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Perhaps the post is informative and useful, but y'all should know that Brett Glass [is] a sole proprietor doing business as LARIAT, a wireless Internet service provider in Albany County, Wyoming,

No, the disingenuous bit was trying to appeal to usenet users, free-speech advocates, and small-government Libertarians. The submitter and Commissioner McDowell are not concerned about any of these groups. In fact, what they are proposing would almost certainly negatively affect all of the above.

This (pdf) is what Mr. Glass is about.

I don't share your opinion about regulation, but you have to see that you are being manipulated. This is not about small-goverment conservatism. This is about giving telecoms and ISPs the freedom to VCast-ify the net. No unapproved applications (for security ;) ). No unapproved encryption (exceptions for white-listed shopping and banking sites). No unapproved VPNs or SSH.

But hey, look at the high-bandwidth Celine Dion webcast! Check out the low latency on your FPS!

Not to be flip... Nothing personal, just a little angry. McDowell and Glass do not share your philosophy. See for yourself.

Here's my favorite bit:

There are other problems with P2P as well. It congests networks, degrading quality of service for other customers. It exploits known weaknesses in the TCP/IP protocol -- which became obvious when I was here at Stanford but have never been adequately fixed -- to seize priority over applications such as voice over IP that really need priority. And it's mostly used for piracy of intellectual property -- something we can't condone [emphases mine].

No, the disingenuous bit was trying to appeal to usenet users, free-speech advocates, and small-government Libertarians. The submitter and Commissioner McDowell are not concerned about any of these groups. In fact, what they are proposing would almost certainly negatively affect all of the above.

This (pdf) is what Mr. Glass is about.

I don't share your opinion about regulation, but you have to see that you are being manipulated. This is not about small-goverment conservatism. This is about giving telecoms and ISPs the freedom to VCast-ify the net. No unapproved applications (for security ;) ). No unapproved encryption (exceptions for white-listed shopping and banking sites). No unapproved VPNs or SSH.

But hey, look at the high-bandwidth Celine Dion webcast! Check out the low latency on your FPS!

Not to be flip... Nothing personal, just a little angry. McDowell and Glass do not share your philosophy. See for yourself.

Here's my favorite bit:

There are other problems with P2P as well. It congests networks, degrading quality of service for other customers. It exploits known weaknesses in the TCP/IP protocol -- which became obvious when I was here at Stanford but have never been adequately fixed -- to seize priority over applications such as voice over IP that really need priority. And it's mostly used for piracy of intellectual property -- something we can't condone [emphases mine].

I'm sure he'd be happy to replace his expensive backbone with Open Spectrum and then think that P2P was the best thing since sliced bread. There's no reason his upstream bandwith should be so expensive while there's still dark fiber. In the short term, he's probably right about P2P driving him out of business. That's a shame but it's not because P2P is less efficient, it's because of a bad regulatory framework. I'd like to hear his opinion about the big picture before I call him a shill.

His homepage points to text that explains his opinion and position better than his condensed "Principles". For all of that, his Principles has very nice language about the anti-competitive behavior mentioned above.

Likewise, a telephone company or other "first tier" provider should not be allowed to price wholesale services (e.g. Internet backbone bandwidth delivered via leased lines, or the price of leased lines to a third party backbone provider) so as to drive a second tier provider's wholesale costs above retail, nor should it be allowed to refuse to deal with providers which wish to buy wholesale services from it.

I'd go further than him and say that owners of backbones should only be allowed to charge rates that make for a reasonable rate of return and this should be the same for everyone. It costs a known amount to lay cable. The costs to maintain it are known and the life time is known. People who wish to use the public servitude should be forced to bid against each other and then be limited in the amount they are allowed to charge. Conditions such as these eliminate his need to restrict his users. Because conditions like that don't exist, his company faces extermination by rate increases regardless of how oppressive his TOS become.

Not that this free market could not be destroyed. If government pursues policies that kill off all but the cable and telephone companies, or does not act aggressively to stop anticompetitive behavior, there will no longer be a free market. The FCC and the courts, by failing to enforce the provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and by allowing the telephone companies especially to cut off competitors, have done a great deal of harm to competition, but it's not by any means dead yet.

Regulation that cripples independent ISPs by destroying their quality of service, raising their costs and prices, and preventing them from innovating would kill them. And that's exactly what the so-called "neutrality" regulation proposed by the lobbyists -- which isn't actually "neutral" at all -- would do.

As I mentioned in my testimony to the FCC (see http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html), the government should stop anticompetitive behavior. If it does, and competition flourishes, no other action is necessary.

Hey twitter... this is what the submitter believes. And he's a shill for McDowell.

Sic 'em.

I have some questions for you.

Do you stand by the following statements in your 2008-09-20 letter to the FCC?

• ISPs should block SSH

  [...] when I attempted to retrieve my e-mail, I discovered that the virtual private networking protocol I was attempting to use to secure the transaction - the SSH or "secure shell" protocol had been blocked. The FCC's network adminstrators - following best industry practices [emphasis added] - had decided to open only certain specific TCP ports to users of the service which they provided to the public within the building.

• ISPs should inspect traffic and block applications

  An application (a technical term for any computer program which is not an operating system) encodes and embodies behavior - any behavior at all that the author wants. And anyone can write one. So, insisting that an ISP allow a user to run any application means that anyone can program his or her computer to behave any way at all - no matter how destructively - on the Internet, and the ISP is not allowed to intervene. In short, such a requirement means that no network provider can have an enforceable Acceptable Use Policy or Terms of Service.
  This is a recipe for disaster [emphasis added].

The requirements advocated by the meddling lobbyists and lawyers at "Free" Press amount to a requirement that ISPs meter by the bit... and they admit that.

The reason is simple. Bandwidth costs money. If you don't constrain the amount of bandwidth people use implicitly (by prohibiting bandwidth hogging behavior such as P2P) or explicitly (by throttling), the only way to ensure that a user does not cost the ISP more than he pays per month is to charge by the bit. They try to soft pedal this and instead make bogus claims that Comcast is limiting "free speech," because if consumers realize that Free Press is trying to raise their bills and put them on a meter, they'll rebel. But it's the truth.

See the section on this, near the end of my testimony before the FCC, at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html.

As I explained in my testimony at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html, the agenda that is falsely being promoted as "neutrality" isn't neutral at all. In fact, it prohibits ISPs from enforcing neutrality, letting P2P take over the networks and shift costs from content providers to ISPs. (That's neither neutral nor fair.) It's being done for the benefit of a few corporations -- such as Google, Vuze, and Slingbox -- that support the lobbyists at Free Press, MAP, and the other organizations that ae pushing for regulation. Google, for example, funds Larry Lessig's empire on the Stanford campus, so Lessig (a board member of Free Press) has gotten it to pursue Google's "cause."

What's more, there's no "free speech" issue here, because Comcast was not censoring the Internet. (Comcast is even letting its users right through to the site of Free Press, which is posting outright lies and slander about it.) Note, however, that the government is censoring the Internet in schools, and is proposing to offer censored public Wi-Fi. (The proposal is now before the FCC.)

So, as you can see, the Republicans actually are for true neutrality -- which in this case means not letting the government pick winners and losers by regulating.

In any case, what these appliances address -- and this is legitimate -- is not the legality of the material that's being exchanged but rather a machine's behavior on the Internet. Is it hogging bandwidth? Is it attempting to exploit vulnerabilities in Internet protocols to seize priority over other traffic? (This is what BitTorrent does; it exploits the fact that (a) there's no explicit congestion notification on the Internet and (b) the "fairness" in TCP is all on a "per stream" basis, so if one starts a very large number of streams one will get priority over another user with fewer streams.)

Another very serious problem for ISPs is that P2P is increasingly being used by content providers to shift the cost of Internet bandwidth from the content providers (who are already profiting handsomely) to ISPs (many of which already operate on razor thin margins as a result of price squeezing by monopoly telephone companies). Instead of running their own servers, these content providers (Vuze and Blizzard are two examples) turn their users' machines into servers, often without their knowledge and certainly without the ISP's consent. Since virtually all Internet users in the US have "flat rate" service, the cost of the bandwidth required to operate the server is shifted to the ISP. And since bandwidth at the edge of the network -- at the user's end of an ISP's home or business connection -- is far more expensive than bandwidth in an Internet co-lo, the costs are not only shifted; they're multiplied by a factor of 100 or more. Again, many independent ISPs in this country are barely getting by, and people often complain that there isn't enough competition; they simply must throttle or block P2P or there will be no choice at all.

Americans really have two choices: let their ISPs engage in bandwidth management (which is beneficial; it also stops bandwidth hogs from impacting your quality of service) or be faced with a monopoly or duopoly. See my recent testimony before the FCC at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html for more on this issue. It's important. If you opt for the "freedom" to do infinite P2P (and in this case, it's as in beer rather than in speech, because P2P is mostly used to get free movies and music and virtually never used for political speech), you'll lose your freedom to choose an Internet provider. And then the cable company and the phone company will have their way with you, which you will probably not like.

By "telling it like it is," our company is not "carrying water" for any large corporation. Rather, we're looking out for our users, who -- if we did not exist -- would be left at the mercy of a duopoly. Again, see my comments to the FCC, at http://www.brettglass.com/remarks.html, for more. That page also contains links to other documents which may be of interest to those who would like to get past the propaganda to the truth.

While most of what you've said is incorrect or naive, you are correct, above, when you characterize the zealots who post to that mailing list as being "against" ISPs. They are no going to convince me of the "fallacies" of my "position," because what I'm posting to that list isn't a matter of opinion. I'm posting facts about the Internet business. And many of those facts apply to large and small providers alike (though I am quick to point out when they do not). What's more, you will likely never find an ISP who is more pro-user, pro-consumer, pro-free speech, or obsessed with being fair to users or giving them great service than ours.

Rather than refute your points here, I invite readers to read my postings to that list. Or, better, to read a good summary at http://www.brettglass.com/remarks.html, where I have posted the text of the remarks I made to the FCC Commissioners at their Stanford meeting .

Finally, your false and misleading claim above that my ISP is experiencing "bottom line problems" is not only wrong but libelous. We are not raking in tons of money, because being ISP is not a "get rich quick" business. However, we do make payroll and continue to reinvest in our infrastructure. Most small businesses fail, but we've been going strong for 15 years -- despite the anticompetitive tactics of the telephone and cable companies. I think we're doing well in part because we're doing good for people.

(That's more than 50 per state, so if you don't patronize one, it's not their fault.) That's hardly a duopoly situation. However, independent ISPs often pay more for bandwidth than the cable and telephone monopolies. Some pay as much as $300 per megabit per second per month for their backbone connections. They are thus even more susceptible to being harmed if greedy content providers -- such as Vuze -- siphon off their bandwidth using P2P, or if bandwidth hogs overrun their networks. So, the issue is not one of duopoly, nor is it one of greed on the part of the providers. (Many of them are just scraping by.) Rather, it's greed on the part of some bandwidth hogging users (5% use 80% of the bandwidth) and on the part of content providers which use P2P to avoid paying the freight for delivering their content to users. See http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html for more on this issue.

Many of the posters here, including the one who authored the original article, seem to be forgetting a very simple but important point: bandwidth costs money. A lot of money, in fact, if you're an ISP outside a major city. Many ISPs pay $100 to $300 per megabit per second per month for their bandwidth. Can they afford to give bandwidth hogs unmetered, unrestricted access to it? Of course not! Add to this the fact that TCP/IP is the most inefficient way yet devised to distribute media (a simple analog TV tower is millions of times more spectrally efficient) and that P2P is designed to eat up many times the bandwidth required to transfer the data to the user (because the user's computer becomes a server), and it's no wonder that providers are concerned. Regulations that prohibited ISPs from throttling P2P, or from implementing pricing tiers, would sting the telcos and cable companies (which can cross-subsidize from their other services) but would flat out kill their smaller, independent competitors, leaving a cable/telco duopoly. So, be careful what you wish for. We all like to get a good deal, but if you ask the government to legally mandate that people give you expensive stuff for nothing, do not be surprised when they go broke in a hurry. For more, see my remarks to the FCC at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html.

It's the best way to allocate limited resources. P2P breaks the asymmetrical bandwidth model not because it is any more efficient but rather because it allows the content provider's costs to be shifted from the content provider to the ISP. The original and explicit contract of the Internet, since its inception, has been simple: each side pays for its connection to the backbone. But some content providers don't want to pay their freight. They want to shift the cost of distributing their content to someone else. So, they turn users' computers into servers for their content. This has the additional advantage that since they aren't serving the content themselves, they can avoid being shut down if the content is illegal (which most of it is). Ironically, some of the people who are lobbying to force ISPs to carry P2P are claiming that they are advocates of "network neutrality." But P2P itself is not neutral! It dumps costs on ISPs, magnifying them hundreds or even thousands of times in the process. (For more on why this is so, see my slides at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/pg0.html and http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/pg1.html.) As such, it violates the fundamental contract of the Internet. And it attempts to seize priority over traffic which is much more important. Should a kid downloading illegal music take priority over a life-critical telemedicine connection? Left unchecked, that's what P2P will do. It just makes sense to rein it in or block it.

It's the best way to allocate limited resources. P2P breaks the asymmetrical bandwidth model not because it is any more efficient but rather because it allows the content provider's costs to be shifted from the content provider to the ISP. The original and explicit contract of the Internet, since its inception, has been simple: each side pays for its connection to the backbone. But some content providers don't want to pay their freight. They want to shift the cost of distributing their content to someone else. So, they turn users' computers into servers for their content. This has the additional advantage that since they aren't serving the content themselves, they can avoid being shut down if the content is illegal (which most of it is). Ironically, some of the people who are lobbying to force ISPs to carry P2P are claiming that they are advocates of "network neutrality." But P2P itself is not neutral! It dumps costs on ISPs, magnifying them hundreds or even thousands of times in the process. (For more on why this is so, see my slides at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/pg0.html and http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/pg1.html.) As such, it violates the fundamental contract of the Internet. And it attempts to seize priority over traffic which is much more important. Should a kid downloading illegal music take priority over a life-critical telemedicine connection? Left unchecked, that's what P2P will do. It just makes sense to rein it in or block it.

I was there -- I spoke on the second panel -- and as far as I am aware, I exist. Or at least I think I exist, therefore I exist... I think. But I guess if you're the competition that some folks want to claim does not exist as they pursue government regulation of the Net, you don't exist even if you do exist. My prepared remarks, of which I only got to deliver a little more than half because I was given less time than previous panelists, are at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html

but the facts are not quite right. Brett Glass, of Lariat from Wyoming, was at the hearing representing the issues of ISPs. He runs a small rural ISP providing service to people in Wyoming that might not ordinarily have service. That quite a bit different than the person that wrote the story saying only one side was available. And let me tell you, he is quite the adversary and his arguments are compelling and spot on from his position supporting network management. I happen to be of the other persuasion, but I respect what he has to say as both sides have valid points. Comcast, Verizon, et al do not need to be at hearings as the logic presented by Brett stands on its own and does not need multi-billion dollar companies to echo his arguments to give them strength. But then again, maybe the person that submitted the story is bedazzled by Rolexes and sees branding as legitimizing arguments and people. I have no other explanation as to why he was glossed over.

Please see this link for Brett's comments since the person that wrote this article failed to take notice at the hearing: http://www.brettglass.com/remarks.html

Check this guy out. He's Brett Glass he owns a small ISP in Laramie, WI. He made a presentation recently and discussed how P2P hurts small ISPs. It makes a lot of sense especially when trying to increase deployment - he also doesn't allow p2p over hi network. http://www.brettglass.com/ITIF/

Brett Glass 0wnz j00!!!

First Brett Glass Post!

Btw, fuck Pull-Henning Kunt, Bill Fumerola and Scott Long!

As one of the developers, you might find my recent patches interesting.

Brett Glass
Glassware

FUCK ekrout/Amsterdam Vallon!

Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>

I've mirrored the demos of the games here:

Ballistics Demo
Bandits Demo

Brett Glass to the rescue

I've mirrored the demos of the games here:

Ballistics Demo
Bandits Demo

Brett Glass to the rescue

I thought more people read this. Well, my name is Brett Glass and I want to present you my new BSDL'd compiler: bgcc-0.0.tar.gz

http://www.brettglass.com/spam/

Okay, I looked up Brett Glass. In response to a recent question , he said the best way to use old PC hardware as a web server is to install FreeBSD. The last paragraph of his answer:

"I sometimes use Windows 95 and NT on client machines, but don't find either OS to be mature or stable enough for mission-critical servers. Walnut Creek CD-ROM runs the busiest software library on the Internet on a FreeBSD Pentium machine, and it just doesn't go down. That's got to be the best testimonial anyone could ask for.

Brett also seems to have authored a paper called "Stopping Spam and Malware with Open Source", and presented it at this year's O'Reilly conference. Perhaps your info is out of date?

Okay, I looked up Brett Glass. In response to a recent question , he said the best way to use old PC hardware as a web server is to install FreeBSD. The last paragraph of his answer:

"I sometimes use Windows 95 and NT on client machines, but don't find either OS to be mature or stable enough for mission-critical servers. Walnut Creek CD-ROM runs the busiest software library on the Internet on a FreeBSD Pentium machine, and it just doesn't go down. That's got to be the best testimonial anyone could ask for.

Brett also seems to have authored a paper called "Stopping Spam and Malware with Open Source", and presented it at this year's O'Reilly conference. Perhaps your info is out of date?

--

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Thats right, if you happen to be jeff@somewhere.com or sally@somewhereelse.com or bill@ or steve@ or smith@ or jones@ your gonna get a lot of spam. They try every username they have ever seen on anybody's server -- on your server.

A big problem is that a lot of people leave EXPN (expand) on their sendmail servers turned on. That means joe spammer can go to your server and try expanding every common username on his list and quickly he can get every user on the system to spam. Even if that is turned off, during the normal SMTP process, sendmail will generate an error code if the username is invalid... which means they can cancel that email and try the next name.

This and a lot more spam-avoidance stuff can be found in Brett Glass's paper Stopping Spam and Trojan Horses with BSD, which contains a lot of good information, even if you are not using BSD.
--

If you're in this situation, you're in big trouble no matter what MTA you're using.

Sendmail's code isn't as bad as you paint it, though. Thousands of pairs of experienced eyes have pored over it -- certainly more than for any other MTA.

If you really are concerned about Sendmail, wrap it with smtpd or use qmail. Warning: you'll still need to understand the underlying principles to control relaying and block spam and malware. And don't assume that it will necessarily be that much easier. as this FAQ explains, using spam prevention tools such as DNS blacklists with qmail is more complex than doing it with Sendmail (which requires only one line per blacklist in your .mc file).

--Brett