on behalf of the folks interested in security/stability of e-commerce and as well as ISPs and connectivity providers. I have no reason to doubt Eric's opinion as I've not been involved enough in that part of ICANN and he has. this could change, but the isps that fund suits need to change the suits they send, the trademark lawyer of eyeball network operator X is not the vp of ops of network operator X. Indeed, and I must commend Warren and Eric for caring enough to actually engage in this stuff. While many people in the NANOG/IETF/DNS Operations communities complain about the latest abomination ICANN is inflicting upon the world, there aren't a whole lot of folks from those communities who take the (non-trivial) amount of time to try to understand and address the situation. While I fully understand the rationales for not participating, the lack of strong representation from the technical community does not help in preventing abominations. meanwhile, whois, the udrp, and other bits o' other-people's-business-model take up all the available time. UDRP: The Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (I do not know why it isn't referenced as the UDNDRP or udden-drip). This is the mechanism by which people who believe a domain name is being used abusively can attempt to have that abuse stopped. Folks who have been through UDRP disputes can comment on their view of its effectiveness. Examples of other bits o' other-peope's-business-model might include stuff like how to improve accuracy in the registration databases so anti-abuse folks can have more hope finding spammers or how culturally/liguistically-identical-but-represented-by-different-Unicode-glyphs strings can be deployed as new top-level domains (by analogy, imagine if the DNS was not case insensitive for LDH labels and the 'fun' that would occur if different organizations were allowed to sell names out of the two different TLDs, .com and .COM). Or, if you want something outside of the DNS, what ICANN should do about the RPKI global trust anchor, i.e., whether the RPKI tree should be a singly-rooted tree originating at IANA as indicated by the IAB or a forest of 5 (or 6) trees originating at each of the RIRs (plus IANA) as the RIRs would appear to prefer at this time. If you've read this far, you might worry about your own sanity... :). Regards, -drc (ICANN CTO, but speaking only for myself) -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]
On October 22, 2014 at 15:31 jfb...@gmail.com (Ricky Beam) wrote: On Wed, 22 Oct 2014 14:31:02 -0400, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: Perhaps you don't remember the days when an fsck was basically mandatory and could take 15-20 minutes on a large disk. Journaling has all but done away with fsck. You'd have to go *way* back to have systems that ran a full fsck on every boot -- and in my experience, you absolutely wanted that fsck. That was my point, it was a very brief and concise 30 year history. That's why I mentioned the introduction of the clean bit which was when we began recording (there may have been earlier experiments) the clean unmounting of a file system in the superblock so no need to fsck. And you whisk all that away with it's not really clear to me that 'reboots in seconds' is a think to be optimized (I hope it's clear I meant thing to be opt...) Your efforts are better spent avoiding an outage in the first place. If outages are common enough to be something that needs to be sped up, then you've already failed. One important tool is failover. But once a system fails over you'd like to see the failed component back in service as quickly as possible unless you have an infinite number of redundant systems. Your advice doesn't ring true to me. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]
On October 23, 2014 at 04:42 ra...@psg.com (Randy Bush) wrote: Barry Schein: Interesting you went to the trouble to add a 'c' to my name! You need better quoting tools. I'm reminded of the remark often attributed to DEC CEO Ken Olson, roughly: With VMS (their big complex OS) it might take hours searching through manuals to find a feature you need while with Unix you can determine in seconds that it is not available. and how did that work out for vms? and digital? A few people made billions, a few more made many millions, hundreds of thousands (or thereabouts) had pretty good jobs for upwards of 20 years, and then the second largest computer company in the world vaporized almost mysteriously. The VAX hardware was important. It was for the time relatively inexpensive and very capable, the 32-bit address space (ok, technically four 30 bit addr spaces) and VM hardware at those prices were revolutionary. You had many of the capabilities of a multi-million dollar mainframe for about 1/10th the cost. Ran Unix great! VMS not so much. Mostly re-warmed over RSX (an earlier DEC OS) with a few new ideas to take advantage of the platform, and some cobbling from their TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 OS's (e.g. galaxy.) IMHO DEC desparately wanted to go head on with IBM's 370 line but just didn't seem to get why companies bought IBM mainframes, or found those parts too expensive to compete on. But they did ok financially anyhow so who's to criticize? VMS even had PIP! And sometimes you needed it. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]
Going way off topic but what's still a disaster in log files is the lack of standardization of output. As another extreme OS/370 catalogued virtually (hah) every error msg, if you thought you had a new one you added it to the catalogue as you added it to an error msg in your program and it was likely someone informed you something sufficient already existed, or you just specialized an existing code -- e.g., IED101203EA77... might mean daemon, file system problem, insufficient privilege, recoverable/unrecoverable, etc and then you could add a few more digits (...) to make it unique if you liked or use a known value and some free format text as per usual if desired. System/Kernel/Library wide. I realize there have been a few very weak attempts at this with *ix like errno, strerror (which for some bizarre reason never prints the errno or symbolic error only some text albeit from a known table), sysexits.h, %m in syslog which is just strerror(), etc. But syslog et al needs to go way beyond the daemon, time, and priority and free format text so log analyzers (including grep) have half a chance. Just my 2c. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd adoption and Debian's decision to switch [OT]
All those init.d scripts do about 95% the same thing, all hacked together in shell. Most of them are probably just slightly edited versions of some few paleo-scripts. Set the location of the pid file, set the path of the executable, set the command line flags/options, maybe change some flags/options based on some options in another file like /etc/sysconfig/daemon_name (also shell commands which are just executed inline), then the start/stop/reload/restart/status case statements. And the dependencies of course. It really could just be config files like xinetd or logrotate except for a few hard cases where you could have a run this script attribute. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]
I'm reminded of the remark often attributed to DEC CEO Ken Olson, roughly: With VMS (their big complex OS) it might take hours searching through manuals to find a feature you need while with Unix you can determine in seconds that it is not available. On October 21, 2014 at 16:10 asulli...@dyn.com (Andrew Sullivan) wrote: On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 03:11:55PM -0400, Barry Shein wrote: But for example some of my servers boot in seconds. One is reminded of a mail, included in the Preface to _The UNIX-HATERS Handbook_, available at http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/preface.html. Apparently, things really are going to get a lot worse before they get worse. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan Dyn, Inc. asulli...@dyn.com v: +1 603 663 0448 -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]
On October 21, 2014 at 16:43 morrowc.li...@gmail.com (Christopher Morrow) wrote: On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 4:10 PM, Andrew Sullivan asulli...@dyn.com wrote: On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 03:11:55PM -0400, Barry Shein wrote: But for example some of my servers boot in seconds. One is reminded of a mail, included in the Preface to _The UNIX-HATERS Handbook_, available at it's really not clear to me that 'reboots in seconds' is a thing to optimize... The unix community has exerted great amounts of effort over the decades to speed up reboot, particularly after crashes but also planned. Perhaps you don't remember the days when an fsck was basically mandatory and could take 15-20 minutes on a large disk. Then we added the clean bit (disk unmounted cleanly, no need for fsck), reorg'd the file system layout to speed up fsck considerably and make it more reliable/recoverable, added journaled file systems which really sped things up often eliminating the need to fsck after a crash entirely and recovering in seconds, various attempts to figure out the dependency graph of servers and services which need to be started so they could be started in parallel where dependencies are met, etc. And learned how to do hot failover and master/slave servers etc. And you whisk all that away with it's not really clear to me that 'reboots in seconds' is a think to be optimized To me that's like saying it's not important to try to design so one can recover from a network outage in seconds. Anyhow, if it's not clear: I disagree. I suppose the win is: Is the startup/shutdown process clear, conscise and understandable at 3am local time? followed by: Can I adjust my startup processes to meet my needs easily and without finding a phd in unix? If systemd is simply a change in how I think about /etc/init.d/* and /etc/rc?.d/* cool, if it's more complexity and less EASY flexibility then it's a fail. Actually, much of that is less important except perhaps to a hobbyist. You only have to get the startup/shutdown process etc right once in a while and generally during a planned outage. Recovering from a failure or going back into service quickly after a planned outage is critical and can be critical at any time. Obviously one can appeal to extremum but what you say doesn't make sense to me. At any rate, you are disputing a huge, decades long, and widely fought battle. It's certainly not my opinion. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd adoption and Debian's decision to switch
On October 21, 2014 at 13:44 brun...@nic-naa.net (Eric Brunner-Williams) wrote: systemd is insanity. see also smit. SMIT! Rhymes with -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Why is .gov only for US government agencies?
On October 22, 2014 at 01:25 i...@itechgeek.com (ITechGeek) wrote: Instead of multiple govs trying to use .gov or .mil, the best idea would be to collapse .gov under .gov.us and .mil under .mil.us (Much like how other countries already work). And of course they'll also keep .GOV and .MIL because it's too much trouble to do whatever it'd take to actually decomission them so not much would be accomplished. I'm not opposed to the idea, sure, why not, but I'm pessimstic that it'd accomplish much in our lifetimes (depending on your age of course.) I don't see that happening as long as the US gov has a say in the matter. I think .su will be decommissioned long before .gov or .mil are. We agree. Never attribute to megalomania that which can be adequately explained by inertia. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]
On October 22, 2014 at 12:00 md1...@md1clv.com (Daniel Ankers) wrote: On 22 October 2014 11:34, na...@jack.fr.eu.org wrote: Before leaving Debian, things to think: - will systemd be officialy the only system available ? - if so, won't we get a way to bypass that ? And one other thought... is it really that bad? Personally I like it a lot better than sysV plus inittab plus daemontools. I posted my complaints but I think they fall more in the realm of lack of maturity than bad design. I believe systemd is superior to sysvinit but it will take time for it to mature, administrative tools to become available (even if just better logging/tracing), and for us to get used to it and acquire the folk knowledge we need. Until then frustration will arise from time to time. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd adoption and Debian's decision to switch
On October 22, 2014 at 07:04 r...@gsp.org (Rich Kulawiec) wrote: I've seen similar tactical mistakes when developers insist that information *must* be stored in a relational database -- even though plain old ordinary text files are perfectly adequate for the task, are easier to debug, are easier to fix, and easier to maintain. There is an unfortunate tendency among many developers to attempt to wring the very last bit of performance out of systems and not to take into consideration that the scarcest and most expensive resource is the system administrator. Saving a few microseconds or a handful of bytes here and there is a horribly bad idea if it chews up an extra hour or week of SA time. Obviously it depends on the application, generalities are dangerous. But one advantage of DBs are that you automatically get all the mechanics of failover, distribution, backup and recovery, atomicity, consistency, integrity, security, etc. that come with the DB essentially for free. There is a tendency that one starts with this idea of keeping it simple, such as text files, and then proceeds to build all these mechanisms themselves, usually poorly. Look at how many different formats of configuration files we have on a typical *ix system, nearly one per application/daemon that needs a config file. Why do I have to know how to properly modify a passwd file, named config, logrotate, tcp wrappers, mail daemon configs, anti-spam configs, etc etc etc (usually in /etc!) down to what they will each take for a comment or separator or stanza syntax. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
RE: Linux: concerns over systemd adoption and Debian's decision to switch
On October 22, 2014 at 11:36 jamie.s.bow...@raytheon.com (Jamie Bowden) wrote: From: Bryan Tong The final fact is that bash itself is a dirty language that developers hate and system administrators love. Excuse me? I've been administering systems for over twenty years now and I can't say that I've ever even once chosen to use bash over any alternative; no matter how much that alternative might suck, bash sucks more. Your Linux addicts who've never used another flavor of Unix may be addicted to bash, but there's no helping some people. I wish I had a nickel for every time I started to implement something in bash/sh, used it a while, and quickly realized I needed something like perl and had to rewrite the whole thing. Sure, one can insist on charging forward in sh but at some point it becomes, as Ken Thompson so eloquently put it on another topic entirely, like kicking a dead whale down the beach. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd adoption and Debian's decision to switch
On October 22, 2014 at 05:43 l...@satchell.net (Stephen Satchell) wrote: How did this discussion get into NANOG? :) Because in the field of automotive engineering we are the ones who actually need to get down the road on time, reliably, and consistently while the automotive engineers probably take the bus where they can continue their design discussions. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]
I've done a fair amount of hand-to-hand combat with systemd. When it's good it's good, tho not always apparent why it's good. But for example some of my servers boot in seconds. When it's bad it can be painful and incredibly opaque and a huge time sink. Googling for suggestions I've found several threads where the co-author (Poettering) jumps in usually to be annoyingly arrogant (I'm sure he's very bright and good to children and pets and overworked) responding with comments like why don't you just read your logs and not bother this list or similar (that was paraphrased.) The logs are, in my experience, almost always useless or nearly so, mumble failed to start basically. I'm not the only one: http://www.muktware.com/2014/04/linus-torvalds-happy-systemd-author-kay-sievers/25151 It also resists tools like strace because it tends to do things by IPC. In one extreme case I just reworked an /etc/init.d script to avoid systemd (not use the various /etc/rc.foo files), mostly just hit it with a sledgehammer and put fixing that on my TODO list. Unfortunately I am mortal and have limited time on this earth. My experience as I said is mixed, hard cases are very hard where they really seem like they shouldn't be (just tell me roughly what you're trying to do rather than just fail, eg, via some debug enable), most are just your usual oops it wants this or that situations. I don't think I'd want to revert to sysvinit, systemd seems architecturally superior. But it needs a lot more transparency and some attempt to gather common problems -- like why is it hanging asking for a password on the console when I can't see why it thinks it needs one? -- and FAQ them with real answers or add some code/configuration to fix that (never ask for a password in this script OK? And no --no-ask-password isn't fixing this so stop repeating that answer!) -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Why is .gov only for US government agencies?
Not that anyone is looking for a solution but I suppose one possible solution would be to use the two-letter cctld then gov like parliament.uk.gov or parliament.ca.gov etc. No doubt there would be some collisions but probably not too serious. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: update
On September 28, 2014 at 13:22 j...@baylink.com (Jay Ashworth) wrote: The Internet is the only endeavour of man in which a single-character typographical error in a file on a computer on the other side of the planet *which you do not even know exists* can take your entire business off line for the better part of a day. -- Someone, in the wake of the (I think) Turkish YouTube BGP hijacking; damn if I remember who. I might be embellishing. :-) Oh I dunno. I know someone who accidentally brought down the entire Manhattan phone system (monopoly, pre-mobile days) installing a carefully tested patch with a hot failover running (oh well, the best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley.) Sure, that was just Manhattan, and of course everyone on the other side of those connections. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: internet governance, rir policy, and the decline of civilization
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? -b
Re: Scotland ccTLD?
.PC, for Picts (I believe it's available.) But I doubt that would fly. They could combine Scotland and Picts to rationalize .SP. I don't know anything about Scotland's attitude toward being identified with the Picts, however. Perhaps that's a nonsensical idea. Oh well. I guess if Scotland devolves they should invade Seychelles. Problem solved. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Fwd: Interesting problems with using IPv6
Reading the article what occurs to me is: IPv4 requires a certain amount of administrative personnel overhead. It's relatively low which is certainly one reason for the success of IPv4. People are expensive so any new, pervasive technology will be judged at least in part on its personnel requirements. I'd go so far as to say that administering large IPv4 networks grows in personnel roughly as the log of the number of nodes. If what this is telling us, or warning us, is that IPv6 networks require higher personnel costs then that could become a big issue. Particularly among management where they've become used to a few to several people in a team running the heart of quite large networks. What if IPv6 deployment doubles or triples that personnel requirement for the same quality of administration? Does anyone know of any studies along these lines? My guess is that there isn't enough data yet. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: The Next Big Thing: Named-Data Networking
Well, it's a good thing we have you around to keep us honest. On September 8, 2014 at 07:37 mo...@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta) wrote: Barry Shein wrote: Understand these were speaking notes and it was safe to assume the audience basically understood DNS so it wasn't my intention to give an exhaustive introduction to how DNS works. Surprisingly many people who basically understand DNS have the same misunderstanding as you, which is why some people believe in NDN. There also seems to be some splitting of hairs over the meaning of site in your response. That is, some sort of physical boundary vs an authoritative boundary. Then, site based FQDN can not be used for scalable routing. At any rate my proposal doesn't eliminate hierarchical addresses, See above. One could use the FQDNs themselves as hierarchical addresses at least as an external representation. You are trying to define something not usable for scalable routing a hierarchical address, which is as bad as your attempt to distort the definition of site. Masataka Ohta -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: The Next Big Thing: Named-Data Networking
Understand these were speaking notes and it was safe to assume the audience basically understood DNS so it wasn't my intention to give an exhaustive introduction to how DNS works. There also seems to be some splitting of hairs over the meaning of site in your response. That is, some sort of physical boundary vs an authoritative boundary. At any rate my proposal doesn't eliminate hierarchical addresses, it just says (in brief) that bits is bits and IP numeric addresses per se were mostly a product of modeling fast CPU registers which may not be the only model. One could use the FQDNs themselves as hierarchical addresses at least as an external representation. It was intended to be a provocative proposal. On September 7, 2014 at 11:11 mo...@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta) wrote: Barry Shein wrote: The idea is very simple, each site would be responsible for their own domain and to respond to simple remote requests for name to ip address mappings or back again. Wrong. DNS is not that simple. Domains and sites have, in general, independent topology that sites can not be responsible for domains. Perhaps, your misunderstanding is commonly shared by those who believe in NDN, though they might think there are negligible number of exceptions. Then, data, mostly, could be routed based on name hierarchy, which scales well. The reality, however, is that exceptions are everywhere and we need something like DNS to translate names into something scalably routable, that is, hierarchical addresses. Masataka Ohta -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: The Next Big Thing: Named-Data Networking
, the 2000s are over, computers are fast and getting faster and parallelism (such as multiple cores and threads) is commodity as are relatively large memories. If the average host name is about 32 characters and there are about a billion hosts then it takes around 32GB to hold all that information, maybe twice that with table overhead, 64GB. I can buy 64GB flash drives for around $100! They're too slow but I hope you get my point. And, besides, you only need to hold each network portion once in a router's memory, not for every host: COM THEWORLD 192.74.137.0 SHELL01 71 DNS 112 that's simple. To search the table the router could use a perfect hash function or as close to that as we really need. It would probably be better if we all agreed on one or a few hash functions but it's not necessary, it's only used inside a router, but it might make debugging easier. Bazinga! No DNS! But what about our list of uses of host to ip mappings? 1. Computationally / Memory efficient Who cares? 2. IP changes? Build it into ICMP and BGP infrastructure, that's a routing problem. We already have another system, ARP, which deals with similar problems to map IP to MAC addresses. 3. DNS Tricks! Trix are for kids. But, again, a routing problem. 4. Multiple interfaces Same sort of problem, mostly a last hop problem. 5. Aliases Still a last hop problem What are the problems? What do we gain? We get rid of this huge, noisy, complex infrastructure. We still need registries and registrars because we still need to file who owns a host name. But we can get rid of the entire RIR structure, the five regional organizations which hand out IP block, usually for $1000 or more per year depending on the number of bits in the network part (less is more expensive.) Well, they could still coordinate some routing functions, ASNs, etc. No DNS, no DNS attacks! To me this seems more secure tho that's a dangerous conjecture to make. But we have removed a rather public, distributed target and put most of the function in the routing infrastructure directly which tends to be more secure. For example, you don't accept routing updates from anyone, only trusted hosts. And in the near future we can expect even that to be signed. Speaking of signed, no DNNSSEC! DNSSEC is a fairly simple concept, sign DNS information exchanges using public key cryptography, with a rather complex operational overhead such as key updates and revocations. Gone! I've discussed this on very technical (private) mailing lists with the sort of people who built the MSN infrastructure, Morgan-Stanley (no more than 100msecs downtime PER YEAR!), Google, Vonage, etc. Worst complaint: We're so accustomed to thinking in terms of DNS that there must be SOMETHING wrong with your idea!! A few thought it was great and made reference to other discussions over the years which were somewhat similar tho not quite as sweeping. SO WHAT IS WRONG? -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
On July 18, 2014 at 14:49 j...@baylink.com (Jay Ashworth) wrote: Original Message - From: Barry Shein b...@world.std.com I just read, I could dig it up, that about 1/3 of all broadband users have one and only one provider, about 1/3 have 2, and about 1/3 have 3 or more. And a tiny sliver have zero, hence about. Perhaps, if you count DSL as broadband, or you count cellphone tethering. Otherwise, I would assume it's closer to 85/12/3. Could you dig that up, Barry? http://bgr.com/2014/03/14/home-internet-service-competition-lacking/ or http://tinyurl.com/ourl62e -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
I meant that comment as more of a snark that if someone wants to argue let's let the market take care of it then first we should reign in the govt-issued monopolies and small-N oligopolies. I just read, I could dig it up, that about 1/3 of all broadband users have one and only one provider, about 1/3 have 2, and about 1/3 have 3 or more. And a tiny sliver have zero, hence about. There has been massive cross-subsidization from voice monopolies also. The whole thing stinks if one cherishes anything resembling a free and open market. But worse, much worse, are the vertical trusts. Comcast is the nation's major CATV provider with on demand and pay per view video. AND Comcast owns NBC Universal. This is like one company owning almost all the auto manufacturers, petroleum and gasoline companies, refineries, tire manufacturers, and the roads and road construction companies. And obtained all that by government fiat. All that's left, to beat the analogy to death, is one is more or less free to drive where they want. And now they're working on that! And it's getting worse not better (e.g., Comcast is trying to acquire #2 Time-Warner.) Shall we wait for them to merge with Verizon and then ATT before we smell the coffee? Calling on the FCC to straighten any of this out is nonsense, they don't have the jurisdiction for starters. And, worse, the FCC's primary product is media censorship. What we need is the Dept of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to enforce anti-trust law probably with the help of Congress (yeah good luck with that.) The FCC is what happens AFTER we admit that we WANT it all to be one big monopoly like ATT was pre-breakup. Then of course we'd have to regulate that monopoly. That's why the FCC was created (and spectrum management.) Right now it's the worst of both worlds, they get the effective monopoly with protections and almost none of the regulation. We're in a pickle. On July 17, 2014 at 03:00 o...@delong.com (Owen DeLong) wrote: (me...) Let Comcast, TW, ATT, Verizon, etc relinquish their monopoly protections and then perhaps we can see something resembling a free and open business climate evolve. Even that would deny that they already have become vast and powerful on these govt-mandated sinecures. The problem with this is that so long as service providers are allowed to be facilities providers, there is an economic natural tendency to monopoly or small-N oligopoly in all but the densest of population centers that will result as a simple matter of external reality. It simply costs too damn much to put facilities in for there to be large-N copies of facilities serving the same area. That is one of the reasons I'm such a huge fan of home-run SWCs[1] with large colos run by a facilities only provider, whether that FOP is a municipality, NGO, or for profit entity (or even multiples if that were to somehow be feasible). Owen [1] Serving Wire Center -- a hub where all of the fiber from a given distribution area (of radius N where N maximum reasonable distance served by common transmission technologies available at the time of construction with costs in reason for household usage. Today, I believe that's about 5km, but it may be more).
Re: Net Neutrality...
On July 15, 2014 at 13:08 na...@brettglass.com (Brett Glass) wrote: At 12:19 PM 7/15/2014, Barry Shein wrote: There exists a low and high (practical) bandwidth range within which it simply doesn't make any difference to a given business model. Very true. And there's another factor to consider. Estimates of the maximum bandwidths of all the human senses, combined, range between the capacity of a T1 line (at the low end) and about 4 Mbps (at the high end). A human being simply is not wired to accept more input. (Yes, machines could digest more... which means that additional bandwidth to and from the home might be useful for the purpose of spying on us.) What does this imply about the FCC's proposal to redefine broadband as a symmetrical 10 Mbps? You can do the same sort of calculation for devices. Once the screen is updating at the screen refresh rate you are done, plus or minus getting a faster screen but as you note that's not open-ended. At some point you can't see faster refreshes anyhow. etc for other human interface devices. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Net Neutrality...
Re: Net Neutrality In the past all attempts to create a content competitor to the internet-at-large -- to create the one true commercial content provider -- have failed. For example, AOL, Prodigy, various portals, MSN, Netscape, on and on. We can split hairs about who goes on the list but the result is clear since if even only one qualifies we know it failed. The point stands. To a great extent net neutrality (or non-neutrality) is yet another attempt to create a content competitor to the internet-at-large. This doesn't prove it won't work but the track record viewed this way is bad: 100% failure rate to date. Mere bandwidth can foil any such nefarious plans, assuming an enforceable zero bandwidth (or nearly so) isn't one of the choices. But just somewhat less bandwidth or as proposed prioritized bandwidth? Maybe not a problem/advantage for very long. Note: I'm using bandwidth measures below as a stand-in for all possible throughput parameters. For example if the norm have-not bandwidth were 100mb/s but the have bw was 1gb/s I doubt it would make much difference to many, many business models such as news and magazine distribution. Those services in general don't even need 100mb/s end to end (barring some ramp-up in what they view as service) so what do they care if they were excluded from 1gb/s except as a moral calumny? Do you think you could tell the difference between surfing news.google.com at 100mb/s vs 1gb/s? I don't. And if have-not-bw was 1gb/s and have 10gb/s it would make little difference to video stream services except perhaps when someone tried to ramp up to 4K or whatever. But, etc., there's always a new horizon, or will be for a while. So the key to network non-neutrality having any effect is bandwidth inadequacy for certain competitive business models. It only can exist as a business force in a bw-poor world. Right now the business model of concern is video streaming. But at what bandwidth is video streaming a non-issue? That is, I have 100mb/s, you have 1gb/s. We both watch the same movie. Do we even notice? How about 1gb/s vs 10gb/s? There exists a low and high (practical) bandwidth range within which it simply doesn't make any difference to a given business model. 56kb dial-up is sufficient for displaying 512kx512k images, and 1mb/s is luxurious for that application, you couldn't gain a business advantage by offering 10mb/s modest-sized image downloads. There's simply no such open-ended extrapolation. Adequate is adequate. The internet views attempts at content monopoly as damage and routes around it. to paraphrase John Gilmore's famous observation on censorship. P.S. I suppose an up-and-coming bandwidth business model which vastly exceeds video streaming is adequate (i.e., frequent and complete) cloud backup. With cheap consumer disks in the multi-TB range, well, do the math. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
On July 14, 2014 at 08:17 d...@dcrocker.net (Dave Crocker) wrote: On 7/12/2014 3:19 PM, Barry Shein wrote: On July 12, 2014 at 12:08 ra...@psg.com (Randy Bush) wrote: or are you equating shell access with isp? that would be novel. unix shell != internet. You mean when you sat at a unix shell using a dumb terminal on a machine attached to the internet in, say, 1986 you didn't think you were on the internet? An question with more nuance than most folk tend to realize: To Be On the Internet March, 1995 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1775 How about Vicarious Access: No physical connection but people keep coming into your office to tell about some dopey thing they just read or saw on the internet. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Inevitable death, was Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
From: Benson Schliesser bens...@queuefull.net Thanks for adding this perspective, Barry. I think it's realistic. But I also think it might miss an orthogonally connected issue - this isn't just about bandwidth, but about commoditization, consolidation, size etc. It may be that small ISPs just can't compete (at least in the broader market) as the market evolves. Similar to how I was disappointed by the loss of my local bookstore, but still buy all my stuff from Amazon. ... I hear Brett essentially asking for Netflix to do more for him than it does for big ISPs, because his small rural business model can't compete with the big guys. Thoughts? But if the marginal cost of carrying netflix and similar approached zero this wouldn't be a problem. A big problem with being a usenet server was that it could take 50GB of disk space, easy. How to monetize all that disk space in a day when a GB disk cost $500? A surcharge for clients using usenet? Charge downstream customers you fed? New protocols with less store and more aggressive forward? Evolve to sites which specialize in usenet service rather than expecting every mom pop ISP to provide it as a base measure of service? But today I can get key fobs with 64GB for about $50, and of course 4TB disks for under $200. So the apparent urgency of the content business models is directly related to the costs, which tend to drop over time, usually to the point that it becomes non-urgent (or argue that they can't.) More importantly it tends to go through the same basic patterns: Identify who is benefiting. Argue about what benefiting means. Try to assess relative benefits and costs proportionately. Improve technology step-wise to mitigate and possibly reallocate costs assessing any effects on benefits. Follow the technology curve. Etc. Video streaming seems challenging. But so did 50GB of disk once. I suppose if I were to make a concrete suggestion it would be to try to develop hypothetical cost curves, thresholds (at what cost does it not matter even to the more vulnerable?), estimate dates (hah!), and not put more energy into the problem than such an analysis merits. In particular soas not to develop potentially disruptive new models whose implementation and cost of implementation one might soon enough come to regret. Also remembering that extrapolations tend to be foiled by discrete events. For example, Apr 1, 2017: Comcast/TW buys Netflix... On Jul 13, 2014 3:59 PM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: Just an observation: I've been on the internet since dirt was rocks. It seems to me that one theme which has come up over and over and over is that some new-ish technology demands more bandwidth than whatever it was people were doing previously and as it popularizes people begin fighting. In the early 80s it was downloading the host table, could people please try NOT to all download via a script at exactly midnight!!! Then it was free software in the eighties, did WSMR et al really have a RIGHT to become a magnet for such popular program downloads?! And graphic connection to remote super-computer centers. Could the images please be generated locally and downloaded off hours (whatever off hours meant on the internet) or even shipped via tape etc rather than all these real-time graphical displays running???!!! Hey, the BACKBONE was 56kb. Then Usenet, and images, particularly, oh, explicit images because OMG imagine if our administration found out our link was slow because students (pick a powerless political class to pick on and declare THEIR use wasteful) were downloading...um...you know. And games OMG games. I remember sitting in an asst provost's office in the 80s being lectured about how email was a complete and total waste of the university's resources! Computers were for COMPUTING (he had a phd in physics which is where that was coming from.) And the public getting on the internet (ahem.) On and on. Now it's video streaming. And then the bandwidth catches up and it's no big deal anymore. And then everyone stops arguing about it and goes on to the next thing to argue about. Probably will be something in the realm of this Internet of Things idea, too many people conversing with their toaster-ovens. My comment has always been the same: There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who try to figure out how bake more bread, and those who herd people into bread lines. I've always tried to be the sort of person who tries to figure out how to bake more bread. This too shall pass. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo* p dir=3DltrThanks for adding this perspective, Barry. I think it#39;s = realistic. But I also think it might miss an orthogonally connected issue
Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
On July 13, 2014 at 11:42 ra...@psg.com (Randy Bush) wrote: ahhh. so not government regulated == wild west got it Let's not forget that the big players in all this have cross-subsidized from huge, government-protected monopolies or very-small-N oligopolies in cable, phone services and wire plants, etc. To now suggest that non-governmental business processes would be superior to arbitrate interconnects etc seems, to me, highly disingenuous as a principled position. Let Comcast, TW, ATT, Verizon, etc relinquish their monopoly protections and then perhaps we can see something resembling a free and open business climate evolve. Even that would deny that they already have become vast and powerful on these govt-mandated sinecures. I'd argue it's not the wild west inasmuch as it's more like the old joke about three wolves and a sheep voting on dinner. But the imagery of range wars is apt. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
Just an observation: I've been on the internet since dirt was rocks. It seems to me that one theme which has come up over and over and over is that some new-ish technology demands more bandwidth than whatever it was people were doing previously and as it popularizes people begin fighting. In the early 80s it was downloading the host table, could people please try NOT to all download via a script at exactly midnight!!! Then it was free software in the eighties, did WSMR et al really have a RIGHT to become a magnet for such popular program downloads?! And graphic connection to remote super-computer centers. Could the images please be generated locally and downloaded off hours (whatever off hours meant on the internet) or even shipped via tape etc rather than all these real-time graphical displays running???!!! Hey, the BACKBONE was 56kb. Then Usenet, and images, particularly, oh, explicit images because OMG imagine if our administration found out our link was slow because students (pick a powerless political class to pick on and declare THEIR use wasteful) were downloading...um...you know. And games OMG games. I remember sitting in an asst provost's office in the 80s being lectured about how email was a complete and total waste of the university's resources! Computers were for COMPUTING (he had a phd in physics which is where that was coming from.) And the public getting on the internet (ahem.) On and on. Now it's video streaming. And then the bandwidth catches up and it's no big deal anymore. And then everyone stops arguing about it and goes on to the next thing to argue about. Probably will be something in the realm of this Internet of Things idea, too many people conversing with their toaster-ovens. My comment has always been the same: There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who try to figure out how bake more bread, and those who herd people into bread lines. I've always tried to be the sort of person who tries to figure out how to bake more bread. This too shall pass. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
On July 12, 2014 at 12:08 ra...@psg.com (Randy Bush) wrote: And, for the record, it's pretty widely acknowledge that The World (Barry Shein) was the world's first commercial ISP - offering shell access in 1989, and at some point started offering PPP dial-up services. As I recall, they were a UUnet POP. yep. and uunet and psi were hallucinations. can we please not rewrite well-known history? or are you equating shell access with isp? that would be novel. unix shell != internet. You mean when you sat at a unix shell using a dumb terminal on a machine attached to the internet in, say, 1986 you didn't think you were on the internet? The shell machines were connected to the internet. You could FTP, email, telnet, etc etc etc. Back in 1989 that was on the internet. Heck, in 2014 it means on the internet. Right this minute I'm in a shell on a Linux machine connected to the internet and I'm pretty sure I have access to the internet. Consider the difference if you unplug that shell machine from the internet. Internet Service Provider. You got internet services. What hair are you trying to split? That you were using a shared address? Are people behind a NAT wall not on the internet? -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
What is generally claimed is that I was the first to put the general public on the internet. Unix shell account, $20, connected machine, have at it. I got enough crap at the time for doing this that it must have been significant! ``Wot??? You can't put the GENERAL PUBLIC on the internet? What are you CRAZY??? You're illegally reselling federal property!!! (etc)'' The leap was that it was around $20 to ANYONE with a modem and a terminal (yes we had customers who actually used VT100s) or PC rather than thousands per month for a 9.6KB or 56KB leased line, router, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World.std.com On July 12, 2014 at 12:18 ra...@psg.com (Randy Bush) wrote: And, for the record, it's pretty widely acknowledge that The World (Barry Shein) was the world's first commercial ISP - offering shell access in 1989, and at some point started offering PPP dial-up services. As I recall, they were a UUnet POP. yep. and uunet and psi were hallucinations. can we please not rewrite well-known history? or are you equating shell access with isp? that would be novel. unix shell != internet. btw, not do denigrate what barry did. a commercial unix bbs connected to the real internet was significant. the left coasties were doing free stuff, the well, community memory, ... and barry created a viable bbs commercial service which still survives (i presume). a significant achievement. randy -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
On July 11, 2014 at 22:31 o...@delong.com (Owen DeLong) wrote: Not to take away from Barry, but around that same time, some of us left coasts were also helping to build Netcom as a viable commercial entity providing shell and later PPP and dedicated line access (DS0, T1). That was several months later, Rieger et al were well aware of The World, and Panix for that matter which came after World but before Netcom. They were springing up, yes, but first is first, vague handwaves of around that same time is irrelevant. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix
On July 12, 2014 at 07:16 mfidel...@meetinghouse.net (Miles Fidelman) wrote: umm what history am I re-writing? http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ - is as good a source as any for Internet history, which says this under 1990 The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access says ok - one can quibble 1989 (what Barry states on World's home page) PSInet was very late 1989, so there was that, I believe UUnet was 1990 I have ads and price schedules from October 1989 for public access internet. I could probably even dig up billing data from October or November. We actually started by offering shell and uucp access in August 1989 and then became a UUNET POP which put us directly on the internet in October. There was a T1 in our offices which back then was a pretty big deal! It was shared with other UUNET customers. We already had hundreds of customers using email etc when we became 192.74.137.*. UUNET and PSI internet wholesale were nearly simultaneous, I don't know the exact dates but early summer 1989 for internet sales. UUNET was already in the uucp biz for a year or two before that, we were a UUNET uucp customer when we started (and some other nodes like Encore, BU, etc.) Another reference is RFC2235 (I don't know why they used 1990 but it was written in 1997 and by then it didn't seem worth correcting) but there are a bunch of articles, I have most of them linked on my home page, http://www.TheWorld.com/~bzs What I did forget was NEARnet - which embarrasses me, since I was at BBN at the time. But, at first, NEARnet limited access to the NSFnet backbone to it's non-commercial customers (at least that was the policy - I'm not sure that filtering was ever really turned on in the gateways). I don't recall whether CSnet had any commercial members. Apple was a CSNET 56k customer. or are you equating shell access with isp? that would be novel. unix shell != internet. well now we get to rehash to very old definitional distinction between Internet Access Provider and Internet Service Provider and yes, if a service provider takes money, to provide access to the Internet in some way, shape, manner, or form, yes - that's providing Internet access or service - and as soon as dial-up included PPP, then that's a non-issue btw, not do denigrate what barry did. a commercial unix bbs connected to the real internet was significant. the left coasties were doing free stuff, the well, community memory, ... and barry created a viable bbs commercial service which still survives (i presume). a significant achievement. The other service Barry provided was pushing the whole issue of commercial access to the backbone. That was kind of epic. I agree, that's the real point. As I said, what I did caused a furor. And yes, they're still going strong. I still maintain an account - it's my backup for the rare case that I need a separate site for diagnosing issues with our cluster. Cheers, Miles -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. Yogi Berra -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Next steps in extortion case - ideas?
Not sure if anyone else has mentioned this but one reason to get law enforcement involved, cynicism aside, is a concern for personal, particularly physical, retribution. At one time I spent a bit too much time refuting holocaust deniers, it got rather one-on-one. They came in various flavors but some were easy to characterize as neo-nazis, some well known to law enforcement and the media, etc. There were times I'd look up and down my (fairly long) driveway carefully when coming home, in a manner of speaking. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Ars Technica on IPv4 exhaustion
On June 19, 2014 at 04:01 o...@delong.com (Owen DeLong) wrote: ICANN != a good sampling of number resource issues or concerns. As you noticed, the whole mess with domain names and their IP issues is the monetary tail that wags the ICANN dog. ICANN barely pays attention to number resources and when they do, it?s primarily to do whatever has been agreed upon by the policy processes in the various RIRs. This is actually a good thing and we should seek to preserve this fact after ICANN loses its ?adult supervision?. Really. You're really completely discounting ICANN in having any leadership or participative role in the IPv4/IPv6 transition? Interesting. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Ars Technica on IPv4 exhaustion
But I thought ICANN was supposed to be the new and future nexus for all things internet governance? On June 19, 2014 at 13:57 morrowc.li...@gmail.com (Christopher Morrow) wrote: On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 1:51 PM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: Really. You're really completely discounting ICANN in having any leadership or participative role in the IPv4/IPv6 transition? What leadership position have you seen them take ASIDE from marketing (in the last 2-3 yrs, but most of that has been ISOC not ICANN directly) in the last 5 yrs or so? -chris -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Ars Technica on IPv4 exhaustion
Well my suggestion was less in the realm of imposing changes in policy and more in the realm of providing resources (even if just as a nexus) and fora to help promote IPv6 adoption, brainstorm the problem. There is a cross-disciplinary aspect to this, it's not only a network engineering and operational issue, or only incidentally. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Ars Technica on IPv4 exhaustion
Not to mix this up but one of the main reasons I attended ICANN meetings over several years was an interest in the IPv4/IPv6 transition. To say interest was sparse is an under, er, over statement. There was a good session on legacy IPs, a topic more than marginally related, in Toronto in fall 2012, a few people here were there. Really, I can list them like that. I'd sit in on the ISP sessions, for years, but when they weren't talking about how to fill out travel reimbursement reports (Brussels) they were mostly talking about site takedowns for intellectual property violations and similar, very similar, trademark issues and domains, etc. In a nutshell the whole TLD thing and other registry/registrar and closely related business issues so dominated discussions it drowned everything else out about 99%. If I'd bring it up, shouldn't we be discussing what we can do as an organization about IPv4/IPv6?, I'd usually get a 1,000 mile stare like who let this guy in? I remember once being cut off with oh, CGN will solve that (Sydney). I realize RIRs are more directly involved in many ways but this should be, in my opinion, a high-priority global internet governance policy issue with RIRs implementing or enjoying the results, not driving the issue, or only as much as they can. Then again vis a vis ICANN you can say this about almost any issue not directly related to registry/registrar business matters. TL;DR: I think there's an exposure and public awareness problem, even with those who are chartered with being interested. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: NTIA cedes root zone control
And the seventh seal is broken... -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Large DDoS, small extortion
On May 23, 2014 at 15:19 asulli...@dyn.com (Andrew Sullivan) wrote: On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 02:09:18PM -0400, Barry Shein wrote: I just don't know and would suggest reliance on case studies and experienced professionals. Well, yes, but I also observe that LE's interests and your own as the operator of the site diverge, because their risk isn't the same as yours. It's worth keeping that in one's calculus. Good point. There is the danger of the operation was a success but the patient died (i.e., they caught the perp but destroyed your business in the process.) -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Large DDoS, small extortion
Sure, of course, many of us have. But how is $VICTIM supposed to distinguish the wheat from the chaff without reference to specific cases and results? Some reasonable-sounding suggestions could be counter-productive or even downright dangerous (depending on the nature of the attacker.) Or a waste of time. On May 22, 2014 at 23:22 iki...@gmail.com (Blake Dunlap) wrote: Most of us wish we didn't. There are so much more productive ways to spend the day than fighting a determined and adaptive attacker. -Blake On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 10:20 PM, Roland Dobbins rdobb...@arbor.net wrote: On May 23, 2014, at 3:38 AM, Barry Shein b...@world.std.com wrote: Some real life experience and results, case studies. Some of us have quite a bit of real-life experience and results in these situations. -- Roland Dobbins rdobb...@arbor.net // http://www.arbornetworks.com Equo ne credite, Teucri. -- Laocoön -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Large DDoS, small extortion
On May 24, 2014 at 00:38 rdobb...@arbor.net (Roland Dobbins) wrote: Never, under any circumstances, pay. Not even if you've persuaded the Men from U.N.C.L.E. to help you, and they suggest you pay because they think they can trace the money, do not pay. Ok, you're recommending $VICTIM ignores or resists the advice of law enforcement authorities, right? What is this based on other than your subsequent common sense reasoning? (directly below) Why not? Because, irrespective of what happens with this one attacker, you will be swarmed by countless others. Attackers brag when they're paid; they'll exaggerate how much they received, and then you have a much bigger problem. By irrespective of what happens do you include your earlier suggestion that the attacker might be traced and arrested? Tracing the money in extortion schemes is a common tactic. Obviously the likelihood of success has to be evaluated. But a lot of criminals are dumb or perhaps put better naive. DDos'ing is one thing, successfully laundering money is a different skill set. I just don't know and would suggest reliance on case studies and experienced professionals. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Large DDoS, small extortion
You know what would be nice? Some real life experience and results, case studies. I see the common sense and logic to a lot of these suggestions but that and $1.75 plus tax will get you a venti coffee of the day at Starbucks. Victim: I'd be very wary of these suggestions unless there's some good, solid reason to believe they're based on reality not just I've simulated all of human psychology in my head and here's what I think you should do... I think it's interesting that the guy asks for such small amounts, under US$1000. Maybe that's a lot of money for him. Maybe he thinks it won't be worth investigating such a small amount. Maybe he thinks it's not a very big crime so if he gets caught he's more likely to walk. Maybe he thinks he's poor/broke and this money is deservedly his to demand, it's such a modest demand. Note: He could be factually/legally wrong but that's why I prefaced with maybe he thinks... Maybe he's a sadist and gets a kick out of making you squirm and the money is just his way of keeping score, making you do something tangible, kind of like kiss my boots! Maybe he's insane which voids all of the above. Maybe it's some sort of penetration exercise by terrorists, a govt, etc. Maybe all I've said and $1.75 plus tax... -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Observations of an Internet Middleman (Level3) (was: RIP Network Neutrality
On May 12, 2014 at 15:02 n...@foobar.org (Nick Hilliard) wrote: In the net neutrality debate, the last mile service providers are in a position where they need to upgrade their access networks, but the end-user pricing is not necessarily keeping pace. You make a common error: That we the people should be concerned with Comcast's (et al) business model over our own ability to obtain the best service at the best price. That we should be so concerned that we are willing to legislate and regulate against our own interests lest Comcast et all suffer an economic injustice. It's an interesting, albeit not uncommon, view of economic justice for corporate entities. We live in an economic advocacy society, not one driven primarily by economic justice. The latter is generally called charity and charity for huge corporations is, well, just that. Obviously one has every right to advocate for corporate welfare but let's call it what it is. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Observations of an Internet Middleman (Level3)
On May 12, 2014 at 15:37 n...@foobar.org (Nick Hilliard) wrote: On 12/05/2014 15:27, Clayton Zekelman wrote: I think that's where the biggest gulf exists. It doesn't seem fair. It seems like extortion. The last mile access guys are the gatekeepers to the end user, with little competition. that is the core problem: lack of competition. Net neutrality is a kludge to deal with a specific type of failure in the market. HOWEVER, I do agree with this comment. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Observations of an Internet Middleman (Level3) (was: RIP Network Neutrality (was: Wow its been quiet here...
Possibly interesting: FCC chairman will reportedly revise broadband proposal http://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-chairman-will-reportedly-revise-broadband-proposal/ or http://tinyurl.com/kfwrogs -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Observations of an Internet Middleman (Level3) (was: RIP Network Neutrality (was: Wow its been quiet here...
I agree with your summary. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: Observations of an Internet Middleman (Level3) (was: RIP Network Neutrality (was: Wow its been quiet here...
On May 10, 2014 at 22:34 ra...@psg.com (Randy Bush) wrote: imiho think vi hart has it down simply and understandable by a lay person. http://vihart.com/net-neutrality-in-the-us-now-what/. my friends in last mile providers disagree. i take that as a good sign. Yeah, well, for extra credit integrate Akamai into that story. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
Re: The FCC is planning new net neutrality rules. And they could enshrine pay-for-play. - The Washington Post
On April 27, 2014 at 21:56 larryshel...@cox.net (Larry Sheldon) wrote: On 4/27/2014 8:59 PM, goe...@anime.net wrote: If the carriers now get to play packet favoritism and pay-for-play, they should lose common carrier protections. I didn't think the Internet providers were common carriers. Here we go again! There is more than one commonly used meaning for common carriers. There is a Communications Common Carrier as defined in the US Communications Act of 1934 regulated under the FCC and as subsequently amended by...blah blah blah. And there is the much older common law usage which can apply to trains, planes, taxis, delivery services, stagecoaches, etc which basically recognizes that in general many services engaged in COMMON CARRIAGE. They can't be assumed to know what (or who for that matter) they are carrying for a fee -- when they don't. Obviously if one can prove they did or should have known that's an exception. So therefore shouldn't be assumed responsible for the contents if illegal or whatever. And not dragged into civil lawsuits if, e.g., someone claims that carrying the package caused harm unless perhaps the carrier threw it at the head of the recipient in which case they'd probably be culpable. Another requirement of a common law common carrier is that they provide their service to the public without discrimination other than ability to pay and whatever reasonable rules apply to everyone -- e.g., package can't be dripping liquid or weigh more than someone's before picture in a nutrisystem ad. The details of that of course have been beaten to a fine powder in court cases and subsequent law and regulation. SO...an ISP (et al) can be considered a common law Common Carrier without being a Common Carrier as defined in the Comm Act 1934 (and subsequent, Telecom Act 1996, etc.) ISPs don't in general have knowledge of the contents of the data they carry except when you can prove that they did which is generally assumed to be the exception or as a result of being served proper notice. But I thought we agreed on all those terms in 1991 on the com-priv list? :-) IANAL, if you mistake what I said for legal advice or accuracy you are your own fool. But I don't have to be an animal expert to point out y'all don't know the difference between a dog and a cat. -- -Barry Shein The World | b...@theworld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Dial-Up: US, PR, Canada Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
