Taming the Web

Thomas writes: "A story on Technology Review outlines the closer-to-reality-than-you-think fact that Internet regulations are right around the corner. It points out three false hopes held by web 'libertarians.' 1. the web is too international to control. 2. the net is too interconnected to fence in. 3. the net is full of hackers that are impossible to control. This is a good read." Bingo.

Comments

Pessimism

[abe ferlman]

What is needed is involvement at any level we can afford. The more that users are involved in any endeavor that involves them the better, generally, that endeavor does.

I think Napster's experience disproves this theorem. A better way of stating it might be "The more money is behind an endeavor the better, generally, that endeavor does. A riddle: what's the functional difference between truth and marketing dollars?

Sadly,
Bryguy

By the numbers

[WillSeattle]

OK, read the article. Yes, it's true, but it's also false.

First, my creds are longer than I care to think about, back in the dawn of time. And, no, I don't hack any longer, but all I'll say is, if I had, the statute of limitations is up.

Myth #1 The Net is too International to be Controlled

The Net, the totality of the Internet, is. The Web, the channel that our browsers serve up http and https and suchlike, is affected by our ISPs. We can still use TCP/IP and backchannel, go thru various ports - this part is still wild and wooly. Or we can stay safe inside AOL and MSN and their versions and it's controlled. It's like the Wild West - when you come into Dodge, they take your guns at the city limits. If you stick to the patrolled routes, it's fairly safe; if you wander off into the badlands, it's not.

Myth #2 The Net is to Interconnected to Control

See above. While you can route around censorship and damage, this requires active or passive participation by someone. So long as bastions of freedom exist, so long as encyrpted channels go through, this will continue to exist. But the rest can be partially controlled.

Myth #3 The Net is Too Filled with Hackers to Control

So long as we reward hackers with publicity and teens have very little to lose and don't care about it, this will always be true. If they suddenly fear being caught, it will increase some people's activity and scare off others. So, this is mostly true.

But, in sum, it all comes down to this:

The Net is the Perception, Not the Reality.

So long as people believe in the above tenets, it will self-perpetuate. If they lose faith, it will change. Just as the founders of America believed in press freedom but favored other restrictions - remember the 50s, that teen gang era, eventually followed by the 80s.

Re:By the numbers

[schulzdogg]

Myth #1 The Net is too International to be Controlled

The Net, the totality of the Internet, is. The Web, the channel that our browsers serve up http and https and suchlike, is affected by our ISPs. We can still use TCP/IP and backchannel, go thru various ports - this part is still wild and wooly. Or we can stay safe inside AOL and MSN and their versions and it's controlled. It's like the Wild West - when you come into Dodge, they take your guns at the city limits. If you stick to the patrolled routes, it's fairly safe; if you wander off into the badlands, it's not.

Given the current enviornment this is true. The point of the article is that this enviornment isn't an absolute. It's pretty easy for an ISP to limit you to port 80 only. Then what do you do? Tunnel? Sure but in order for that tunneling to be useful you'll have to release the specs to the world so you can communicate and then it gets cracked down again.

A good example is cox @home. They just dropped incoming port 80 requests in response to code red. So now no one can get to my web server. I switched to port 81, but trying to propogate that information out is time consuming, and it's possible some people will never get that information. And that's a relativly simple thing to overcome. But my ability to communicate on the net was harmed when they did it. I can route around it, but every route limits the user base that can find that information. Even in the "wild west" it was still relativly easy to keep my info off the web. Each time you introduce difficulty into finding information it reduces the number of people who will find that information. As that number gets smaller you cease to matter.

Myth #2 The Net is to Interconnected to Control See above. While you can route around censorship and damage, this requires active or passive participation by someone. So long as bastions of freedom exist, so long as encyrpted channels go through, this will continue to exist. But the rest can be partially controlled.

How many large pipes are there out of small_data_haven_1? How do you route around that? The fact is that despite our best wish's there is a single point of failure for many websites. Remember a few weeks ago when the train derailment in maryland caused thousands of people to lose all access?

But, in sum, it all comes down to this:

The Net is the Perception, Not the Reality.

So long as people believe in the above tenets, it will self-perpetuate. If they lose faith, it will change. Just as the founders of America believed in press freedom but favored other restrictions - remember the 50s, that teen gang era, eventually followed by the 80s.

What? If we hold hands and believe then it will be so? Why don't we all believe we can fly and save money on air travel?

Words are failing me... JUST BECAUSE YOU REALLY WANT SOMETHING TO BE A CERTIAN WAY DOESN'T MEAN IT WILL BE THAT WAY

that's the problem, a lot of powerful groups want some control, while the users are dancing around wagging their tounges and insisting that nothing can hurt them and nothing can stop them. Instead of thumbing our nose's at copyright holders desires we should start thinking about how to solve them. Because otherwise the internet will be controlled.

Re:Democracy vs. Corporate control

[telbij]

That's a pretty dim view of humanity. You are of course correct that corporations wield most of the political power. But that's not because they are some incredible behemoths that we have no power over. It's simply because Americans are spoiled, and they really don't give a shit about things like the environment or international justice.

The American people are as bought and paid for as the government, so to say that the government somehow doesn't represent the people is a convenient excuse to dismiss your civil responsibility. Believe me, when there's a large public outcry, the government will listen.

Corporate control of the Internet may very well happen, but don't let your experience of corporate control over your lifetime lead you into false assumptions. The greater a controlling power becomes, the more unstable it becomes until it topples. That is the really real truism of history.

Bimbo

[rho]

It points out three false hopes held by web 'libertarians.' 1. the web is too international to control. 2. the net is too interconnected to fence in. 3. the net is full of hackers that are impossible to control. This is a good read." Bingo.

No, not "Bingo" -- try "Bimbo".

Point 1 and 2 are irrelavent -- while the article threw up a couple of examples that seem depressing, they miss the fact that it's really #3 that makes the whole mish-mash go 'round.

A dedicated and motivated hacker will always be able to engineer around limitations in onternational politics or bandwidth. It's what makes us love hackers so much.

The point about hardware not being crackable is ridiculous -- if the content is going to be read, listened to or watched, it has to go analog for a bit -- and at that point it is vulnerable. All it takes is one guy to re-record, transcribe, copy or what have you, and a "free" version is in the wild.

Are Gnutella packets suceptible because of their headers? No biggie -- encrypt the headers, mutate the headers, whatever. It's a Whack-a-Mole game that can't be won.

Ignore #1 and #2 -- it's #3 that will keep the other problems from encroaching.

Ack, journalists...

[gregbaker]

Fallacious agrument #1: "Swaptor Isn't Too International to Be Controlled" == "The Internet Isn't Too International to Be Controlled". Following this kind of argument, 4 is not even because 3 is not even and they're both numbers. As a side note, am I the only one that hasn't heard of Swaptor?

Fallacious agrument #2: "Gnutella uses a bandwidth-inefficient protocol" == "The Internet isn't very interconnected". There's nothing impossible about efficient true P2P. If Gnutella isn't it, that's Gnutella's problem. This is actually the same fallacy type as #1.

Fallacious agrument #3: "Software hackers can't do hardware" == "Nobody can hack hardware". A topical counter example: it's not very hard to buy a DVD player modified to be region-free.

Honestly, do journalists not have to take a critical thinking course at some point? For that matter, do editors no longer edit? While the main focus of the article (the Internet ain't as free as some people assert) is probably true, the lack of a single cogent argument in a three "page" article is horrifying

He Who Controls The Pipes...

[Dr. Dew]

As long as you don't own the pipes, you can't rely on being able to pump anything you want through them. The bad news is that with many smaller ISPs having been failed, abandoned, and made obsolete by the bigger/higher bandwidth players, many of us don't even have the ability to vote with dollars, except to forego Internet connection entirely. As if.

So it's not as easy as switching providers. And unless you live in a cell block or a row house, connecting your system via your own pipes isn't much of an option. Okay, not even in the cell block. Maybe wireless technologies will help ameliorate this, but at the moment, I wouldn't want to transmit anything to my buddies using the high-speed wireless data transmission technologies readily available to me.

But I disagree that geeks should stop fighting "rules" and restrictive legislation out of fear of causing a clamp-down effect. Those who are skilled and interested should work toward sensible legislation (if such a thing exists). The demise of technocrat.net is one indication to me that such skills are rare in the geek community. The average R&D meeting is another such indication.

I have more hope that as geeks continue to occupy influential positions in Corporate America and other industrialized nations, that the geek ethic will get a voice that matters to someone besides geeks. With due respect to Richard Stallman, the CTO at any company I've worked for has far more influence on the corporate direction - and the limits of corporate expectations - than any outside voice.

But hey, I could be wrong, and I'm sure I'll find doubleplusgood travel arrangements on WorldOnline2010 (a wholly-owned subsidiary of AOL/Time-Warner/Daimler-Chrysler/Philip Morris/Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati).

Re:He Who Controls The Pipes...

[crucini]

But I disagree that geeks should stop fighting "rules" and restrictive legislation out of fear of causing a clamp-down effect.

That's not what the article's saying. It's saying that geeks should not express arrogance, hubris, and a belief that we will technologically route around any restrictions. The more we taunt the government with "can't catch me!" the more laws and countermeasures they will bring to bear. The way to fight the internet crushers is to articulate our viewpoint to the public and to the press, to show that our perspective is a reasonable one that most people can understand, and to advocate a clear, logical path forward that makes more sense to the average person than the current path.
I agree with you that the ability to do this is quite rare.

Re:The Internet Will Never Be Successfully Regulat

[jayhawk88]

Your probably just trolling, but here goes anyway:

The internet has been around for more than two decades...

It's been around for 2 decades, but has only recently been recognized as something more than the worlds largest geek toy, largely ignored by the rest of the world. Big business on the Internet is still in its infancy, but you'd better believe that if it continues to grow like it has, laws and regulations will follow.

The internet stretches across national boundaries

Read the article, they actually address this argument. It doesn't matter if I setup a Napster server in Timbuktu if the RIAA can cut off my one-and-only access point to the outside world.

Now that we have web servers in space

Show me a timeframe for getting a robust, stable, viable Net Sanctuary Space Station, and I'll show you an Internet that has long since been beaten down by Evil Big Business (tm).

As long as I can connect...

[cr0sh]

As long as I can connect two computers together, the internet will exist...

For me, it started with a null modem serial cable strung between two TRS-80 Color Computers, so that I could "share" the single floppy drive I had.

I quickly moved to a 300 baud modem - and I suddenly had a whole new world at my fingertips.

Later came a 2400 baud modem, a 14.4, a 28.8. BBS's all over town - the city - Fidonet - across America, and in some cases, around the world.

I messed around with connections over telephone wire, building funky parallel port bit-bangers, to create a po-man's networking system.

Now I have a personal network inside my house - cobbled together from parts and pieces the corps didn't want - picked off the scrap pile of electronic hubris...

I hear talk of 802.11 - lasercomm - radiocomm - it is in the air. Hackers will do it. Fidonet will be recreated.

What are they to do? Regulate radio - oops, they already do! Regulate 2.4GHz - yep, that will come. Regulate sell of lasers? That could happen, too. Regulate light making devices? Perhaps.

Maybe I will then hack together a system that only transmits/recieves during the daytime, using mirrors to reflect the sun over long distances, to be received and converted using homemade selenium photocells (and yes - I know how to make them). Regulate mirrors?

Then I will stand on the roof of my house - and shout to the heavens, and my friend beyond, who will relay my message. It may be slow - but to shut me up, you will have to kill me.

KILL ME, DAMMIT! DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND, YOU GODDAMN FUCKING CORPORATE GOVERNMENT MACHINE?!

/end...fucking...rant>

Re:As long as I can connect...

[analog_line]

The problem with that is, this whole "information should be free" movement has always been the underground. Governments by their very nature, do not want information to be free, because that gives them less control over the governed. It's not necessarily the will of those in government, it's a property of the entity. Hence "Classified: Top Secret" information.

The "problem" with the Internet as it is today is that the Underground decided it wanted to see the light of day, and completely unexpected by everyone other than those within it, it threw the shadows to the side stepped out, and dared the Establisment to stop if from being where it wanted to be. The prime example of this being Napster. As every idiot knows, the primary purpose of most everyone who used Napster was to get for free something they'd normally have to pay for. Flaunting legal authority. You all know it, and you all loved that little thrill. I know I did.

The problem was the Underground is great at being sneaky and in the dark and shifty and eluding the occasional forays by the Establishment into it's world. It was smallish and nimble. However out in the open, and becoming popular as all hell, the Undergound got fat, dull, and sloppy. It slacked off when it had the Establishment on the ropes and it's been fighting back ever since (the DMCA, and all it's friends) and the Underground, while concerned, never really thought it could do anything about it. Now the Underground is starting to realize it fucked up not finishing the job and it's scrambling to hold on to it's gains, but it may be too late.

Eventually the Underground's going to get pushed back where it belongs, underground. The Establishment will have changed, and the Underground will have to make up for lost time. And even if they'd taken out the Establishment, they would only have taken up the mantle of it's foe and the Establishment would eagerly take up the banner of the Underground.

History is your friend. Take advantage of it's lessons in perspective. This kind of thing has been happening since societies have existed. My elders always used to say "You kids think you invented sex." To this crowd, they should have added "you kids think you invented rebellion". We haven't done a very good job of it, either. Even in losing there can still be honor, but with most people in this issue, I don't see that happening. Most of us are whiny jerks, believing somehow that the world owes us whatever WE WANT without daring to get in our way, but unwilling o do much more than whine about it if you don't get your way. Your enemy was determined, was defending their very livelyhood, and you backed them into a corner, which as any of the great military strategists studied in business school today would tell you, is a catastrophically stupid thing to do. Maybe you'll learn the next time.

Re:As long as I can connect...

[BeanThere]

Simple. Use an anonymous remailer that breaks and encrypts the email

Using an anonymous remailer is NOT simple by any means, not for 99% of the population. Not only do they tend to move about, but you also normally have to chain several remailers if you want any hope of anonymity. That is NOT what I would tell my grandmother is a "simple way to obtain freedom on the Internet". Freedom should be something 100% of people have automatically and conveniently, not something that a highly skilled 1% of people can get at a sacrifice of convenience. It should be *simple* for *everyone*, which means I shouldn't have to try teach my grandmother what an "anonymous remailer" is in the first place. This isn't about the "right to trade illegal files", its about simple freedoms. Computer illiterates also have a right to it.

Re:As long as I can connect...

[Kallahar]

Simple. Use an anonymous remailer that breaks and encrypts the email. Even though it still might be seen by Carnivore it would be gibberish and anonymous. The only place it gets reassembled and decrypted is at the final destination when the FBI illegally installs a keystroke logger to get the password. It doesn't even leave YOUR computer without being broken and encrypted.

The systems exist, unfortunately only hackers (in the good sense) will use them. But isn't that really the point? Do we really want a bunch of computer illiterates trading illegal files?

Travis

Re:As long as I can connect...

[Rogerborg]

If this post doesn't get moderated to 5, then it's probably time to stop reading /. and go stock your bunker with spam, ammo, and good breedin' women.

Re:As long as I can connect...

[cr0sh]

Listen - I don't give a fuck about some damn song I don't own that someone else does!

I do give a fuck about information pertaining to my fair-use-rights and freedom to copy a song or other information I have, however I wish. I also give a fuck about distributing my own songs and information Freely - thus becoming a competitor to the corrupt mass of mainstream media that exists today!

If you don't understand, then step out of the way - I will come back to help you learn later.

Re:As long as I can connect...

[cr0sh]

Maybe not many - but those that do will be those that gain. I care about the "average user" - the problem is the "average user" doesn't care about me, let alone himself. We need to show these users that they should. It is becoming more difficult to do this each passing day. We are letting it slip through are fingers. I don't know the answers to how to acheive this level of education.

Today I took a look over at Columbia Journalism Review - Who Owns What - and you know what - it is fucking depressing. So depressing, somehow I half-ass expect to dig deep enough and find CJR is 0wn3d by one of the very entities it exposes...! It really is _that_bad_.

What I was trying to point out with Fidonet is the fact that things might go underground. I propose we tear down the old first, though - why should they have it - we were first, we built it - why do they get to set the rules - fuck 'em...?

Re:As long as I can connect...

[BeanThere]

Here's a "simple" challenge for you. Send a single email to someone outside the USA, say for example in Europe, *knowing* that that email is NOT going through an FBI Carnivore box along its way.

Good luck. *That* is how easy the Internet is to regulate and control.

The issue is not whether or not the Internet exists, but whether or not there is real freedom on the Internet. Therein lies the problem.

And you can yell all you want about using strong encryption on your emails - wait until they throw the first few people in jail for using "technologies that prevent law enforcers from doing their job" (or something like that), and see how many people still have the balls to use strong encryption.

It seems you would rather sit around until they make things illegal and then try to find *technical* workarounds. Don't you think a better solution would be to work to develop a legal/government system that wouldn't be able to take away freedoms in the first place? The people need to have some control over lawmaking and regulation, otherwise it *will* end up being done in the interests of big corps and government.

Re:As long as I can connect...

[Anoriymous Coward]

Perhaps a constitutional amendment along the lines of "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of the press" would be in order?

Freenet - dodging the issue

[Sanity]

He goes to great lengths to point out why Napster and Gnutella are easy to shut down (duh, they weren't really designed for that kind of attack), but then glibly dismisses Freenet because only pornographers are using it, and it doesn't support "searching". Clearly he hasn't read the FAQ.

Even if you believed that Freenet has *no* userbase, and that it is still so incomplete that nobody can use it, the simple fact that it exists and he doesn't (can't?) present a way to shut it down, refutes his argument. As has been pointed out elsewhere, even if ISPs placed restrictions on usable ports, Freenet can easily be persuaded to tunnel over other ports.

Of course, you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story...

Re:Freenet - dodging the issue

[PureFiction]

All we need to compliment Freenet is a decentralized resource discovery/search infrastructure.

Then all arguments in the afore mentioned article disappear. The sole remaining thorn will be port blocking / filtering by ISP's.

And even this is a technicality, not a show stopper.

Re:Freenet - dodging the issue

[crucini]

Basically you are offering a variation of the "can't stop our superior technology argument." If Freenet catches on and the PTB want to kill it, I think they will. They would only have to do one of the following, but they will probably do all to be sure.

1. Arrest and imprison anyone who offers Freenet software for download, as it's a circumvention device under the DMCA.
2. Stop all inbound TCP connections to consumer computers. Stop all UDP to/from consumer computers except for UDP53 to the ISP's nameserver.
3. Require a license, complete with an examination and posted bond, to run any kind of internet server. This would also help get poorly-admined boxes off the net. I can verify that this mechanism is quite effective in the construction industry. Every construction contractor, whether specializing in glass, electrical, fire alarms, ceilings, or other trade, must have a responsible individual who passed his license examination, and must post a bond. The responsible individual tends to shoot down sleazy ideas like building something below code to save money. He knows from his license exam that he faces license suspension/revocation, which effectively kills his company and can follow him to future companies.
4. Apply Civil Asset Forfeiture to computers used in Freenet. An enforcement firm could connect to Freenet, identify at least one node, and subpoena the customer info from the ISP. A special police task force could drive around following a list and confiscating computers. The operation would more than pay for itself. Remember, no court proceeding is needed for CAF. The officer just has to believe that the asset was used in the commission of a crime.

Anyhow, as the article author points out, the way to protect Freenet from all that is to get the general public on our side. Simply flaunting our allegedly superior technology invites the techno-illiterates to haul out the big guns.

Re:Freenet - dodging the issue

[crucini]

All you need is 2 nodes for a network.

But the network only becomes viable or interesting when there are lots of nodes. Was it Metcalfe who said the value of the network increases with the square of the number of hosts? Anyhow, your claim sounds like Winston Smith claiming that the contents of his head, at least, were still his property. We all know what happened then.

I would comply, but probably be looking at real estate in Canada or some country that actually lets people run thier own lives.

Canada has signed the WIPO treaty. That treaty says:

Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures...

And in a grammatically tortured sentence, the treaty demands punishment for anyone who dares:

i) to remove or alter any electronic rights management information without authority;
ii) to distribute, import for distribution, broadcast or communicate to the public, without authority, works or copies of works knowing that electronic rights management information has been removed or altered without authority.

So if Canada hasn't passed a DMCA-like law yet, they are bound to do so by treaty. Maybe you can move to Iraq or Libya. These rogue states might need sysadmins for their homebrew networks of playstations computing nuclear bomb yields.

Myth #4

[Illserve]

Our html coders know how to make a series of links between a sequence webpages.

MOD Chips

[skyknytnowhere]

He comments that hackers won't be able to come and sodder a hardware workaround... Well he is absolutely and blatantly wrong. for $6 I can have the kid next door modchip my PS1. most of that money pays him for the sodder.

For the PS2 I can go to my local game store, and for $30 (most for the warranty on the chip) they will do it. THAT is convenience.

Hackers will break through any hardware lock as easily as software locks. Why? Because unlimited free time will always beat limited paid time.

skye

Re:MOD Chips

[ChaosDiscord]

Actually, I think the Playstation mod chip scene more accurately demonstrates pure capitalism in action. You want a mod chip. A hardware company in a country non-restrictive laws wants your money. If necessary, the transaction will go black market, but so long as the amount you're willing to pay exceeds to cost to produce, someone will be happy to help you.

Re:MOD Chips

[BeanThere]

Because unlimited free time will always beat limited paid time

And a bit of jail time beats both. They'll only need to throw two or three people in jail (or give them massive fines, or even just send around lots of scary sounding threats) before 99.9% of people succumb.

Why fix problems with "hacks", "modchips", "workarounds" etc, when the problems SHOULD be fixed right at their source - the faulty laws that generate the need for hacks. Finding a technical workaround to some hardware lock is doing nothing but treating the SYMPTOMS of the problem, not the problem itself. By and large, hardware locks, copyright protection devices etc will win out over 95% of the population. Why settle for problems that only 5% of people have the technical know-how and the will to work around ILLEGALLY, when 100% of people should really be doing those same things LEGALLY. Fix the laws and the culture, not the symptoms thereof. Hardware locks are just a symptom.

Spam Tunnelling

[clare-ents]

How about we build a P2P protocol that disguises all the data as spam.

Either we can use P2P or SPAM becomes a contol control mechanism and sending it becomes illegal.

Win win surely?

That is whay we have RFC 3093

[einhverfr]

Firewall Enhancement Protocol. This is exacltly the sort of thing that cracking down on the internet will promote:

http://kludge.psc.edu/~ksulliva/rfc-april1/rfc3093 .txt

Nice try.

[Mike Schiraldi]

The result, in Ballon's view, is easy to foresee: "At a certain point, the studios and labels and publishers will send over lists of things to block to America Online, and 40 percent of the country's Net users will no longer be able to participate in Gnutella. Do the same thing for EarthLink and MSN, and you're drastically shrinking the pool of available users."

While people will put up with crappy service and high bills, if you take away their MP3s and porn, they will take their business elsewhere. If AOL and MSN started blocking MP3 trading, and Earthlink ran another round of "We don't spy on you or control you" commercials, they'd grab huge chunks of their competitors' former customers.

Indeed, the governments of China and Saudi Arabia have successfully pursued a similar strategy for political ends.

That's because it's harder to leave your country than it is to switch ISPs. Well, maybe only slightly harder. :)

Re:Nice try.

[NullPointer]

Indeed, the governments of China and Saudi Arabia have successfully pursued a similar strategy for political ends.

And that really is where the argument "might" be successful. Congress already tried regulating some things with the CDA and I wouldn't put it past them to try something else along the same lines. Still, I think this article misses some things. I could be wrong, but I believe that businesses (RIAA, MPA) will eventually create their own commercial "net" using VPNs which consumers will use to access their products. Rather than trying to tame the net, they'll just create their own tunnels for their own proprietary devices so the masses can buy their candy. It would certainly be easier than trying to come up with some sort of world-wide net police force or constantly trying to shut down the latest hack or crack. It just seems like it would require too much effort on their part to attempt to "regulate" the internet. Money always follows the path of least resistance (lowest cost).

Lessig, Litman, and Schneier

[gizmo_mathboy]

This story just brings up the problems and issues written about by Lawrence Lessig in Code. This primarily revolved around the notion that unless the users (hackers, lusers, slashdotters, everyone) take an active part in how the laws and code are shaped then big business and government will do it form them.

Jessica Litman's excellent book,Digital Copyright, details how copyright law was shaped without the users being present. Sort of a glimpse into what could happen to the Internet

Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies goes into depth concerning how techonological solutions are permanent (which I think refutes some of the article's notion concerning Myth #3).

What is needed is involvement at any level we can afford. The more that users are involved in any endeavor that involves them the better, generally, that endeavor does.

Re:Nope.

[Mike Schiraldi]

Freenet uses encryption, but an ISP can still look at it and say, "Hey, there's freenet!" ... going through SSL would additionally obscure the fact that it's Freenet.

Re:Nope.

[isaac_akira]

It looks like the info-war will soon resemble the drug war.

So the government will spend billions filling our prisons with pastey faced geeks, while military-grade crypto and mp3 cd-r's will be available for $5 on any street corner? Good plan...

Re:Looks like a very uninformd piece

[BeanThere]

For example, in the long run for every "shield" there will be a "sword" that will be effective against it

While empirically this has generally been the case in the past, I fail to really see any absolute "law" of the universe that says it will necessarily always be this way. I don't personally believe that it is always going to be that way, unless you can show me the proof of the reasoning that says it will. I think that at some stage within the next 100 years, technological capability is going to overtake our ability to directly use it. (Some people would call this the "singularity", but I don't completely believe in that as it is usually described). For thousands of years, it was just "conventional wisdom" or "general knowledge" (or whatever you want to call it) that man could not fly. Then, suddenly, it was no longer true, and after a brief period of mental adjustment, it is now completely normal and natural that man regularly flies. Its just an example, but I think this is the same .. many people just accept as "general knowledge" that "for every 'shield' there will be a 'sword' that will be effective against it" .. I fully expect that sooner or later, that is suddenly going to change. Another example of this type of thing, over a shorter time span, it used to be the case that the very idea of an email client automatically executing binary code "hidden" within an email was an insanely stupid idea, and nobody in their right minds would even have thought to suggest that email clients *should* be this way. Suddenly, that changed, and now everyone has gotten used to the idea.

Generally I see it as not only possibly, but likely, that sooner or later technology will bring us *effectively* unlimited bandwidth and processing power (if its possible under the laws of physics, man will get round to figuring it out, and I suspect that it is possible under the laws of physics), and at that stage it would become quite possible that large volumes of traffic could be analysed and possibly blocked with at most one or two milliseconds delay. (Its just an example .. but extremely few people would find their work obstructed by 2 ms delay).

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[einhverfr]

In the scenario I'm describing, the data on the disk is encrypted. When it leaves the initial reading device, it's still encrypted. So it's not vulnerable.

You should have said it was less vulnerable rather than not vulnerable. You seem to be assuming that the recording industry would invest the billions of dollars it would take to develop a strong encryption system which would be invulnerable. They would have to develop a secure watermarking scheme which was backwards compatable before they could approach encrypting it in the hardware. I am not so sure that this is possible. (How does a CD-ROM drive know when to encrypt?)

OK, if you can run a line out fo your stereo into your sound card and record it, you can get all the same music at nearly the same quality (almost).

About DVD software.... So I have a high-res output from my Video card. So I have multimonitor support. Suppose someone makes a card, indended for diagnostic purposes which allows me to feed SVGA input directly into a movie file on my hard drive. Soch a card would have all sorts of uses (Affirmative Defence under DMCA) which would have nothing to do with DVDs...

Re:A counter-example

[megaduck]

Absolutely right. Touche.

All regulation fails

[mmmmbeer]

No government has ever managed to regulate anything with absolute certainty. People speed all the time, despite the presence of Police on the streets. Banks, convenience stores, and houses are robbed daily. Tax fraud goes uncaught. Illegal drugs are trafficed in huge numbers. Murderers, rapists, and child abusers get away with it.

The only difference between breaking laws in "meatspace" (which, btw, I never hear anyone use except stupid authors like this guy) and breaking laws on the web is that it's a lot easier to spread the tools for breaking laws on the web than it is in the real world. And despite what some foolish authors may think, hardware protection can be and has been cracked (see: Playstation). And, like in the real world, the more people who feel that a law is unjust, the less success there will be in enforcing it (see: War on Drugs).

Re:All regulation fails

[Tackhead]

>No government has ever managed to regulate anything with absolute certainty. People speed all the time, despite the presence of Police on the streets. [ ... ]

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens' What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."

- fair use excerpt from "Atlas Shrugged".

You don't have to buy into the rest of her philosophy to see that she hit the nail on the head here.

Re:All regulation fails

[crucini]

Definitely. I frequently think of that quote when I see the trend towards illegalizing everything. How's this for an idea: before a Congressman can introduce a new bill, he must recite the existing laws of the US from memory. If even the lawmakers don't know the laws, how can we be expected to obey them?

Bye bye web....

[letchhausen]

I always said that this so-called "Internet" was just a fad that, once regulations were in place, would go away. No porn, no web, no kidding. Fuck the pigs, trying to control our lives....as a friend pointed out to me recently, John Locke said that the state should never put itself into the business of protecting citizens from themselves. And of course there's the old Ben Franklin saw that those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither. Looks like it's police state time for Amerika. I wouldn't be so down if it wasn't for the fact that so many people are so stupid that they would check into the Matrix hotel as the ultimate gated community. What happens to Neo and Morpheus when they wake people up and get to be as stunned as Randall P. McMurphy when the people tell them that they checked themselves in voluntarily....

Re:Did you even read the article's arguments?

[raju1kabir]

Other services that encrypt and tunnel and decentralize and info-hide are not subject to this weakness, no matter how many silly red herrings some tech-ignorant journalist might pull out of his pants.

And there will always be new, exploitable, and fatal weaknesses which will be easily exploitable by a well funded government agency, no matter how invincible some cocky technicians might believe they are.

But that's not nearly as significant. When the goal is to get Pandora's box open, nobody cares much in the long term when someone manages to keep it closed for a few extra minutes.

Can't Control the Web...

[jhaberman]

... Tell that to users in China or Afganistan. The government actively shuts down ISP's and terminates all connections to "undesireable" sites. Once big brother becomes involved, personal liberties go right out the window. And don't try to tell me that "it could never happen here". Think again. You mean to tell me that if some alphabetic government agency or powerful international corporation started putting MASSIVE pressure on backbone providers to shut down... (enter offending matter here - Movies - MP3 - p0rn)... they couldn't get action?

Sure... most of us would raise hell. But if they withstood? Then we're the ones who get screwed.

Think about it.

Jason

Re:Can't Control the Web...

[raju1kabir]

Tell that to users in China or Afganistan. The government actively shuts down ISP's and terminates all connections to "undesireable" sites.

1. China and Afghanistan are two separate countries. They do not share an entity called "the government."

2. Afghanistan does not have any ISPs and it never did. Internet users dial to Pakistan.

3. What do you mean "terminates all connections to 'undesireable' sites"? Someone sits there tossing in filtering rules in real time?

4. The government of China doesn't have a hope. They only catch the stupidest people. The rest have figured out how to get what they need without attracting attention or running into filters.

You mean to tell me that if some alphabetic government agency or powerful international corporation started putting MASSIVE pressure on backbone providers to shut down... (enter offending matter here - Movies - MP3 - p0rn)... they couldn't get action?

They might get "action", but it wouldn't be effective in the long term, because it's not possible to identify movies/mp3s/porn when properly conveyed.

What about Morpheus?

[nougatmachine]

The article mentions that Gnutella is moving to larger servers to facilitate traffic, and this makes these servers prime targets for shutting down, thus slowing the networks. But what about Morpheus? This company licenses the same technology as KaZaA (but without the spyware), which lets broadband users serve as intermediate "super-nodes" which will automatically have more queries passed along, if I understand right. I might have gotten that detail wrong as I'm not very familiar with the technology, but the point is that Morpheus automatically sorts the bandwidth for you, and presumably does not rely on a centralized server while still giving adquete performance. The webpage also claims that information on the network is "encrypted", but not many details are given.

I think this kind of thing would be pretty hard to police.

Re:Nope.

[bnenning]

Are we a police state now for enforcing laws against illegal drugs?

In many ways, yes. We've got asset forfeiture, loss of privacy, roadblocks, warrantless searches, profiling, and a host of other abuses of power. Yet they have all failed to stop either the supply or demand of drugs. They have also created substantial opposition to the drug war, as more and more people start to realize that it cannot be prosecuted without violating the rights of the law-abiding. A "war on hackers" fought along similar lines would be even less effective, since information is easier to conceal and deliver than narcotics.

Re:What THEY can do

[bnenning]

WE NEED TO FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS POLITICALLY, NOT JUST TECHNICALLY.

I agree completely. I'm not saying that "the net is virtually uncontrollable" should be our main political argument, only that it's true. Furthermore, it is in our best interests to persuade our adversaries that it's true. The MPAA believed that CSS could stop all "unauthorized" use, and they're probably now hard at work on a "secure" successor. If they realized that their goal is impossible, they might start offering features that increased value rather than removing it. Until that happens however, we definitely need to oppose government assaults on freedom. Write your congresscritters, donate to the EFF, and spread the word about consumer-hostile laws like the DMCA.

Control Freaks!

[HiThere]

How I despise control freaks. Yes, I'm sure they will pass regulations. There's no good reason. There aren't even any justifications that will stand up under scrutiny. But they'll pass the *** laws anyway just because that's the kind of people they are. These people are one of the better arguments against gun control. (Also, of course, in a more dispersed form, one of the better arguments in favor of gun control.)

Vile, intrusive, busybodies. And that's being kind about them. If everyone of them just happened to get larangitis for a year or so the world would be a much nicer place. If they also got carpal tunnel, then it would be even nicer. They don't seem to serve any socially useful purpose at all, and they are certainly vastly unpleasant to a large number of individuals.

Re:Looks like a very uninformd piece

[BeanThere]

Maybe not now, but your viewpoint has an astounding lack of forward thinking. Try to imagine for a moment what sort of technologies might become available in the next 20 to 50 years. Yes I know most people consider 20+ years in the future to be "forever" (hence, y2k), but its really just around the corner.

Re:Err...

[3247]

"So it starts again, with bbs's, then a couple of nearby bbs's link with a cat 5 cable, or a leased line, or a wireless ethernet."

"Someone who does this is obviously interested in illegal activities. So we have to make it illegal to build networks that are not under the supervision of a trusted provider."

Re:A counter-example

[rhavyn]

Do you know how PGP works? It's called the web of trust. Similar to that 7 degrees of separation theory. Sure, Bobby might not know Sally, but to verify who Sally is would not be difficult. Furthermore, if we were in such a situation as described, no one would trust anyone else explicitly anyways. And, yes, it will always be possible to break into a web of trust, but it need not be easy. I can always say that you need 4 ultimatly trusted signatures for me to believe who you are. Or 10, or 100. A speakeasy worked in a similar manner. Some of them got busted, many didn't. But, if things head in that direction, you can be sure that ideas like the speakeasy will resurrect and become prominant.

Re:Err...

[Bonker]

I was not aware that some schools don't allow LANs in the dorms. What is the reasoning behind this rule? I assume that the computers are owned by the students, not the school. Since a LAN is not using any school resources (aside from electricity), I'm perplexed at how they justify such a rule.

The school I'm talking about is West Texas A&M University, a private university outside of Amarillo, TX, that later merged with Texas A&M.

Now, as far as I know, there was nothing in the school rules that particularly forbid student-administered private lans. There were the usual 'Thou Shalt Nots' in the rules. Thou shalt not collaborate on programming projects, Thou shalt not copy software, Thou shalt not do anything to make the heavies come down on our school, etc... Now, the real issue here, I'm certain, was the fact that the small campus LAN was administered entirely by (and this is only my second hand knowledge, feel free to correct me if you know better) teachers and contracted computer administrators. Students were neither encouraged to have any part in the administration of the facilities, and when they did try to take part, excuses were found to get rid of them because they invariably opened up 'security risks'. One individual caused waves by allowing other students to access Windows 3.11 FTP in the open access lab. Another caused waves by daring to install a Linux-based webserver. ("We simply can't allow something so insecure as Linux to run when we have guarantees from Microsoft on the security of Windows NT").

As the price of networking hardware began to drop, student Lans based on Windows 95 and Linux began to emerge, usually communicating to the rest of the world via dial-up ISP accounts. Cat5 ran all over the dorms, through hand punched holes in the walls, and through the hallways. This, I'm certain, was the problem for the RA's. When they complained about their dorms' residents' refusal to take down their network cable, the school administration responded by handing it over to the CIS department. CIS realized that there were LANs on the campus that they did not adminster, and the school rules were quickly ammended to address this. 'Thou shalt have no LAN which is not directly administerd by CIS.' So the students had to take down their cables, but CIS was suddenly obligated to provide dorm-wide internet access, and installed RJ45 data jacks to most of the dorms, making a larger mess than the RA's were complaning about.

Now, before the mass installation, a lot of the students I know who had been forced to take down their own Cat5 almost instantly replaced it with a series of IR receivers. They ran about $120 apeice at the time, but that was a pretty small 'initiation fee' for those who wanted a spot on the LAN for multiplayer DOOM and file-sharing. With the installation of the data jacks in all the rooms, students were able to set up IP masquerading networks, and have unfettered, private, but slow internet access to the world through WTAMU's T1 to Sprint.

WTAMU students and alumni feel free to correct me if you know this sequence of events better than I, since I got this second hand.

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[jgerman]

It doesn't matter what encryption scheme they use, there will always be a way to get at the data. It's impossible to hide it completely. The problem is that a very small percentage of computer users, and then again a very small percentage of those have the skills and sohpistication to get at that data. The common computer user would be helpless. Which is all that really needs to happen in the eyes of the corporations, if less than one percent of cd buyers can get at the information the situation becomes much easier to control.

But what the hell do you people want?

[electroniceric]

I thought the article did a great job of getting around the deterministic remarks that this subject always get snared in. But everyone's response here on ./ seems to go right back to the we'll find a way to beat "Big Brother" camp. But let me ask you all this: What do you really want to be able to do on the Net? Do you really want your mail server DDoSed all the time because hackers really do rule the earth? Should nobody make any money on intellectual property? The answers are probably mostly no. So why do people immediately go to 54-40 or fight mentality?

I think part of the reason is we're mourning the loss of Internet as a place of exploration, where you can be a commando, a spy, Robin Hood, the President, and an accomplished student of the arts of net all at once. If this is really true, then we should be trying to preserve the feeling of the place, without trying to disobey laws just because they're there.

I couldn't agree more with the author - we should be proactive instead of whiny. Time join EFF, join someone, anyone, rather than just posting 30000 insipid comments to bulletin board.

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[einhverfr]

Cool. So now, your speakers are a "circumvention device" ;)

Ask EA

[Merk]

The international nature of the Internet is really just a red herring. The real important point is the 'net is too hetrogenous to control. Too many different protocols, laws and locations are involved. The proof of this is that even though nearly all countries with significan Internet connections consider kiddie-pr0n to be highly illegal, it continues to thrive. If being illegal were enough of a reason for something to disappear wouldn't that be gone by now?

Napster, Gnutella and BearShare all have their flaws. This shows that regulators/authorities will always find a way to shut down any new innovation. Whether this is true or not is unimportant. The only thing that could make the interconnected nature of the Internet meaningless is if somehow it were possible to stop the next version of the program to avoid blocking. Freenet may well have many flaws and may be blocked completely some day, but how long do you think it would be till Freenet2?

The only argument the article addresses that's at all meaningful (hidden away in that secret 3rd page) is that the 'net is full of hackers that are impossible to control. This really ends up being the same argument as the other ones. The only way these hackers are not an issue is if the thing they're attacking is attackproof. The only way to make something inaccessible to hackers is to make it inaccessible to everybody. The best that someone protecting something is that they make it so hard it's not worth the while to try. This is possible, but very unlikely.

Back to the subject line. This whole article is about preventing one or more people from getting something they want. One obvious example of this is video games. EA has been publishing computer games for about 20 years now, and in that time I've played cracked EA games on just about every platform, from the C64 to the PS2. Throughout that whole time EA has fought against "pirates", but they just can't stop them.

Right now getting an MP3 of RIAA music is about as easy as using a few POKE and PEEK commands on a C64 to bypass the copy protection of MULE or the Pinball Construction Set. In the future it may well be as hard as getting past the copy protection in Madden 2002 on a Nintendo cartridge. If it's worth it to them, people will do it.

The fact nobody has yet broken into Fort Knox doesn't mean that Fort Knox can't be broken into. It especially doesn't mean the issue of "keeping gold safe" has been solved. It's always just a matter of time.

Err...

[mindstrm]

My 'false hopes' revolve around the fact that I can connect one computer to another, somehow, without what I do being filtered, no matter what. So can anyone else, and so we eventually get the internet.

Pundits can argue all they want that it won't stay that way.. but it will.

Re:Err...

[Bonker]

The point he was trying to make is that the 'internet' has the ability to reemerge, even if it is censored into non-existance.

Yes, currently most of use rely on some form of corporate-owned copper infrastructure for our internet feeds. This is in the form of cable, phone, and DSL-based ISP's and telcos. It doesn't have to be this way...

A growing number of internet users are setting up lans based entirely on wireless networks, using wireless protocols. Other users are setting up infrared shots. IR shots were very popular in a dorm I visited once that 'prohbited' unauthorized computer LANS. If the RA couldn't see cable, there was no LAN, despite the fact that a massive amount of file-sharing and gaming was going on behind his back.

Also, there are projects in place that effectively protect 'forbidden' information over those connections that are too convenient to abandon in the form of FreeNet and Gnutella, which the author of the original article mentioned, and then seemed to completely ignore.
Is the government going to outlaw private lans or wireless? They could, but we'd just find another way to get around it. It's very difficult to detect low-power, tight beam microwave, which is already in use in some wireless projects.

I agree with the root poster here. Unless the government takes our computers away, they can't take the internet away either.

Re:Err...

[isorox]

So it starts again, with bbs's, then a couple of nearby bbs's link with a cat 5 cable, or a leased line, or a wireless ethernet. Eventually qwehave comletely free network of wireless networks across the city, linked to other cities by modem links. The modems get upgraded, people co-locate near the gateways to other cities and countries, and we have a whole new internet. Then the government regulates it again and we're back to square 1.

Re:Err...

[crucini]

And all of this guerrilla networking will evaporate like breath on a mirror with the first few high-profile arrests and convictions. The government could prosecute under any number of laws, but the most straightforward prosecution would be under the DMCA, showing that the unauthorized network is a 'circumvention device'.
The government would target one or two of the most visible net-builders and the rest of us would scurry away with our tails between our legs.
You seem to be missing the point of the article, which is that network cleverness is not going to beat laws, police and prisons. If we want a free internet, we have to explain our beliefs to the press and to ordinary people. If we keep saying 'you can't stop us', they will stop us.

It's very difficult to detect low-power, tight beam microwave...

That was conventional wisdom until it was disclosed that the US was sniffing lots of Soviet point-to-point microwave via satellite in the '70s. What was possible in the '70s is probably much cheaper and easier now. And before you point out how bizarre it is to bring the full might of the military-industrial complex against some popular victimless crime, look at the war on drugs. Drug sniffing dogs? Heat scans of neighborhoods? It's like science fiction.

Re:A counter-example

[gargle]

Can Jimmy stop Bobby while permitting them to talk about nice safe legal things? Answer: No.

Suppose the penalty for passing bad information is execution. Catch someone and make an example of him. Then the Bobbys will be too scared to pass any bad information around. The Chinese call this "Killing one to scare a hundred."

So that's what Bush's revived star wars...

[Marvin_OScribbley]

is REALLY for... blasting pirate satellites out of orbit ;-)

Re:Big Brother Has Been Around for a While

[Merk]

So... you were given a number at birth? I wasn't. In fact I was never forced to have an ID number. I do currently have a number of numbers that uniquely identify me or my possessions, but certainly no supreme ID tag. When I decided I wanted an above-the-board job and was willing to pay taxes I accepted a government-given number. But rarely do I need that number except when dealing with such an above-the-board job.

You talk about what happens when I decide to fight. I'll tell you something -- I'm fighting already. And the government isn't going to have much luck disarming me. See, I'm not dumb enough to think that I can actually take on the government through physical violence. My weapon is my mind.

Re:Big Brother Has Been Around for a While

[Merk]

If you have a bank account, you have an account number. If you have a computer it has a serial number (and you as the owner can be identified by that). If you have a job you probably have a SSN/SIN. Does anybody ask me for any of those numbers when I go buy a pack of gum? What about when I travel across the country? Nope. Having a number of numeric IDs doesn't mean I was assigned a number at birth, and certainly doesn't give it that ominous feel you talked about. Don't let numbers scare you so much. Despite all these numbers we have, we still have more freedom than the numberless slaves did, or than the peasants of the middle ages. It's not the number that's dangerous -- it's how it's used, and until you can convince me that big brother is tracking my every bubble-gum purchase I'm not going to worry.

Imagine this scenario:

Officer: "ON THE GROUND TERRORIST!!" Officer 2: "HE HAS A GUN!!" Officer: "Damn armed terrorists"

Don't you think that's a wee bit more likely than being shot for being lippy?

So it's the rule of brute force then?

[gelfling]

This article breaks down into the following:

Laws can be whatever governments and their corporate sponsors want them to be.

Any corporate body will prosecute whomever is easiest, closest, most convenient to prosecute.

Any attempt to circumvent that will marginalize you.

Let's think about that for a moment. Laws can be made to do whatever the people who paid the government to create them, what then to do. True enough, with the stroke of a pen Disney can write a check to get a law passed making it illegal to say the phrase "Mickey Mouse" without flipping a quarter to Michael Eisner. I don't see the relevance of that. That is precisely what brought us to this point - the OVERREACHING of music, video and other companies to put a lock on every last bit. So? How has that prevented at least the technology to unwind that so far?

Next, Our corporate masters can go after whatever is easiest to bite. Nothing new there. If you can't sue the company owner then sue the service provider or the electric company that powers the site or the guy who brings the pizzas. Make it so difficult to do business that they fold of their own 'volition'. So it's gunboat diplomacy. I get it. But that is the xenophobic fallacy of 'they can never build it better than us'. Who's to say the mercurial powers of the PRC wouldn't be willing to turn a blind eye to someting that weakens the US supremacy in intellectual property? Can you say industrial espionage? This is precisely where companies like MS lose billions in bootleg CD's for example so how is digital music and movies any different?

The last point is really hubris. You can't fight city hall. Maybe not. Maybe all you have to do is burn it down.

A cold day in the internet

[Squirrel Killer]

The Hague Conference on Private International Law is developing an international treaty explicitly intended to make outfits like Swaptor more vulnerable to legal pressure--"a bold set of rules that will profoundly change the Internet," in the phrase of James Love, director of the activist Consumer Project on Technology. (The draft treaty will be discussed at a diplomatic meeting next year.) By making it possible to apply the laws of any one country to any Internet site available in that country, the draft treaty will, Love warns, "lead to a great reduction in freedom, shrink the public domain, and diminish national sovereignty."

I found this paragraph the most frightening of all, especially the bold section. What this seems to mean is that by publishing my web page, I'm opening myself to prosecution in any contry with an internet connection. Right now, I can't see anything too objectionable on my site, but what if I post a section from the Bible that some Islamic fundamentalist government has outlawed? What if I post the Declaration of Independance and China outlaws that?

The United State Supreme Court has routinely found in favor of free speech when the restrictions against speech were chilling to other speech. A law targeted against porn, but which affected medical discussion would typically be found to be "over-broad" and stricken by the courts.

A treaty like this, however, is more than overbroad, it's overboard. In a questionable justifed attempt to make laws enforceable internationally, this treaty would quell Constitutionally-protected speech because even though it's protected within our borders, you'd be prosecuted on your first step onto foreign land. Why would you speak (or publish on the internet) if you'd get arrested when you traveled abroad? (The similarities to the Skylarov case are very much in mind here.

I don't mind too much if corporations want to lock their customers into "their" internet, and I don't care if the government attempt to regulate because they'll fail for a variety of reasons. I'm much more concerned about the rights issues. While treaties like this won't kill the internet(no, there's no immenient demise of the internet), but it will surely make it a less interesting place.

-sk

Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM also.

[einhverfr]

I recently came across a short story and commentary on intellectual property by RMS called "The Right to Read" (available at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html). Interesting and chilling look at current trends in intellectual property.

Articles like this help to emphisize the points made in the story/article. Interestingly, the slashdot article meantions hardware changes as a way to protect copyrighted materials without the possibility of copying. I should mention that this overlooks a major point-- hardware has to give the majority of choice up to the software, and anything that completely prevents digital copying of works must by necessity interfere with many innocuous activities without offering complete security (suppose I rip music from an encripted CD, decrypt it, pass it to another process through a named pipe, encode it in another format, and write it to disk. Is the hardware going to measure everything that the kernel does?)

THe only way around this is, IMO, to outlaw open source kernels (a possibility mentioned in The Right to Read). I don't think that this is a current possibility. The other possibility is to prevent CDROM drives from reading audio CDs. That is not going to happen soon either.

The slashdotted article states:"I can write a program that lets you break the copy protection on a music file," says Dan Farmer, an independent computer security consultant in San Francisco. "But I can't write a program that solders new connections onto a chip for you."

This statement is somewhat naive... One can always write a program to emulate any piece of hardware, and there will always be ways of breaking them.

Stallman seems to indicate that the DMCA poses a significant threat to free debuggers (which could be used to circumvent copy protections) and free kernels, which could also be used to circumvent protections.

We need to stand together supporting the right to read.

Looks like a very uninformd piece

[Alex Belits]

It describes, what corporations and governments want or doing in their attempts to control the Internet, but we know this already. The problem is, it doesn't contain any plausible reasons why those attempts can possibly be successful.

Re:Looks like a very uninformd piece

[Alex Belits]

There are some pretty general rules that technology follows. For example, in the long run for every "shield" there will be a "sword" that will be effective against it. Or that absolutely everything fails from time to time, no matter how good it is designed and produced.

The nature of the network is that any attempt to selectively block something in it will cause the performance loss that will make it unusable for its primary purpose -- while China can allow itself to block a bunch of sites because it can even isolate itself from the rest of the world without any noticeable damage (keeping their own network inside the country working unimpeded), most of people, companies and governments will see the decrease of performance and reliability as a significant threat to them, and this will become even more obvious in the future.

Re:Looks like a very uninformd piece

[BeanThere]

FBI's carnivore can pretty much already sniff 99.99% of Internet traffic in the USA, which should alone be proof of how incredibly easy it would be to impose other limitations on freedom on the internet backbone. The vast majority of traffic goes through a few very fat pipes owned by a tiny handful of providers, all of which are quite happy to agree to whatever agencies like the FBI ask them to do. Carnivore was so damn easy to implement, thats proof, ITS BEEN DONE ALREADY. So how hard would it be to just add some extra features? Its peanuts. Some people argue "the internet is too big to regulate". Thats BS. The internet is not only WAAAY smaller than "the real world", its a helluva lot easier to police, as everything flows through a few limited pipes. Consider this: (a) Internet: 99.99% of communciation can be wiretapped, and damn easily at that, all the infrastructure is already in place, and there is pretty much only one way to communicate: the IP protocol. (b) Real world: I doubt that even 50% of communications can be tapped, there are not only many different methods of communication that you'd have to check up on, each presenting its own unique challenges (e.g. reading each letter in the post??). Additionally there is a lot of space to cover .. you can just talk to someone out in the park, the desert, or on a lake or ocean, and wham, no wiretapping possibilities. Try that on the Internet. Good luck.

Re:Looks like a very uninformd piece

[Alex Belits]

"NSA Line Eater", a recorder that keeps the history of all Internet traffic over major backbones, is a well-known semi-mythical entity that people assume, is very likely to exist. The problem is, all the data that it could (did?) collect should be almost impossible to process in any reasonable manner, and it's still not technically feasible to make it in any way respond by blocking the flow of data without bringing backbones to a crawl. So, yes, it's possible that everything is being recorded, but it has absolutely no effect one anyone's ability to block something.

Internet Wiretapping

[karb]

I've actually been thinking about this for a while ... remember the big outbreak on /. a while ago about the proposed IETF (I think) standard to allow wiretapping? It was shot down, and there were many self-backpats, because we had shown The Man Who's Boss.

Unfortunately, The Man still needs to fight crime (and, if he tried not to, how the heck would he explain this to his sometimes-boss, The People?), hence, Carnivore, developed by the FBI, something that we probably find far more unappetizing than a community-built standard.

Did you even read the article's arguments?

[Artifice_Eternity]

The internet has been around for more than two decades, during which time it has managed to elude being regulated in any meaningful way, anywhere in the world.

That's an unsupportable generalization. Plenty of individuals and groups have seen their online activities regulated - Napster, Yahoo! France, and any site ever kicked off an ISP due to outside legal pressure.

The internet stretches across national boundaries. For regulation to be successfully carried out, an international body would need to be involved.

Ever hear of the Hague Convention? It was in the article. International agreements on intellectual property, copyright, etc. are growing day by day, as the economy is globalized and more information moves around the world.

Now that we have web servers in space, even international bodies will be powerless to censor the internet.

The US is embarking on wholesale weaponization of space. I disagree with it, but satellite-killing satellites - built by the US or someone else - will become a reality sooner or later.

The skills of hackers and crackers will summarily overcome any attempts by government to lock-down the internet. If hackers can infiltrate the most secure military computers of the greatest nation on earth, how will the US, but more especially, the rest of the world, ever regulate the internet?

This is about the only variable that I don't think can be controlled. Human ingenuity is pretty amazing. But the hurdles to an open Internet are going to get higher and higher (you didn't mention hardware-based content management, featured prominently in the article), and only an elite few may end up being able to circumvent them.

Re:Did you even read the article's arguments?

[raju1kabir]

Plenty of individuals and groups have seen their online activities regulated - Napster

Napster was regulated because they felt it a worthwhile tradeoff to have access to the "legit" capital market.

If they could/would have foregone outside capital, or gone to the underground capital market, they would have been much harder to regulate.

Of course, the more salient point is that they were regulatable because their operation depended completely on centralization. Other services that encrypt and tunnel and decentralize and info-hide are not subject to this weakness, no matter how many silly red herrings some tech-ignorant journalist might pull out of his pants.

Very simple

[bartle]

There will never be a way to restrict the access of information totally, a single Slashdot brainstorming session could come up with enough bizarre hacks to keep us safe for quite a while. What has freaked the companies out is how easy it is for the common person to gain access to copyrighted materials. And that's exactly how far things are going to be pushed; when the computers people buy in stores can't be made to easily access copyrighted materials, the companies will breath a collective sigh of relief and relax. We'll have burrowed tunnels through whatever protection mechanism that's in place but no one will really care.

Nope.

[Mike Schiraldi]

Internet service providers can always pull the plug?treating Freenet, in essence, as an unsupported feature, in the way that many providers today do not support telnet, Usenet and other less popular services.

...at which point Freenet will start tunneling through http, pop3, ftp, ssh, and any other common protocol. If ISPs start peeking at specific packets, Freenet will start using SSL.

And like i mentioned in an earlier comment, why would ISPs do this? MP3s and porn are far and away the most popular uses for the Internet today, according to a study i just made up. It would be like making cars that don't go over 55 or "tobacco water pipes" that only work with tobacco.

Re:Nope.

[crucini]

Ah, but mix in one more factor. All this tunnelling will require software. Software like that needs to be revved pretty frequently - the version from three weeks ago will be blocked by some change in MSN protocols. And distributing this software is 'trafficking in a circumvention device' according to the DMCA, and punishable by 10 years imprisonment. Where will people download this software? How will development be coordinated? Remember, we take for granted the use of open mailing lists in software development. How will programmers live with the fear that the helpful person who offered programming advice on MSN chat may be an FBI agent collecting evidence for a bust? And finally, if some super-secret channel evolves for the development and distribution of the tunneling software, how does Joe User get connected? Remember, Napster was cool because of all those Windows users. Gnutella became useful when Limewire and Bearshare connected hordes of Windows users.
Are we a police state now for enforcing laws against illegal drugs? It looks like the info-war will soon resemble the drug war.

Re:Nope.

[crucini]

I think you are too optimistic, and underestimate your opponents.

1. ...at which point Freenet will start tunneling... How about consumer ISP's don't allow inbound TCP connections? End of code red, end of zombie DOS attacks, end of p2p. And only 0.01% of users will even understand what's happening, much less complain. Look at the cable ISP's that filtered inbound port 80 in the wake of Code Red. Mostly they didn't even bother telling their tech support!
2. why would ISPs do this? Because the government tells them to. ISPs already remove alleged copyright-infringing material without due process, because the DMCA says they must do this to avoid liability. All we need is an amendment to the DMCA listing the technical countermeasures that ISP's must take. And it's easy, much easier and cheaper than the content-policing ISP's are currently being forced to undertake.
3. MP3s and porn are far and away the most popular uses for the Internet... Cutting off p2p only hurts the ISP if the consumer has a choice. If all ISPs block p2p, consumers have no incentive to hop. And I don't think many people will give up internet access altogether because they can't have p2p. And the reduction in bandwidth might make ISP's more profitable.

Re:Nope.

[aozilla]

How about consumer ISP's don't allow inbound TCP connections?

That's when we start tunneling through email, or through irc, or through MSN/AOL/Yahoo Messenger. Hell, you could "tunnel" through automated geocities account creation.

If all ISPs block p2p, consumers have no incentive to hop.

That would require some serious legislation. Legislation which would probably be unconstitutional, but more importantly, would hurt big business.

In any case, they're not going to block email. It's unlikely they'll even block MSN Messenger (as in force Microsoft to close the protocol). Tunnelling TCP over MSN Messenger is trivial, and the two ends don't even know each others IP address.

Re:Nope.

[bnenning]

I think you underestimate the opponents of our opponents. Let's say the **AAs make a pact with Satan and get all server-type inbound TCP connections blocked for nearly all users. That still leaves mail and IM, either of which can form the basis of a p2p network. If ISPs start monitoring those channels for content, we can encrypt. If they somehow prohibit encryption, we can use steganography.

Short of establishing a police state, the bad guys will not win. And if we do become a police state, we have much bigger problems than DVD regions and overpriced CDs.

Re:Nope.

[crucini]

Hell, you could "tunnel" through automated geocities account creation.

That's a really beautiful interesting idea. I'm going to really think about that.

That would require some serious legislation. Legislation which would probably be unconstitutional, but more importantly, would hurt big business.

How would it hurt big business? It would benefit ISP's - make their lives simpler and more profitable. As for ordinary big business, this would have little effect - they're not using consumer connections for their servers! As for the Content Owners, this would be an absolute godsend. So how would it hurt Big Business?
Your point about tunneling over mail/MSN is a good one, but here's a possible flipside. You can tunnel your traffic to your best friend, and I'll tentatively grant that in the 'tunneling arms race' you stay one step ahead of 'tunneling detectors'. But what if you want to share information with people you don't know? How can you publish your willingness to share information without exposing yourself to a sting operation?

Re:OK, thats it. I'm reading that fucking book

[Unknown Poltroon]

hmmm, ill let you know

Democracy vs. Corporate control

[Apotsy]

I found this quote interesting:

By insisting that digital technology is ineluctably beyond the reach of authority, Falco and others like him are inadvertently making it far more likely that the rules of operation of the worldwide intellectual commons that is the Internet will be established not through the messy but open processes of democracy but by private negotiations among large corporations.

The author of this article is deluding himself if he thinks there is any chance of the "messy but open processes of democracy" getting involved in internet regulation. No matter what attitude people take, corporate control will still be the order of the day, for a number of reasons -- not the least of which is that those "processes of democracy" don't exist any more. Corporations found them to be too inconvenient, so they bought them out a long time ago.

Corporate control of the net will happen, because that's the only thing that can happen in today's world. Sure, it would be nice if netizens got some of those silly myths the author talks about out of their heads and adopted a more realistic attitude, but it's not like that would do anything to prevent corporate control from setting in any way. You can't prevent it -- that's the real truism of the net.

Re:Democracy vs. Corporate control

[Russ Nelson]

Government control, corporate control, who cares? The problem is that people have chosen to give up being responsible for what happens to them. Once we do that, once we give up control, somebody else is going to pick it up.

The only solution is to vote Libertarian publicly, and privately to be responsible for yourself.
-russ

Re:Democracy vs. Corporate control

[Russ Nelson]

Microsoft has no control over people who choose not to purchase anything from them.
-russ

Rights language less useful than legal constructs

[hillct]

While we've been focusing on rights language, and discussions of what should be, WIPO, with the support of many old-economy publishers have begun to implement the legal constructs which will allow prosecution for net based offenses, related to intellectual property. The first evidence of this in the US was the DMCA, but for the rest of the story, read the WIPO whitepaper "Technical Protection Measures: The Intersection of Technology, Law, and Commercial Licenses" (available in M$ word format and PDF format). It's a vary interesting read.

--CTH

Re:Explain this one to me...

[Lozzer]

The only thing I can think of is that your ISP doesn't allow any initial SYN packets through to you. This would make you only capable of being a client. If enough ISPs banded together to they could conceivably restrict the majority of iternet connected people this way.

I'd like to think that economics would rear its head at this point and supply of server allowed connections would appear to fit the demand gap. (A lot of online games rely on peer to peer for example)

Even more draconian, imagine legislation in this area. Maybe people would need a (government) server license to run tcp listeners.

Even more scary, this would stop a lot of trojans that set up listeners...

Time for sleep

Great

[CaptainSuperBoy]

Against all the arguments as to why copy protection will NEVER work, we have this gem: "Because e-books can't do two things at once." This is about the best argument in the article, and it's still awful. It's true, it would be kind of hard to run a debugger on that Rocket eBook, but why not crack that eBook on a PC?

This article holds no water if any of the three myths are actually true - and surprise, there are problems with all 3 myths, particularly numbers 2 and 3.

The assumption that you need central servers, or identifiable traffic in order to run an efficient decentralized file sharing network is just plain wrong. The fact that something hasn't been done yet does not mean it can't be accomplished, you know. FreeNet itself is proof of concept that you can have a completely distributed network where no one node knows the whole story. As a programmer I see no reason why you couldn't design a system with traffic indistinguishable from SSH or a VPN, with adequate performance, that was completely decentralized.

I'm surprised at how well written this article is. There are bound to be opposing views on any subject, and I guess it's a good thing that this isn't filled with more FUD or pro-media propaganda. But as it goes, the arguments in this article just don't work. If you had a file-sharing network where you could publish anything, available to anyone at a high speed, how could you justify to the courts that you wanted it shut down? Does the availability of copyrighted material outweigh the overall benefit of the system? Of course not! As the article even says, in order to shut that kind of network down, you'd have to turn off the Internet.

Re:Great

[CaptainSuperBoy]

I don't see any reason why future peer to peer networks would have to be harder to use than present ones. Software has been becoming both more powerful and easier to use over the years. Peer to peer file sharing software is very new, and it's far from being a mature technology.

The Internet is unstoppable?

[dbolger]

A quote in the article says, "The Internet is unstoppable! The flow of data can never be blocked". While I'm sure that the Internet, as it is now can be censored and thus, basically stopped (just look at the Great Firewall of China), the second sentence is the greatest truth - the flow of data can never be blocked. This is as true now as it was when the Nazi's publically burned books in 1933. The model of the internet routing around censorship is taken from real life - if you stop the net, we'll just find another way of spreading our information and letting the data flow. Information is ammunition, and the people will /never/ let that be taken away from them.

Re:Big Brother Has Been Around for a While

[UnknownSoldier]

> When I decided I wanted an above-the-board job and was willing to pay taxes I accepted a government-given number.

There is NO law that requires a person to have a SSN/SIN.

And yes, you CAN work,live,travel without one.

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[PotatoHead]

You know this one always bothered me. The whole CD-ROM thing is due for a rethink. How about connecting the laser and read head right to the machine you have now. Central Point Software (now swallowed by Microsoft...) had an option board that could directly control a floppy drive. Pretty cool unit. Gave the user proper control over the floppy disk. You could read mac disks and make backups of those fragile key disks required to make some programs run. That board also assisted in data recovery from damaged disks.

Early CPUs were probably not fast enough to make good use of a directly controlled CD writer, but the CPUs of today are.

The same thing could be done with DVD.

Why would someone want to do that? I can think of many good uses for this sort of thing.

1. Improved reading of error ridden media.

2. Reading of all CD-ROM formats. SGI EFS formatted discs do not work in a pretty large number of consumer CD-ROMS because their firmware was not written with alternate block sizes in mind.

3. Backups. This is still legal even with the DMCA. Given the high cost and limited release cycles of many types of media this concerns me. Bought a game? Want to play it 10 years from now? What if the media is not playable then? I have games written in 1979 for the Atari 2600 that are still playable on todays hardware. There is no reason this should not continue.

4. Enhanced formats. Users could come up with their own way of using the disc. Maybe they want more space, or perhaps greater resistance to errors. These would be valid choices and a percentage of users would be interested in them.

There are others I am sure, but one thing is sure. Opening up a CD-ROM and driving it yourself is no different from opening your car and making some choices as to what happens under the hood.

Pretty sure that anyone can go to a Radio Shack and get the interface parts required to do this sort of thing. If the current trends continue, particularly with Audio CD's then I just might consider it.

Yeah, I know it is a 'my tech is better than your lawyer' sort of thing. Sue me.

We need advocacy on our side. How can we get this done? Joe Q public has to be able to understand a point like the one I made above. Tell them they can't modify their car and they go nuts! Why is this so hard?

Code talkers

[Col. Klink (retired)]

Allegedly!?!

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[Are We Afraid]

The other possibility is to prevent CDROM drives from reading audio CDs. That is not going to happen soon either.

You need to do some reading about Macrovision's latest abomination. It aims to do just that.

There will, of course, be people who crack these protections. But the important thing is the the vast majority of lusers won't know it -- all they'll know is that it won't rip (or even play) when they put it in their CD-ROM drive. So they'll stop putting audio CDs in their CD-ROM drives.

Bingo: the herds have shifted.

Nothing is inevitable

[Brian Stretch]

We do have a friend or two in high places.

The "it's inevitable" argument is the one used by socialists when they're trying to disarm opponents. Odd to see it being used here, both because of the context and because it's been so thoroughly discredited.

Even if the control freaks can overcome the technical obsticals, the only way they can get sustainable legal support (anyone wanna bet on the DMCA being around in full force in 5 years?) is by convincing the voting public that they want the restrictions, and while that's relatively easy for the pollution-control devices the TR author cites, it's a lot harder to come up with a compelling argument for 'net controls. The odds against figuring out both the technical and legal sides are in freedom's favor.

What THEY can do

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Well one could hack one's TCP stack so an initial SYN-ACK with certain fields set a certain way is treated as a normal SYN packet. That blasts a hole in the not allowing incoming packets filter. Of course, they can filter out that hack, etc. As was said in another post, they have to REACT, and would be one step (or more) behind.

What they could do, is change the rules. Right now things are permitted unless prohibited. If the laws were changed so that things were by default prohibited, instead of permitted, and made it illegal (preferrable as a felony - heck, then they could eventually take away the right of a felon to be on the net too), and made it illegal for hardware or software to exist that doesn't enofrce that, they they could win.

THey could require you pay the gov't a $10M license to provide content, and revoke licenses from any "troublesome" sites (so rich "eccentrics" would not be a threat).

Put enough people in jail for YEARS of their life, take every thing they own and sell it, and make them felons without the right of self-defense or even to vote (so the politicians can IGNORE them - and their fellow "citizens" will think of them as EVIL UNTRUSTWORTHY CRIMINALS), and people will be scared off and/or neutralized as a threat to the New World Order.

WE NEED TO FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS POLITICALLY, NOT JUST TECHNICALLY. IF YOU GET SENTENCED TO 20 YEARS IN PRISON FOR USING FREENET, NO TECHNOLOGY WILL HELP YOU (except a shovel to try to "tunnel" your way out of prison).

Re:The Internet Will Never Be Successfully Regulat

[raju1kabir]

Read the article, they actually address this argument. It doesn't matter if I setup a Napster server in Timbuktu if the RIAA can cut off my one-and-only access point to the outside world.

The article "addressed" it in a most unsatisfactory way. It used a single anecdotal case (St. Kitts & Nevis) and generalized from that, with no basis, to the entire world. So what if St. Kitts has one primary cable connection? They still have satellite. And other countries may have more connections. It is not going to be very easy to cut off a profitable link because someone within a country isn't playing nice.

Re:What about ping time?

[Tackhead]

> While IPv6 does support long ping times, I don't thing your people would put up 0.238745 s to there ping time per hop!

But if the goal is to shovel MP3z over a P2P network, the latency doesn't matter, as long as there's throughput.

A counter-example

[megaduck]

Here's a brain teaser. Bobby wants to give Sally the DeCSS source code. Jimmy has absolute control over both of their computers, telephones, and the intervening network. Can Jimmy stop Bobby while permitting them to talk about nice safe legal things?

Answer: No.

Here's why: The only way to stop the transferral of "bad" information is to stop all information. Let's see how it would work in real life.

• Jimmy scans all of Bobby's e-mail and deletes the e-mail containing DeCSS.
• Bobby starts sending DeCSS as a PDF attachment.
  
  
• Jimmy starts scanning attachments for the source code and deletes all "bad" PDFs.
• Bobby sings DeCSS, records it as a .WAV and sends it as an attachment.
  
  
• Jimmy starts listening to all audio attachments and blocks the offending e-mail.
• Bobby sings DeCSS again, this time in Navajo.
  
  
• Jimmy blocks all attachments altogether.
• Bobby e-mails the code in german pig latin.

I think you see where this is going. Bobby will always be able to pass DeCSS off as "safe" traffic. No matter what Jimmy does, Sally will be cracking DVDs in short order. The article brings up some good points, but I think that there's no way to stop the informational tidal wave. Information may not "want to be free", but people do. There will always be a way.

Re:A counter-example

[BeanThere]

There will always be a way

Maybe there "will always be a way", but those ways are going to get more and more inconvenient, and an ever smaller percentage of people will be able to use/understand them. I don't want to live in a world where I, as a technical person, will be able to obtain and compile DeCSS (while running the risk of being thrown in jail for five years or a $500000 fine) while NONE of my mother, grandmother, brothers, sisters etc (who know little about computers) will be able to. I would rather live in a world where not only would obtaining DeCSS be legal, but I wouldn't need to, nor would my brothers, sisters, parents etc.

From the sounds of your argument, it seems you would prefer the former of these two situations. Moreover, your argument has the an underlying implication that its OK for DeCSS to be illegal, while sending the source is something illegal and nasty which should be hidden. Is that the argument you want to send the world? That its OK to allow DeCSS to be illegal in the first place, and that sending DeCSS code is a criminal activity to be hidden? I don't know about you, but I would rather be arguing that DeCSS shouldn't be illegal in the first place, and that copying it shouldn't be something you have to hide at all. Thats the message we should rather be spreading.

Re:A counter-example

[crucini]

Well that's great as long as Bobby already knows and trusts Sally. Suppose Sally's an FBI agent? Then Bobby has just done the equivalent of selling drugs to a cop. Per the DMCA, traffiking in a circumvention device is punishable by ten years imprisonment.
Will Bobby take this chance to benefit some random stranger?
I think the real threat to the entertainment industry is not Bobby's ability to send data to trusted friend Sally, but Bobby's ability to publish information so it's accessible to a huge audience.
So you have just proved that in the absence of government intervention, our technology beats their technology. Which is exactly the smug hubris condemned by the article - we don't have absence of government intervention. We have the DMCA precisely because the government thinks Bobby is 'out of control' and blowing past every technical restraint.

Re:A counter-example

[crucini]

I think law enforcement is pretty good at infiltrating these 'webs of trust'. I was reading in the local newspaper about a DEA informant who created some headaches for the DEA. Apparently the DEA frequently persuades people who pled guilty to drug charges to act as informants for something like a year before their sentencing. If they are successful in busting a lot of their friends, they get a substantially reduced sentence.

I think the FBI has infiltrated Nazi groups, Communist groups, militias and other tight-knit face to face communities of trust. I think it would be child's play for them to infiltrate an internet-based community linked by crypto. All they have to do is bust one member, whether for traficking in circumvention devices or some unrelated offense, and convince him to be an informant for a lighter sentence. Tell him that he must finger 20 users in the next year. Then bust those twenty, and apply the same technique.

It wouldn't necessarily kill the community, but it would drive out a lot of people. Me, for instance.

And I don't understand how you can demand 100 ultimately trusted signatures. I'm assuming that ultimately trusted == known personally. Do you know and trust 100 people? If so, what are the chances of a new person knowing and being trusted by all 100?

It seems that in practice you'd have to allow 1 ultimately trusted signature, enabling the infiltration/informant attack.

analog; hacking cuts both ways

[bcrowell]

Fallacious agrument #3: "Software hackers can't do hardware" == "Nobody can hack hardware". A topical counter example: it's not very hard to buy a DVD player modified to be region-free.
Also, sound, still images, and movies can all be put through an analog stage and then redigitized, which defeats both hardware and software-based digital controls.

Let's also remember that the world would be a worse place, not a better one, if hackers could crack anything. Suppose someone finds a way to factor large integers, thereby making all public-key encryption obsolete. That would be a horrible blow against individual freedom.

Re:analog; hacking cuts both ways

[Azog]

Nitpick: there are methods of public key encryption that don't depend on the difficulty of factoring products of large primes for their security. Elliptical curves, for instance.

And of course, public key / private key is a major convenience, but all you really need is old school secret key cryptography to make a private, secure network.

Finally, there are encryption methods that rely on the conjecture that P != NP - that is, breaking the encryption would answer the most significant unanswered question in mathematics of the last hundred years. I feel pretty safe about that. Oh yeah, and quantum cryptography too.

But anyway, yes, it is a good thing that there are some things that nobody knows how to break.

What a well-written article!

[mosch]

Internet service providers can always pull the plug?treating Freenet, in essence, as an unsupported feature, in the way that many providers today do not support telnet, Usenet and other less popular services

Gee, what an intelligent statement. I know there are so many providers that drop my telnet traffic.... oh wait, I've never seen that happen, even when I was visiting china.

As far as the "digital signatures" of certain types of traffic. Sure you could block port 6347 or something, but then they'd use a different port. You could analyze every packet to see if it was GNUtella, but a) that would take massive hardware upgrades and b) people would just encapsulate the traffic. Suddenly gnutella will be proxied over HTTP-SSL, and the choice will be either to shut down all e-commerce, or live with it.

Let's burn these bridges when we get to them, There's no need for full-scale paranoia yet.

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[MrResistor]

The slashdotted article states:"I can write a program that lets you break the copy protection on a music file," says Dan Farmer, an independent computer security consultant in San Francisco. "But I can't write a program that solders new connections onto a chip for you."

This statement is somewhat naive... One can always write a program to emulate any piece of hardware, and there will always be ways of breaking them.

It also completely ignores the existence of hardware hackers. Remember how the Playstation wasn't supposed to be able to read copied games?

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[Archfeld]

Unless your a fool you take the cdrom back to the store and get a refund, or better yet a new copy of an unplayable CD and do it all over again. Returns play hell with distributors, BIG TIME. You'll see companies go bankrupt under the deluge of returned merchandise.
As long as it is LABELED CD-ROM, IT MUST BE PLAYABLE ON ALL CERTIFIED CD-ROMS :)
Not that this will stop the inevitable CORP'ing
of the net. For that there is only one answer FREENET. Support FREENET NOW

Re:Explain this one to me...

[raju1kabir]

The only thing I can think of is that your ISP doesn't allow any initial SYN packets through to you. This would make you only capable of being a client. If enough ISPs banded together to they could conceivably restrict the majority of iternet connected people this way.

Nope. You could just come up with a protocol that tunneled atop existing connections (opened from the ISP customer to some central server that brokers the handshakes), used UDP, or whatever.

What people keep forgetting is the modularity and morphability of information. It can be broken down and repackaged to by virtually indistinguishable from any other type of information. Therefore you have to cut off everything, or you cut off nothing.

Re:Um.

[camusflage]

connected to a shinyhappy ad-laden corporate network through ATM-like dumb terminals.

Larry Ellison? You're posting to /. now?

Seriously though, I thought we had pretty much squashed the idea of network computers circa. 1998.

mod the parent up, pls ...

[uebernewby]

If anything, Napster proved that people are more than willing to profit from the freedom someone else (even a commercial entity designed to make money by actively promoting breaking the law), but they're not in any way willing to defend their new freedom.

Here's the real myth

[kindbud]

Soon, it is widely believed, the Internet will become a universal library/movie theater/voting booth/shopping mall/newspaper/museum/concert hall...

I don't know that this will happen, and certainly I don't believe it will happen on the scale he proposes. I am certain that the people who believe that it will, are just as dogmatic and uncritical of this prediction as the writer of the TR article believes the "net-libertarians" are about the inevitablity of free information flow. The former belief is speculation, wishful thinking. The latter belief is based on the cold hard facts of the protocols and signalling methods used on the Internet, and 25 years of operating experience backing up the basic soundness of the design. The only way to censor communications on the Internet is to dismantle it.

He goes on to talk about comments by the creator of BearShare:

By insisting that digital technology is ineluctably beyond the reach of authority, Falco and others like him are inadvertently making it far more likely that the rules of operation of the worldwide intellectual commons that is the Internet will be established not through the messy but open processes of democracy but by private negotiations among large corporations.

This statement is so naive, it makes the rest of the article that descends from this notion nearly irrelevant. We've already seen how transparent the "open process of democracy" is. ICANN is the poster child for this trend. Everyone who cares about these issues already knows the Corps want to own the whole thing. This writer seems to have just discovered that an awful lot of ugliness happens because of decisions made in smoke-filled boardrooms. Gilmore, Falco, EMS and all the rest have known this for a very long time, indeed, knowning this has been going on for the entire history of the Internet is evidence that the "information wants to be free" dogma is more than a leap of faith.

I have yet to see any lasting commercial success for the "universal library/movie theater/voting booth/shopping mall/newspaper/museum/concert hall" crowd. Maybe it will happen. Maybe we'll all be flying around Blade Runner-style in hovercars, too.

Right. What is much more likely, in my view, is that the dream (nightmare?) of the "universal library/movie theater/voting booth/shopping mall/newspaper/museum/concert hall" Internet, is overblown and unrealistic, given the facts about the way the Internet operates. It's much more likely that the universal-whatever network will be a private corporate owned and operated network, not the Internet as we know it, which will continue to exist in parallel.

Re:The Internet Will Never Be Successfully Regulat

[raju1kabir]

Nevis has Cable and Wireless for a provider. Cable and Wireless has an exclusive very long term government sanctioned monopoly on ALL telecommunications. You just try to set up your satellite ground station and see how fast you wind up in JAIL.

The same rules exist all over the place. Plenty of satellite dishes. Easy to hide. Radio waves != visual spectrum waves. Camouflage therefore trivially feasible.

You'd be amazed what's happening outside your little patch of Hicksville

Granted, I've only worked on networking projects on 5 continents so far, so I've plenty to learn, but where exactly is Hicksville?

Re:Explain this one to me...

[uebernewby]

What people keep forgetting is the modularity and morphability of information. It can be broken down and repackaged to by virtually indistinguishable from any other type of information. Therefore you have to cut off everything, or you cut off nothing.

And what you're forgetting, and what the author of the article is not, is that people are lazy by nature. If it's going to take an effort to "make information free", only a very small group of people is going to put in that effort. MP3's weren't that much of a problem to major labels back when it took logging into a ratio ftp site to get them, well, to be fair, they were somewhat worried, but it was nothing like the uproar caused by Napster, a program that allowed even the dumbest of (l)users to swap mp3's with a few mouseclicks. Likewise, maybe a few techno freaks might figure out a way to do freenet even if their ISP blocks it, but most people won't if it takes too much effort.

Good points, but refutable

[Ulwarth]

He does make some good points, and this is good stuff to think about - definitely not something you want to dismiss out of hand. However, I think all of the points are refutable from many angles. Here's my take:

#1 - The Internet is Too International to Be Controlled

Actually, I think it's more than the international issues can keep things tied up in red tape long enough that we can do whatever we want in the meantime. Things on the Internet happen in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, and sometimes days; in terms of International law, they happen in terms of years and decades. By the time law is adapted to new technologies, those technologies are long since past the "new" stage and well on to the "outdated" stage, with other technologies to replace them. Law will never be able to keep up.

#2 - The Net is too Interconnected to Control

He focuses mainly on two points: that true peer-to-peer sharing is still to inefficient as networks get large, and that most Internet users run off of a few major networks (AOL, Earthlink, MSN). For the first point - yes that's true, but it's just technological hurdle. Such things, as we all well know, are much easier to solve than matters of law, and no doubt true peer-to-peer networks will be "good enough" sometime in the near future. As for the second point - well, the "hackers", which includes most everyone on Slashdot, don't use any of those services for Internet access. So it's true that those services could probably disconnect the mass market from the sharing networks fairly easily; but it seems likely that that would either cause many people to defect to "real" ISPs, or else that people would develop protocols that disguise themselvs as email, FTP, or web transfers.

#3 - The Net is too filled with Hackers to Control

His entire argument here seems to be that sooner or later companies will distribute their electronic information on properitary hardware that can't be accessed by a PC. If that's true, then he's right. But I don't think that will be profitable for the companies, because what's the point of getting something in electronic format if you can't put it on your computer? And if there is any way to view the information on your computer screen, then some bright 16-year-old from Norway will figure out how to download it as data. Period.

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[QuantumFTL]

his statement is somewhat naive... One can always write a program to emulate any piece of hardware, and there will always be ways of breaking them.

I don't know about you, but I'm not aware of any way to write software to emulates a CD-ROM drive (that is, has the capability to directly read the CD-ROM without a CD-ROM drive being present). Hardware does things that software can't BECAUSE IT IS IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD. So while it's quite possible to emulate some parts of hardware (namely computational functions), physical interaction isn't truely emulatable (otherwise I'd just write code to have my laptop make my bed, pick up chicks, and haul them back to my dorm room). I think it is you who is naive.

Big Brother Has Been Around for a While

[Louis Savain]

Looks like it's police state time for Amerika.

Big Brotherism starts the moment that individuals are forced to have ID numbers like a bunch of slaves. It's been around for a long time. It's just getting more efficient with computers. In fact, the more a trojan horses and viruses are unleashed on the net, the more secure and efficient it becomes. IP laws are just the tip of the fascist iceberg.

On a side note, there is a story in the old testament where King David gave the order to take a count of the people. God got so pissed off at that flagrant violation of liberty that he sent a nasty plague on them. Just a thought.

If you don't have income property, you're a slave. You can either live with it or fight it. But watch out if you decide to fight. The state is rather powerful. It is armed to the teeth and will not give up its power easily. They'll hurt you real bad if they have to. But first they will disarm you as they have pretty much done already. So you're all shit out of luck.

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[crucini]

suppose I rip music from an encripted CD, decrypt it, pass it to another process through a named pipe, encode it in another format, and write it to disk.

That would not be possible in the 'trusted hardware' regime, which is already being designed. Let's take it step by step:

1. suppose I rip music from an encripted CD This may or may not be possible, depending on the design of the trusted hardware. A conservative design would have the CD drive go into "safe mode" on encountering protected media. When in safe mode, the CD reader could output the data on a special dedicated connector that connects to the sound card and sends an encrypted stream. It could refuse to transmit protected information via the IDE/SCSI interface. But let's assume that they don't go this far, and that the encrypted data is available to the CPU.
2. ...decrypt it... Here's the problem. Let's say there are several keys embedded in the DAC of your sound card. The stream is encrypted with one of those keys. How are you going to discover one of those keys to use it in software decryption? Remember, CSS was cracked because (first) they allowed software implementations (a mistake) and (second) there were fundamental flaws in the homemade cryptosystem. But let's imagine that the stream is encrypted with AES, using a session key encrypted with RSA. How are you ever going to decrypt this?
3. ...pass it to another process... You can't. Sorry to belabor the point, but a correctly implemented trusted hardware solution will never trust software. The decrypted program material will never be visible to the bus, cpu or ram of the host computer.

The crux is, as you say, that the platform will interfere with many innocuous activities. Because from the IP owner's point of view, the only innocuous activity is playing the program material through a licensed, authorized, tamperproof output device.
As you can see, there's no need to outlaw open source. If the IP interests are kind enough to open their specs, we will be able to play their material on open source platforms. No harm done, because the computer will never have access to the cleartext material.

Why is it always about piracy?

[Nonesuch]

Fiber Optic cable (not as expensive as you'd think.)

Low-power IR lasers (great for line-of-sight)

Tunneling - via leased lines, over IP, over any other bidirectional transmission that might otherwise be restricted.

More importantly, there are many uses of a 'free' Internet which have no relation with the theft of intellectual property, and which, though Corporations may wish them to be supressed, cannot be legally controlled in a "free" society.

OK, thats it. I'm reading that fucking book

[Unknown Poltroon]

this week.

Re:The Internet Will Never Be Successfully Regulat

[crucini]

The article "addressed" it in a most unsatisfactory way.

Yes. Because the off-shore company cited in the article is apparently still operating, despite their alleged vulerability. However I still agree with the author that national sovereignty is becoming a less effective shield against corporate interests.
Many people here hope that a powerful antagonistic country like China could house data havens. The missing fact here is that if China did that, they'd be using the data havens as bargaining chips. So in a future negotiation with the US, China could give up the data havens in exchange for less pressure on their human rights record. Any country powerful enough to stand up to the US has its own agenda, which does not include freedom of information.

The first hackers were Hardware hackers

[Nonesuch]

Reading the article at 'Technology Review', it is very clear that the author is forgetting the roots of Technology, and the roots of hacking.

Hacking isn't about software or hardware, it's about making a system of any sort behave outside of it's designed constraints.

The very first hackers were the people who built and modified hardware, and there has always been a strong culture of hardware hacking in the USA, Germany, and many other countries.

Has everyone forgotten the days of blue boxes, satellite TV hacks, Cable TV decoders, and every other method of physically either bypassing hardware controls or building replacement hardware decoders to bypass attempts to protect content from access by unintended recipients?

For somebody purporting to write an article about the future of technology, this guy sure has ignored the history of technology.

"... Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it"
-- George Santayana

Re:Explain this one to me...

[crucini]

I'd like to think that economics would rear its head at this point and supply of server allowed connections would appear to fit the demand gap.

Imagine a town that has two broadband options: DSL from SBC (you know they're planning to force pppoe, right?) and a cable company. SBC filters all inbound connections. After initial grumbling from a tiny minority of users, it becomes apparent that their support costs and bandwidth costs have gone down. They're making money. The cable company sees this and decides to follow suit. At this point the ten geeks in town move to the one remaining dialup ISP. They proudly flaunt their ability to share mp3's at 56k.

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[einhverfr]

suppose I rip music from an encripted CD This may or may not be possible, depending on the design of the trusted hardware. A conservative design would have the CD drive go into "safe mode" on encountering protected media. When in safe mode, the CD reader could output the data on a special dedicated connector that connects to the sound card and sends an encrypted stream. It could refuse to transmit protected information via the IDE/SCSI interface. But let's assume that they don't go this far, and that the encrypted data is available to the CPU.

Attack the sound card then, or better, the adapter interface. You could then digitize an audio version of the CD player output and use that as a basis for the attack. After enough samples, it should be reasonably possible to attack it realtime, assuming that the recording industry doesn't "get it" and hide behind good encryption rather than the DMCA....

...pass it to another process... You can't. Sorry to belabor the point, but a correctly implemented trusted hardware solution will never trust software. The decrypted program material will never be visible to the bus, cpu or ram of the host computer.

Of course, the data is vulnerable when it leaves the initial reading device, wherever it is supposed to go. It might require hardware hacking, but it would likely not require too much hardware hacking ;)

Re:Explain this one to me...

[crucini]

Nope. You could just come up with a protocol that tunneled atop existing connections (opened from the ISP customer to some central server that brokers the handshakes), used UDP, or whatever.

Sounds like an illegal circumvention device under the DMCA. You are proposing to set up a commercial server (remember, consumer bandwidth won't help) with the explicit purpose of helping people violate the law. It could work if it's not widely publicized. But p2p only became great when it was widely publicized. I think that after the first operator of such a server is sentenced to ten years in prison, the others will be off the net pretty fast. As for UDP, why would the ISP of the future allow UDP packets? The only 'legitimate' use for UDP will be a client querying his ISP's nameserver.
You're right about the morphability of information - if I can transmit X, I can transmit Y. But if I can only receive, not transmit, then this property is of no use to me.

Random bits

[Russ Nelson]

As long as we have the ability to transport random bits around, we have free speech. And there are too many useful applications which generate random bits for anyone to control them. Given encryption, you can identify a pile of bits as something, and until/unless you release the key, who can tell if you're lying or not.

And anyway, if it were technologically possible to control the net, somebody please explain to me why Code Red exists? Don't even bother bringing in the lawyers, because what Code Red does is already horrifically illegal.
-russ

Mann's article is excellent--but somewhat flawed

[Hiawatha]

I just got back from several African countries a few months ago. There are moves afoot to give countries on the west coast of the continent access to high-bandwidth undersea cable connections. The first such will be installed by year's end. When that happens, it will be possible to send data from, say, Togo, just about as easily as from Toulouse or Toronto. Mann is dead right that, contrary to myth and legend, large swaths of the world still have lousy Internet bandwidth availability. But in a couple years, that will have changed. Any country that wants in on the global economy has to get wired. So they're dropping cable like crazy. And that'll make it practical to run your Internet business out of Accra or Freetown.

Mann's still right about another key point, though. You'd better not set foot in the US if you use the Internet to break American law. And he's also right that international law is being modified to seal off the safe havens. So while one point of his argument isn't as strong as he might think, it still holds up pretty well.

Re:two general assumptions are faulty

[crucini]

The first assumption is that people will buy the devices, LOL.

Right, I mean who would buy a VCR with Macrovision?

Re:The Internet will never be completely controlle

[crucini]

I'm glad you see it. It seems that very few posting here do. The end of the computer and the end of the internet will mean nothing to the average user. Actually, life will probably be easier and cheaper for him. The fact that our computers are full-fledged internet hosts is a historical accident. The upcoming times could be the dark ages of computing. It doesn't bother me that we face a powerful adversary; it bothers me greatly that most of us foolishly underestimate that adversary.

our childlike naivete and arrogance

[crucini]

I've read the article and all the comments, and I think the comments simply reinforce the point of the article - we are arrogant and naive and continue to cling to our 'three myths'. Every time the adversary strikes a blow, we react with utter astonishment: "I can't believe they're really imprisoning us!" "How could they shut down that site - isn't it a First Amendment violation?"
And then we're back to our regularly scheduled hubris. The author warned us that "haha - you can't stop me" is not a viable message for winning over voters and politicans. The 'rebuttals' mostly say, "as long as we have host-host connectivity, we'll find a way around everything."
That rebuttal is begging the Powers That Be to shut off inbound TCP connections to consumers. It would be easy; it would save bandwidth and administrative headaches; it would prevent Code Red and similar things; it would remove ISPs' liability for user-hosted infringing content; and it would go unnoticed by 99% of the internet-using population. And when it happens, I expect the usual expressions of shock and astonishment on slashdot. The words of people who underestimated their adversaries.
There's another myth the author didn't address: "They can't arrest everybody!" Although this may be a variation of myth 3 - infinite supply of hackers. What this myth overlooks is that it will only take a few high-profile arrests and convictions to quell everyone. As Sun Tzu put it, 'Kill one to terrify ten thousand.' What this myth also overlooks is that the enforcement end of the system can be made profitable. The simplest procedure would be to seize the computers of p2p participants under Civil Asset Forfeiture. There would be no need to charge the violators with a crime, unless they obstruct police activity. Two cops driving around in a van, guided by a printout of addresses, could probably seize two computers an hour. That would more than pay for their time. And they might luck into some busts or other stuff - cops are by no means reluctant to have a pretext for entering homes.
Entering a battle with overconfidence is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. Our puny weapon is just enough threat to justify pulling the trigger. And our overbearing and unjustified arrogrance makes all the neutral bystanders eager to see that trigger pulled.

Re:Not only the net. THe article mentions CPRM als

[crucini]

Of course, the data is vulnerable when it leaves the initial reading device, wherever it is supposed to go.

In the scenario I'm describing, the data on the disk is encrypted. When it leaves the initial reading device, it's still encrypted. So it's not vulnerable.

...assuming that the recording industry doesn't "get it" and hide behind good encryption...

I don't think we can count on their ongoing refusal to understand modern cryptography. We have strong, free, widely available crypto algorithms and a good body of knowledge on building cryptosystems from them. I'm afraid they will finally 'get it'.

Re:Explain this one to me...

[crucini]

I've been thinking about your question. An information exchange network is not strictly speaking a circumvention device. However, when the DMCA speaks of a "work" effectively protected by a technological measure, I don't think it requires that the technological measure be applied by the "owner" of the "work".

In other words, if a cable TV company buys programs without any protection, and yet their box outputs them with Macrovision, the work is now protected by a technological measure. Therefore a box that strips Macrovision is a circumvention device.

ISPs blocking inbound connections to consumers could therefore be considered a technological measure. A program that bypasses this blocking would then be a circumvention device.

I think a judge would be willing to apply this logic. If you followed the 2600 case, it's clear that once a judge identifies a party as 'bad guys' - that is, in opposition to major corporations, and the law under which they are charged is aimed in their general direction, he is not going to allow some computer technical issue to stop him.