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telcos argue that they want to curb proliferation of online video and other types of data-hungry streaming that allegedly taxes their networks they think imposing traffic fees on content providers would be a fair solution. So ISP's (not TELCO's since not all ISP's are necessarily TELCO's) want to impose sort of a private highway fee for passing bandwidth through their networks... Its surprising to see which one of these clowns will be the first to stick it to the next one. Since all networks rely on another one to pass their information through their pipes (peering), I wonder how long before one de-peers with another and breaks the Internet again (see: Who broke *.org).

I wonder what idiotic government officials while having their pockets greased will do their emails no longer come in but instead they receive a hostage notification from their provider: Dear Mr. President, under subsection 1(a)(b)(c)(d)(e) of the Draconian Telecommunications Act, we cannot deliver today's messages. Please pay the sum of a) bandwidth b) tax fees c) attorney fees d) greaser fees in order to release your messages.

"... state's literally falling off the map" sounds like a bunch of hyperbole.

Many Sprint competitors at the time were envious of its success. Comments like yours sound like a rehash of Sean Doran is the antiChrist rhetoric of the time.

The CIX served its purpose in getting ANS CO+RE to agree to let its customers exchange traffic directly with other commercial providers (PSI, AlterNet, others) without the NSFNET AUP in the way. After that happened, it turned into a trade association that also happened to run a single point of failure in the form of the CIX-WEST AGS+ router.

:0 c:
* CONDITION_GOES_HERE
$DEFAULT
:0 Af: /var/tmp/.vtext.lck
| formail -b -f -I "To: 7035551212@vtext.com" -I "Received"
:0 A:
!7035551212@vtext.com

...and of course you'll need to replace 7035551212 with your number.

Wow, that got me thinking. ISPs are not held liable for piracy, hacking, etc, because they are a "common carrier." Common carriers have no knowledge of the traffic they carry, they are simply moving things from point A to point B. That limits their liability.

There's a minor problem with your argument. ISP's are not common carriers

http://www.cctec.com/maillists/nanog/historical/00 10/msg00012.html

There's been a thread on NANOG about Avi Freeman at the WSOP. From his website:

# Chief Network Scientist for Akamai: Working on new products, especially around Internet monitoring and availability
# Playing poker every few months (see http://avi.freedman.net/poker.html) - I came in 5th and made the final table of the Pot Limit Omha event at the World Series. ESPN will air it on Aug 31, 2004.

http://www.cctec.com/maillists/nanog/historical/01 08/msg00649.html

I'd suspect that they may be in cahoots with the NSA... (I don't think so)
Oh, gosh, no, but I'll take the bait. No relationship at all...
Let's see:
Verisign = NSI
NSI = SAIC
SAIC - the joke is SAIC is "CIA's" backwards
SAIC = the largest CIA contractor, these guys are spookier than the spooks who employ them.
Of course, the info on their cut of the NSA budget is somewhat less public but they are definitely "close personal friends".

Also, SAIC is in cahoots with Bechtel on the Yucca Mountain (store hot radioactive crap here in NV because no one cares and we already paid off the necessary locals) project. Gee, why control that? I wonder what you could do if you owned a place that no one would dare approach, much less try to break into...
No, definitely nothing to worry about here...
These guys are laughin their asses off, misdirecting us towards sitefinder while they burrow deeper and deeper into systems that control the flow of all kinds of information. People would fall over if they knew how many different systems SAIC is in on. These guys are taking the "long now" view to connecting the dots.

I am also getting ready to start work on my company's next commercial product, and it looks like a spam filtering SMTP gateway is going to be it even though I've got this drop-dead idea for optimal HTTP redirects that I've been wanting to implement for about the last 14 months. Oh well, "follow the money."

Concentration of power into a single individual: It's very true that power has corrupted every individual in whom it has ever been concentrated in the history of mankind. I do not feel that I am necessarily above whatever elements of human nature give rise to that. I worry about it. Probably other people worry about it more than I do.

There are people whose judgment I trust -- folks that have been in the industry longer than I have or maybe just as long as I have, but have done different things -- where I've learned that when they argue with me, they're usually right. And I have run what I'm doing by these people, and I'll continue to do that whenever I want any change in the way that I approach it. And if I get back some horrified stare that says, `Paul you're going to be the next Hitler; you're going to take over the universe,' I'm pretty much expecting that I'm not going to tell them that their concerns aren't justified. I am as worried about this as I think is healthy, but I'm not willing, once again, to say, `Well, because concentrating power in the hands of one person has always been dangerous, we should not attempt what we're doing.'

[here, Paul, with more WWII references, refers to the fact that he is willing to block popular ISPs or sites and how it is similar to the way that people were willing to firebomb Dresden (even though the German's thought they wouldn't), as clear a reference to "acceptable collateral damage" as possible without using the phrase] ... I think I've told the story of the firebombing of Dresden to at least a half dozen popular host resource owners in the last two years. *

According to this reply on NANOG, "What the FCC limits is the power (db) level you can place on the line in the PSTN. This is to limit crosstalk in copper cable bundles. This power limitation does not equal a speed limitation. This seems to have arisen from the fact that the first PCM modems - USR X2 units - could not go faster than 53.3K without violating the FCC power limitations. All other things being equal, the more power you can use, the faster you can go. To cover their ass USR put the disclaimer on the boxes talking about how X2 was capable of 56K, but limited to 53.3K due to the FCC blah, blah. Many people read this as the FCC having some cap on allowed speed since they didn't explain that the trouble was with X2's inability to go faster in
the allowed power band."

Such devices do indeed have serious problems when interposed by ISPs without the knowledge of the end users, although they've gotten more reliable over the years -- basically by letting requests bypass the cache whenever they see anything that doesn't look exactly like a plain-jane request for a static file.

I remember a few years back reading about Paul Vixie's efforts to solve this problem, watching as his posts on the subject went from enthusiastic (in the early trials, where he was seeing 50% hit rates) to disappointed (later on, when the work-arounds for various problems with dynamic content had pushed the hit rate down into the range where it wasn't really worth it anymore).

Last I read (which was years ago) he was going to adapt the technology to make a box for ISPs that would do transparent SMTP proxying to discourage spammers, but it looks like he wasn't fast enough -- nowadays everyone just seems to block mail from dialup IP ranges instead.

I'm a network engineer for a medium-sized ISP in The Netherlands. Martijn Bevelander has been operating in de dutch ISP world for years now. Previously most people saw him as a huge clown; his daddy (some chief somewhere) seems to always fund his playing in the internetworld while he manages to get all his companies to go broke.

His staff continues to show their good knowledge on the Internet: see this mail where one of his noc monkeys notifies the operators on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange of a new announcement from Bevelander Internet Services: 192.168.0.0/16. Perhaps this was just a sneak preview into the future?

The dutch media have reported on several occasions on him: check this link from Webwereld.

Insiders still laugh on his ignorance regarding security. He used to have his printers wide open connected to the internet, resulting people to send complete black pages to it. Another great story is how he continued to buy new 3com switches after he failed to change the administrators access to them and someone from the outside shutdown't his uplink port. Yeah Martijn, they were all broken.

So far he was just a joke. The troubles started when his company Bevelander Internet Services got broke and he quickly setup a new company called Megaprovider. After most of the customers were transferred, he sold the empty remains to Concepts ICT. Appearantly Megaprovider is not doing to good as well, seeing his Cyberangels adventure.

One of his well-known associates, Joshua Dodds, is known as a true DDoS-kiddo, DoS'ing everyting and everyone who says a bad thing about him on IRCnet. I guess they will never learn...

The original discussion on Nanog can be found here or perhaps here. He originally had the proposal on his site (dead link) but he seems to have taken the page down, and I don't see any reference to him contributing to this draft.

Actually, this is the faster link.

Here's a faster link.

Check out the immediate reply to the original announcement. The guy says "There's no need to slashdot internic.net tomorrow morning." :-)

1AF4 F638 4B2D 3EF2 F9BA 99E4 8D85 69A7

9A49 B5AF 8C39 83B9 369C 2512 D1B1 A795 D48A 5892

John Crain's PGP signature reports the version of PGP he is using is "PGP Personal Security 7.0.3". Perhaps key fingerprints are displayed in MD5 instead of SHA-1 in this version of PGP? I doubt that, since I think PGP originally used MD5 sum and moved to SHA-1.

I do not now how to compute the MD5 fingerprint of a PGP key either in PGP Freeware 6.5.8 or GnuPG 1.0.6.

Oddly, the reply to the NANOG post about the change encourages people to hold off on downloding the hints file to prevent Slashdotting internic.net since. The reply claims that the update is not at all critical.

Oddly, the reply to the NANOG post about the change encourages people to hold off on downloding the hints file to prevent Slashdotting internic.net since. The reply claims that the update is not at all critical.

....the day before. See the message. Granted not much warning, but it wasn't silent.

is here.

It's funny to see a ten megabyte logfile produced every seven minutes *SLAP* woops. It's /not/ funny seeing a ten megabyte logfile produced every seven minutes. I wonder what they use for logfile analyses, I think it's getting more information than it's able to process.

Edwin

If you didn't know about this, then you don't know about the biggest, costliest demo failure in world history (I think). :)

There's a more detailed explanation of what this really means at http://www.interesting-people.org/200101/0015.html . (Stolen from the NANOG discussion today, the thread starts here: http://www.cctec.com/maillists/nanog/current/msg00 681.html).

The evil backhoe is a common antagonist and joke among ISPs and backbone operators -- people 'in the business' (the internet business, that is).

I worked in a NOC and up into engineering at a minor internet backbone (for those of you up on your history, the first one to use ATM) and whenever something went down, we'd joke "Some drunk ran into a light pole," or "Some stupid backhoe operator took out MAE East again."

It's funny, but it does happen and causes a lot of people to pop Tums until it's over. Train wrecks can be devestating too, since fiber/copper are often run along train tracks for a lot of reasons.

After a brief search, I came up with the following interesting blurbs:

A fiber cut from 1999

One from 1998

An article about a fiber cut on Slashdot itself

Sprint has "fiber repair" rodeos, heh.

If you do a google search on "fiber cut" and "backhoe", you'll come up with tons of hits. So, you can see, backhoes being the bane of the service provider is a very true statement.

FYI, the NANOG mentioned in some of those articles is the "North American Network Operators' Group" and they have meetings where they discuss cool stuff related to the internet. I went to a meeting once.. boring as hell. But I got some t-shirts and the day off work to go. Wheeee!

I recall a post on the NANOG mailing list recently that ARIN has started delegating CIDR from 64.0.0.0/8. The post is here .

The summary of what you'll see is a consensus that people who configure routers with different MTUs on different interfaces using RFC1918 address space, well, shouldn't do that. As long as they don't, you won't see any of the breakage that you describe above.

Many networks already do filter RFC1918 packets on their border routers. An interestingly heated discussion on the pros and cons of this is to be found on the nanog list. first message of (LONG!) thread


Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my