The Role of the ISP — Individuals and companies who have their own networks interconnect those nets by plugging in through Internet Service Providers [ISPs]. And in turn, each ISP is linked to “upstream” network providers, and through those to a group of very large carriers who form what’s called the Internet backbone. It’s not just a two-dimensional backbone, but itself is a distributed network of very-high-speed carriers with real-world physical interconnection points. There are many possible routes from an end user to another end user through this backbone. The big providers do what is called peering at these interchange points, where they are all peers, handing off traffic from one to the other with the flow based, of course, on how much traffic is going in any given direction, but otherwise “equally” in terms of priority.

There is, of course, nothing to prevent companies from creating their own private networks to route their traffic faster or more directly than the Internet can route it, but the flexibility and particularly the ubiquity of the Internet makes it ferociously attractive even for private data exchanges.

Each ISP collects fees from its customers, and it then purchases its upstream connections (meaning connections “closer to the backbone”), paying more or less based on the bandwidth of those connections. That’s how upstream ISPs make their money. And they pay the backbone providers for connections. And so forth.

Bandwidth — From the earliest days of the Internet, ISPs have provided service based primarily on the bandwidth (bits per seconds) provided to customers.

In the 1980s, a regular guy like me might buy dial-up service, which could run at maybe 1,200 bits per second [bps]. My blue graph illustrates relative speeds from dial-up on the bottom to T1 dedicated service on the top. Dial-up services (which includes ISDN)  reached higher speeds with better equipment (called modems – which connected a computer to a phone line). Even higher speeds could be achieved with dedicated lines rather than dial-up. ISDN reached 64,000 bps, but required two dedicated pairs of copper wires. The “T1” line, spoken of in hushed reverent tones in the 1990s, was a repurposing of the phone company’s internal T1 lines, which bundled 24 basic lines together into a single channel at about 1.5 million bits per second [mbps].

As digital services proliferated, the T1 became less useful, with DSL and ADSL speeds several times faster, and consumer cable Internet going up to nearly 80 mbps at the fast end of that spectrum. My red graph shows the T1 at the bottom end of the data services at 1.5mbps, and cable Internet at the top with around 80mbps. There are also fibre services where the speed of cable is kind of the low starting point, and service may reach 1,000 mbps (1gbps) at the top end.

Ah, but my point is that ISPs used to really sell bandwidth and your monthly price would be linked to the speed of your connection to your ISP.

• If you multiply out the bandwidth times the number of seconds a month, it would give you a theoretical maximum amount of data your ISP might be carrying in a time period. A phone line running at 1,200 bps would carry a max of about 30 billion bits (about 3 gigabytes) in a month, for example, though typically you’d be using only a fraction of that.
• As data services developed, businesses bought “T1” and higher-speed lines from their ISPs. Today’s DSL services at 6 mbps theoretically could carry about 15 terabytes [TB] in a month (15,000 gigabytes). And consumer cable data services could carry more than 10 times that amount of data, or more than 200 TB in a month.

Bandwidth and Capacity — As with any network that carries traffic — think interstate roadways, for example — a network is built with enough capacity to handle only a small percentage of the total possible traffic. Otherwise, the vast majority of routes would remain almost empty most of the time.

Engineering a Network’s Capacity — So there’s an “engineering” problem that always has to be solved — deciding how much capacity to actually build or turn on (to “provision”). (But look up the term dark fibre sometime if you want to know more.) Carriers need to be able to handle realistic peak traffic, but not maintain excess and therefore unused capacity.

Managing Network Traffic — And when a network gets close to capacity, the network manager wants to manage traffic in some way to avoid complete gridlock. In fact, large network managers claim that this is the primary reason to eliminate net neutrality – because they claim it hampers their ability to shape traffic when it peaks.

Why Limited Bandwidth and Net Neutrality are enemies — So carriers want to be able to prioritize (”shape”) traffic (and presumably charge someone more for priority traffic). Makes sense, huh? If the network is clogged, wouldn’t you as customer want your real-time video or audio calls to get through. And wouldn’t you agree to postpone delivery of spam, or delivery of traffic that’s not time-critical? That’s the genesis of the term Quality of Service [QoS], which deals with finding ways to ensure the delivery of high-value communications. But the question is who sets the priorities. Certainly one user would like to prioritize his video or audio. And another might prioritize her online real-time gaming. So here is the one crucial sentence in my argument:

In other words, to belabor my point, if there were no principle of net neutrality the carrier could prioritize and give more timely delivery to the prioritized traffic.

And to belabor my further point, if prioritization is allowed, carriers can and will charge more for it, will make special rules that benefit themselves (and their associated companies and services), and will begin restricting other traffic. This is the origin of today’s whole hullabaloo about net neutrality. (And with which I am in agreement, as you can see.)

So in a nutshell, this is why carriers don’t like net neutrality:

1. ISPs and other carriers already build out (or “provision”) less capacity than they sell to their users. For statistical reasons, this generally works out just fine.
2. They have to carefully engineer their capacity, and when it fills up, net neutrality (all bits being the same) leads to all traffic, including videos, audio, and real-time communications, get gummed up.
3. They would prefer to be able to de-prioritize some traffic so the special traffic could get through the jams, but net neutrality prevents this. (They’d also like to charge more for this special traffic.)
4. They could build out more capacity, or could “light up” unused lines, to relieve the problem, but that costs them more.
5. Therefore carriers in general will argue against net neutrality.

This leads me to predict some pretty clear scenarios for the future — some Post- Net Neutrality scenarios. You can envision your own, then read on in my next article.

The post Net Neutrality — The Issue is Bandwidth appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Net Neutrality — Its core is that 1. all bits/packets on the Internet have equal priority; and 2. all endpoints on the Internet are interconnected and traffic is accepted and delivered without prejudice to and from each and all of these endpoints.

The network operators (as data carriers) find better and better ways to carry traffic faster and cheaper (and perhaps more profitably overall), but to date it has been Internet pioneers, entrepreneurs, commerce, media, news and online services who have created new uses of this Internet platform, not the traffic carriers themselves.

The opponents of net neutrality want to eliminate the neutrality principles.

They tell us this is so the carriers can innovate and develop new services, and better manage their own networks. I’d say there’s some value in the management issue, but since the 1990s, carriers have been developing new capabilities, higher speeds, and the ability to handle more traffic even with net neutrality in place. What the elimination of net neutrality would allow them to do is charge based on type or origin of traffic — in other words, the carriers would presumably charge more for traffic that’s more valuable to the user, participating more directly in the profitability of every new service innovated by any entrepreneur. And also “calling the shots” on which services may have to pay the carriers more to prioritize, or even handle their type of traffic in the first place.

How do I know this? From conversations and news reports in the mid-1990s.

Net Neutrality has, so far, prohibited this kind of behavior and left the networks as essentially common carriers carrying all data without discrimination.

Legislation and the Internet — Legislation passed in the US, or China, or Iran or Brazil has localized effect for the most part. But legislation in the US, in the case of neutrality at least, will affect vast amounts of global Internet traffic, and the elimination of Net Neutrality in US law, followed by its elimination in practice by network managers, will have global effects.

Political Questions — This is not a “political” question. It is an economic question. Carriers would like to benefit more from the data they carry — currently they carry all traffic uniformly regardless of its content or economic value. Every bit costs the same as the next bit to carry, though some services use more bits. But financial data doesn’t cost any more to carry bit-for-bit than a Disney movie. Although Dems and GOP in Congress are coming down on pro- and con- sides of Net Neutrality, in real life it affects all of us equally. Seeing that Dems are more pro-neutrality, they are attempting to save neutrality which will benefit Republicans every bit as much. The political arguments are really based on taking sides for or against the large network operators, and for or against live citizens.

Why it’s Important — Neutrality permits netizens to build platforms (software, hardware) without regard for whether their traffic will be speeded, blocked or slowed by communication providers. That’s just it in a nutshell. It has been an essential part of net life for many years.

It also permits “anyone” to connect to the net. There are no special fees based on type of business or type of content. Instead they’re based on volume or speed. Fairly and equally. Some content may be blocked legally, but this is rather narrow in scope, and is determined in law, not by network carriers.

As a fundamental principle of the Internet, Net Neutrality is essential to openness and innovation.

The post Net Neutrality — Introduction and overview appeared first on Sky's Blog.

“Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.” – Aldous Huxley

Another year will soon start. Lucky to have made it through this one. Huxley’s thought (above) is certainly what I feel tonight. This past week I’ve gone through a fascinating medical procedure (where the sedative didn’t do as I had expected…and so I had some experiences I had not forecast), and I’ve written more music (extended both Beings of Light and Darkness and my Dakini Dances). I want to focus on more music every day. So for the last day of this year I’m going to commit to focusing on writing new music that whole day. And on into whatever my future is.

And in addition to that, I intend to keep my eyes open and work with those who would support the preservation of our freedoms and rights. I have a new appreciation of the US Constitution and its protections—and the underlying fact that power is given to government by the people—power is vested in the people, not the government. And also how fragile this relationship can be.

So we have our road rising up ahead of us. We can kind of see it through the haze. We have glimpses of what’s coming. But we have to take each turn in the road as it arises. Let’s go!

° ° ° ° °

(If you’ve already listened to the playlists below, the new music is at the end of each playlist. You can mouseover each list, scroll downward, and click to play the more recent additions. The last movement of Beings is new. The last two Dakini Dances segments are new.)

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/234883930″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/132507989″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

The post Happy New Year appeared first on Sky's Blog.

A “backdoor” is a mechanism that allows a service provider or government to access the contents of a system without knowing users’ passwords and without their knowledge. It is essentially a universal key that opens everything.

We hear government officials crying out that this is the only way they can protect the nation against attack. In other words, the government wants to have universal access to every electronic communication, or we will all die in flaming terrorist attacks.

So just why is this the stupidest idea in the world?Well it’s so incredibly stupid because it is impossible to guarantee that a “universal key” that decrypts everything can be kept secret. The government’s argument make it sounds like there’s a little physical key (like a little golden metallic key, let’s say) that could be kept safe in a place like Fort Knox and only brought out when needed. And yes, would be separate keys or processes for each provider or company (one for Apple, one for Dell, one for AT&T, one for Facebook) But encryption does NOT rely upon physical keys—that’s a dangerous argument.

There would be additional processes and safeguards on these keys, but essentially once a key is figure out, an entire company, entire industry, entire set of encryption processes, could be compromised.

With encryption, the  key is a sequence of numbers. You don’t have to break into a vault and “steal” the key to have universal access — you just have to figure out what the key is, even independent of the guys who created it in the first place, and once you figure it out, you’re in and you have access to everything—past, present, future.

Here are some common-sense reasons why this just can’t possibly work:

1. If someone were to find a way to independently generate or figure out the key(s), they’d be able to read every encrypted message ever created. (It’s a bit more complex than this, but it’s close.)
2. The key(s) would immediately become the target of every foreign government’s security services. If one of them discovered the key (stole it, recreated it, hacked an easier way of duplicating it), you’d probably not know. Just suddenly everything would become transparent to them.
3. Crooks will immediately attempt to discover the secret key(s). Don’t underestimate these guys. They are superb hackers and they have many millions of dollars to spend working on this. They might succeed.
4. It’s even easier, however. The key(s) would be stored somewhere on computers. If crooks could hack into that computer, they could probably extract the key.
5. A disgruntled government employee might release the key(s). Think about Edward Snowden if you want to argue that any government anywhere is really capable of keeping everything secret all the time, and forever.
6. Once the key is “out” it’s out forever. There’s no calling it back. (There could be mitigating circumstances on this one, but it would still be a terrible meltdown.)
7. The key(s) doesn’t affect just crooks and terrorists. It would also affect commercial transactions, banking, credit cards, stock markets … in short everything that depends upon encryption could be compromised if the key(s) were hacked.
8. Oh, and public key encryption has existed for years. If the government were to require that in the future there be backdoors for universal decryption, any of the existing encryption systems (which would not have backdoors) could continue to be used. (As far we we know there is no universal key for today’s systems.)
9. You know the phrase “If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.” Well if commercial operators are required to provide the government with backdoors into their systems, you can be sure that outlaws will not, and from then on, only the outlaws will have secure communications.

Convinced yet?

Is that enough? Do you trust any government to do this, let alone to understand the magnitude of this Pandora’s Box?

[1] Interesting Infoworld article about this.

[2] Problems with backdoors Infoworld article

The post Backdoors – How Absolutely Stupid! appeared first on Sky's Blog.

In January (2015) I began a zero-to-sixty transition from full-time computer scientist to composer. The next stage in the process begins in September (2015), where I have been accepted as a student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in their Technology and Applied Composition program. Their Professional Studies Diploma [PSD] is a non-degree, full-time “post-graduate program” that runs one academic year. (I guess I don’t really need more degrees — just want to learn how to do more stuff.)

You can find my recent in-progress work online and I will update this frequently. You can work “upward” from that link to find other works from the recent past. I am currently writing a three-part suite with the working name “Flight” and there is one excerpt online. A second three-part suite, which is yet untitled, is represented as well.  All are works-in-progress.

During this time I will continue to support cyberspark.net efforts in human rights and free speech, and a limited number of Red7 clients.

A pivotal event during the transition was the New Music Gathering which was hosted at SFCM in January 2015. I wrote a short article about the gathering in January.

The post Technology and Applied Composition at SFCM appeared first on Sky's Blog.

What this means is that the theory behind something — in this case encryption using “hard” mathematics — may be very good, but the implementation can be full of “gotchas” — errors, omissions, faults — and that‘s what will get you in the long term. He was specifically commenting on Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US National Security Agency and whether they can read all encrypted messages, but it can apply to many other software endeavors.

If you’re thinking of writing some software whose function is critical, and especially if lives depend on it, you have to be extremely careful with your implementation. And Open Source is a big plus because other eyes can look at your code and spot mistakes that you, as author, are likely to overlook.

So whatever you’re working on, be very, very careful with the implementation.

The post In the long run they’ll get you “in the code” appeared first on Sky's Blog.

If the US were to institute laws that allow the Attorney General and/or companies to force ISPs to block (or modify the DNS for) domains they assert are in violation of copyright, it would be the beginning of a slippery slope which could well lead to blocking (censorship in effect) for other reasons. There is just not enough due process in these proposed laws. Once the mechanics are in place, it would be easy to justify using them for other purposes.

I was most impressed at the action taken by Wikipedia on January 18th (2012) to make their service unavailable (except via mobile and for certain pages). And Google did a great job by blacking out their logo, leaving their search intact, and providing links to further information, including pages to reach Congresspeople! Craigslist.org also put up a splash page, which I think sent many people in the right direction. Craig Newmark, founder (and customer support) of Craig’s List is very much involved in citizen democracy (“democracy 2.0” if you will). I put up notices on my own sites, and on my friend Amy Jussel’s ShapingYouth.org on the 18th, directing peoples’ attention to the SOPAstrike page. I was also impressed that

The key is to not require that ISPs or search engines be the enforcers of government policies, and to not wreck the DNS (and DNSSEC) system by spoofing (even legally) domain names.

I believe Wikipedia and Google turned the tide, and am hopeful that these misbegotten bills will now be abandoned or completely rewritten to make more sense!

The post Stop #SOPA #PIPA Wikipedia + Google turned the tide appeared first on Sky's Blog.

There is no due process and no way someone who is wrongfully blocked can get themselves quickly unblocked.

And were this legislation to pass in the US, it would signal strong support for other countries similarly blocking internationally-hosted content based on their own national laws. (Many do it already, but let’s not set an example.)

Join me in opposing these bills. Notify your US Senators and Representatives.

This site will be participating in the Strike on January 18th, 2012.

The post Stop SOPA/PIPA appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Here are five reasons why you have to build your own cyber-protection capabilities rather than relying on governments to solve any of your security (and cyber-attack) problems for you. And you have to be vigilant and aware of what’s going on that might put governments even more in control of your online communications, reducing the options you have available to communicate privately with others as well as to defend yourself.

1. Government behavior recently shows that ultimately they (all?) want online communications to be available for them to read, even if they’re encrypted. The excuse is that terrorists and traitors use encrypted channels and therefore all communications must be readable by the authorities. Thus countries are fighting to secure warrantless wiretapping[1. Here’s what the EFF says on warrantless wiretapping – this is a great jumping off point for info], and to get hold of encryption keys (RIM/Blackberry[2. This has been going on for a couple of years with RIM/Blackberry, here Bruce Schneier tells us what the issue was as early as 2008.], Google[3. Read article about Google’s response in Economic Times (India) 16 December, 2010], etc.) so they can read Internet traffic.
2. Some governments (certainly the US that we know of) are already copying your communications into their data storage for later correlation and reference [4. Download the EFF release on AT&T diverting fiberoptic traffic in San Francisco to the NSA.]. ISPs and telcos have gigabit taps in place at interconnect facilities that give government agencies unfettered access to the entire information flow. I know from secondhand reports that this happens in other countries—you can google-around for more leads on that.
3. Governments are now saying (the UN particularly is floating this idea) they want to create international agreements so governments can work together to help make the Internet a safer place. This is a bad, bad, bad idea[5. Here’s what Vint Cerf and others said, according to the Huffington Post.] because repressive governments would rather you not have the ability to blog freely, and if this turns into an international agreement, everyone will be reduced to the lowest-common denominator.
4. They’re talking about kill switches[6. See my article In case of emergency, shut eyes and stagger in the dark.]  that would shut down critical portions of net communications in the event of a government-declared emergency. And many governments already selectively kill some types of communication, walling off YouTube, or Google search, online news like the New York Times, or other services  when they cover something the nation’s governors do not like.
5. If they don’t like something you say, then governments, or patriotic individuals, or attackers-for-hire will shut you down with denial of service attacks. So really you have to have your own plan in place and be ready to execute it. Your plan might just be to shut down, but at least you should be thinking about it in advance. And I’m telling you that governments are not going to be able to step in and protect you from that—it requires action at the level of your hosting facility.

My bottom line is that you yourself have to take care of your security to the degree you can.

First, (#1 above) you need to encrypt your communications with your business partners and friends. There are lots of ways you can do this and all of them require some amount of work, and that small amount of work has always been a barrier. You gotta get over that barrier and do it!

Second (#2) if your communications are encrypted and are copied for later analysis, someone who wants to snoop on you probably won’t like it, but you still are safer because it may take a considerable time to break that encryption. And although 99.9% of what you say won’t be of interest anyway, unless you’re plotting some evil deed, it’s possible for people to misinterpret what you’re saying and go after you. And on top of that, some of your personal conversations might just be embarrassing.

On #3, it’s just a really bad idea for governments to make policy about what can be carried on the Internet because the repressive governments will speak loudest, and any uniform international rules that would be formed would aim to protect the interests of the most repressive governments, not the rights of individuals. They’ll make it illegal to “advocate overthrow of the government” or “to offend national social norms” and since these differ so radically from one place to another, we will all be bound by rules that severely restrict our ability to speak openly about practically anything.

On #4, cutting access to the Internet in the event of a government-declared emergency immediately impedes the ability of civil society and NGOs to work across borders to stop any hostilities that might arise. It would plunge the net into darkness, where none of us could function. We see evidence of this in the ways China’s Golden Shield (the Chinese firewall) is used to suppress any mention of topics the government does not wish to see discussed. There is no broad freedom of speech in countries that do this kind of filtering and blocking, and if this were institutionalized worldwide so that we could not offend the Chinese government (they say offend the Chinese people, but we know it’s the government objecting, not the people—Chinese citizens are certainly as able as humans anywhere to accept diversity of opinions). Forming regulations that would apply worldwide would severely restrict freedom of speech in the most “free” countries in order to reduce it to the level acceptable to all repressive states.

And finally, #5 denial-of-service attacks are becoming the norm when someone doesn’t like what you’re saying. These are the “private” equivalent of setting up a firewall to stop your opinion from entering a country (like China) by shutting down your “printing press” as it were.

Why the parrot photo? Well, I’ve long had a policy of “if you can’t say something new and unique, don’t say anything at all” so I have not, so far,   parroted any comments on Wikileaks or Julian Assange, though there are many hints about the future of free speech, journalism, and government involvement in all of this, in what you can read almost anywhere online!

The post Don’t rely on governments to solve your security problems appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Domain takedowns

TSA: Recently the TSA in the US has begun using backscatter x-ray and microwave “naked scanners” to  examine all passengers before they take flights (see TSA Encounter at SAN that sparked the“don’t touch my junk” outcry and the statement “He said that I gave up a lot of rights when I bought my ticket.”), and so officials assert that although the US constitution in its fourth amendment guarantees the right to be “secure in our persons… against unreasonable searches and seizures”, there is no right to fly and if a citizen wishes not to be searched they must travel in some other way.

Network Neutrality: I see similar arguments from ISPs which wish to prioritize traffic based on economic and other concerns rather than observe the “net neutrality” rules that have served the Internet well for decades, which could mean that only the web sites that choose to pay higher prices would have their traffic carried quickly and efficiently, and the rest of us might be left in a second tier (or lower) where our sites might be carried more slowly, or not at all.[3. Google and Verizon argued essentially that they should be allowed to surpass the current Internet, develop channels of their own, and charge or do whatever they wish with those.] The argument would be that online expression is a privilege and not a right.

Email blocklists: You’re probably not aware that in attempting to reduce the flow of spam email, ISPs typically “blocklist” servers that they judge to be contributing to the problem. This process entraps many little email servers that are innocent but happen to be housed in hosting facilities where spammers are doing their dark deeds. And getting off the blocklists, or getting removed by ISPs who are blocking receipt of your email, is a difficult process that can take days. Getting onto the list can be by chance, but getting off can be a nightmare. Again, it’s not your right to have email, it’s a privilege.

So what’s the similarity I see in all of these? It’s that technologists, and I include myself in the group (and would also say that the framers of the US Constitution were also technologists in a sense who were inventing a new form of government), frequently develop systems that assume free flow of information, and may even guarantee it as a right. But, as those systems mature and others see the potential for economic gain (which usually implies restricting the flow of something or other), what has been seen as a right frequently turns into a privilege that you have to pay for.

The post What if online expression is a privilege and not a right? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Just for example, if you look at traffic to YouTube from Iran, you’ll see this chart… showing high traffic until June, 2009, when YouTube was blocked in Iran. The scale runs from 0 to 100 and is “normalized” rather than showing absolute bandwidth that’s being used in each country. So it quite nicely illustrates  various cases of heavy-handed content blocking.

To see how censorship effectively blocks YouTube in other countries, try looking at Bangladesh, China, Libya, and maybe some others you can discover in the data.

The post Google and YouTube censorship appeared first on Sky's Blog.

They’re experimenting with putting up a page that shows the number of requests they’ve received, and (partially) the action they took, for the most recent six months.

You can view their map and click the pushpins to see country-specific data. For China, it says

Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.

Isn’t it interesting that rather than saying “removal requests” Google used the word “censorship” in this case?

To read more about legitimate (legal) requests and requests that do not have the force of law behind them and may simply be trying to intimidate a web site owner, visit the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

The Open Net Initiative seeks to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance.

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Now why would I say that? Google and Verizon announced yesterday (August 9, 2010) their joint statement on “an Open Internet.” [Verizon] [Google]

I can read the statement two ways.

First, they propose an Open Internet [1. Remember that the Internet is the underlying transport that supports email, web, video and many other services, so it’s not just web sites that we’re talking about here.] with all traffic being carried with the same priority regardless of content or purpose. That’s good, and it’s what we want. And if you’re just thinking about the next few years, this is all well and good.

At the same time, they propose that services that might be developed in the future not be subject to neutrality rules, and that they may be offered as premium services.

Therefore, our proposal would allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon’s FIOS TV) offered today. This means that broadband providers can work with other players to develop new services.

This means that services that would be quite distinct from what we know as Internet services today could be offered for a price and prioritized, with access being limited in any way the developer wishes to. Naïvely, I’d say this looks fine on the surface of it because we’d still have the Internet to rely on.

Um…but, putting my analytical hat on, I’d say companies could develop these kinds of services and then “neglect” the traditional Internet, or essentially make the Internet look so bad by comparison (through marketing and promotion of new services), or argue that it’s such a cost sink that it would be left behind in favor of the new services. Services that we’d all have to pay more for[2. Kind of like Apple has (perhaps unintentionally) crippled the old iPhone 3G (most of which are less than a year old) by loading a new operating system onto the phone that makes it function poorly, suggesting that maybe they want you to “buy a new phone.” This may have been accidental, but it might as well have been intentional since it put thousands of phones into a limbo land where they barely function any more. Read about unusable iPhone 3G’s and why this is so perplexing for iPhone users]. (Like data on our mobile phones, which you’d think would be cheap by now, but seems to be getting more and more expensive all the time?) The “Internet” could end up frozen in time, carrying only the services it carries now, and eventually choked off through neglect.

So, I see the Verizon-Google proposal as trying to appear to satisfy everyone, but I do not think it really serves the ideal of open communication into the unending future—it just proposes neutrality for the old-fashioned Internet as long as it continues to exist, and after that it becomes just another economic game. What would be far more valuable would be a clear statement that values a level playing field for human communication, which is what the Internet ideally serves.

The post Net Neutrality, Google and Verizon appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The Washington Post reported last week that the Obama administration is seeking to modify the 1993 Electronic Communications Privacy Act so that Internet service providers must turn over transaction records on email communications and possibly web browsing records, upon receipt of a “national security letter” from the FBI. This particular legal process doesn’t require review by a judge—unlike search warrants.^[1]

The law does not allow access to the contents of those emails without judicial oversight…only the more externally-visible addressing information, and that does tend to be what email systems log and archive. On the other hand, the term “electronic communication transactional records” which is what the government could require ISPs to divulge, is not defined in federal statutes, according to the Washington Post.^[2] And so it could conceivably be extended to include other person-to-person communications, such as social media contacts

This is the same process the Bush administration used, in the early 2000s, to ask libraries to turn over the records of books checked out by patrons, which was strongly resisted by librarians at that time.

Phone companies keep records of all of the numbers you call, and these are subject to the same access rules. This has never been a question, and most people in the US are probably at least marginally aware of this.

The real question isn’t whether someone is reading your email addresses and headers—it’s how they are interpreting the titles, subjects, and names of the people you are corresponding with. In the McCarthy era here in the US, you could be blacklisted for associating with the wrong people.

If you have an inquiring mind, would you want someone to judge you based on the titles of the books or publications you’re reading? Or the subjects and addressees of your email?

[2] The New York Times 30 July, 2010 — secondary report and opinion

A whole nother ancillary question is whether your ISP actually keeps these records or not. If they do not, are they then exempt from having to turn over any records, or will the government require that they keep such records in the future? Some ISPs intentionally do not keep certain kinds of records, which helps keep your use of certain services anonymous. And, for instance, I’d guess that very few ISPs, if any, keep records of your browsing history, and this makes it prohibitively difficult to document all of the web sites you’ve visited.

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If you’re not a cyberspace expert and don’t care for geek talk, you may think it’s just another report on cyber espionage. But the messages are important for everyone. And my point is that they are very clearly explained!

Ron Diebert and Rafal Rohozinski, in their Foreward, point out that crime and espionage go together. Or that wherever one goes, the other is soon to follow.

They don’t say this directly—these are my words: Crime, espionage (and warfare) seep into the interstitial spaces of society and occupy any vacuum they find. And from there they can grow to occupy the whole of the space, like a mold, fungus, or rot.

What we are seeing in online attacks against free speech sites these days, particularly drive-by attacks^[1], is that they do not seem to be politically or idealistically motivated, instead they are opportunistic and (presumably) economically motivated because they’re focused on injecting spambots and trojans, not on altering the message of the nonprofit web site.

[1] See CyberSpark.net and click “drive-by” on that page

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