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If This Had Been An Actual Emergency
saridder writes "In an increasing attempt to regulate the Internet like the current PSTN, the US Government has asked the IETF to come up with a system to prioritize government and emergency worker traffic in the event of another disaster, much like the GETS system already in place for the PSTN. It's interesting to follow, because it's only an RFC, so you don't have to follow it. I probably won't be prioritizing government traffic on any of my routers." The story has a link to the ieprep working group if you want to get involved or comment. Perhaps this is a better way than GOVNET.
Were there other problems I just didn't notice? I'm guessing that the government won't need to have priority access to cnn.com if something like that happens again.
Heck, even then, the servers themselves seemed to be the bottleneck. Load levels were pegged beyond comprehension, but I was under the impression that the infrastructure itself held up well. Once again, I could be entirely mistaken about that.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
So there would have to be some kind of flag on government traffic so it could be placed in a higher priority, right? Does that mean it would be possible to set this flag with some sort of hack so I could get a better ping rate in Quake 3?
But I don't think it would really work well in practice, unless it becomes government mandatory. Seems to me that it's like blocking spammers or virus spreading, you actually have to make the sysadmin care to do this.
/. reading or pr0n surfing?
The problem I forsee is how are they going to identify these high priority packets and data transmissions? If they just flag it with a special flag, how long before some haxor figures it out and suddenly everybody has high priority
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
...doesn't TCP/IP already have a system for prioritizing packets? Which no one (especially no router) uses for the obvious reason: It's too unregulated and too easy to exploit, especially if you let just anyone onto the net like today.
If this system goes through, all that will happen is that every single packet on the net is a priority-one red-alert packet and the routers will just start ignoring the priorities (again). There is no honor on a completely public medium, don't forget what happened to the idea of open relays.
I probably won't be prioritizing government traffic on any of my routers.
The government may force you to do it by passing a law.
Even without any law, if the router you own has the feature implemented but you choose to turn it of and someone get hurts (or cannot get help) because emergency traffic is not prioritized by your router, then you will get sued for not giving assistance to someone who needs it.
sounds like they should just build their own damn secure network. considering this is a resource (not yet) 'owned' by one person, why the hell should they get priority?
sorry, awful things happen. get carrier pigeons.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
On 9/11 the Emergency Broadcast System here in the USA was not used AT ALL. WHY?? Because the news channels knew what was going on before the government.
All this talk of emergency communication networks is bogus. They just need to feed information to the news outlets like they always do.
On 9/11, the most important communications did not come from the government. They were the cell phone calls to/from the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. I'd hate to think that those lifesaving phone calls among private citizens might get squeezed out because giving the governor an update on resuce efforts took priority.
Seems the discussion has lost its way: The point here is not to put all Gov't info on this special priority or just send out generic stuff that yes CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/etc. etc. has broadcast.
The point is to support timely communication between government workers who are actually working on the emergency. So when a FEMA person on site arrives at the scene, he'll be able to request certain information or communicate the situation and needs to the agency that can respond.
During Sept. 11, alot of people said that email was useful in letting people know they were ok because they weren't able to get through on the phone. The gov't has been putting a lot of information and communication onto the web, they just want to make sure it gets through in an emergency. Just like a siren on the fire truck lets us know to pull over and let the truck pass.
I do agree that this priority scheme will probably be hacked (unless there is a way to turn it on at the time of the emergency only, just an idea), and be used by non emergency workers.
then ISP's would be common carriers and many the crazy threats to internet reliability would go away. If someone thinks the song on our outgoing answering machine tape infringes their copyright, they can't get our phone disconnected without a goddamn court order, so they shouldn't be able to make our ISP's censor content without a court order either. And we'd be able to get long-term permanent IP addresses like phone numbers, that couldn't be reassigned at an ISP's whim. Those might be harder to remember than domain names, but they'd be immune to trademark disputes and in general very hard to take away from us, so we could include the numbers in our publications in case something happened to our domain names. All that would be left to screw up is the transport layer, and as the world gets covered with wireless network fabric accessed by low powered devices, transport (at least of low bandwidth, important data) gets extremely hard to disrupt.
Good excuse to push forward the rollout of IPv6. Gov't grants to ISPs to get new, IPv6 capable, equipment.
IPv6 has better QoS than IPv4.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
As I see it, preserving the end to end, nondiscriminatory nature of the internet backbone is more important than any current concern about national security or natural disaster response. Creating preferences for any group, no matter how worthy the group or the motive, undermines the essence of what makes the internet a good network and creates opportunities for abuse. Just to touch on a couple points & questions:
In the future we'll see lots of this. We'll see people coming to us or to the gov't with lots of good reasons for discriminating content on the net. National security. Preserving copyright. Stopping kiddie porn. All putatively good motives, but nobody's seeing that the cure, perfect network control, is worse than the disease. It puts innovation in a box and lets our current interests and concerns block what can be done with the internet in the future, and in return all we get is a network that's little more than a fancy mail-order catalog.
if face == spite (nose = 0);
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
Following Internet protocol. Asking for an RFC from the IETF instead of congress passing an unworkable law.
Yes, there is a way to set the priority flags in packets, supported under linux, [as long as you have Config_IP_NF_MANGLE and Config_IP_NF_TARGET_ROS configured into your current kernel].
Then, just run something like
"iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -j TOS --set-tos Maximize-Throughput"
To activate it. Note that this works fine in 2.4.17 and before, but is currently broken in 2.4.18.
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the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
This frees the government to focus specifically on NON-civilian communication issues: military communications, and where do we put Dick Cheney this week? That's an appropriate thing for the government to be working on then.
Of course they'd lose polling points if they just ignored civilian emergency communication, even though doing so would probably leave us civilians better off. We're left with the possibility that some day, the government might lock down CNN et al. in response to an emergency, and as a result we suffer avoidable civilian losses. That'll suck.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Why don't they put out their data on freenet and then if people want to see it it will be replicated on nodes close to the people who want it
Well, freenet doesn't provide much of a reliability guarantee. You can publish something and then ten seconds later have one of the computers that was storing a chunk go down.
Second, freenet latency totally sucks, so it wouldn't be useful for realtime information.
Anyone else thinks that their load of pr0n, warez, mp3s and slashdot news less important than some kind of government agency?
I bet that those that would will never be the ones with power to change it: "Who cares if they are bombing NYC again, i wanna get the whole music album and read that Jon Katz article. Hell with everything else."
Maybe that is taken to the extreme, but there is some truth to it.
I probably won't be prioritizing government traffic on any of my routers.
When you consider the increasing pervasiveness of the internet as a communications medium in the wireless arena, its not hard to imagine a firefighter trying to locate a building exit using a GPS and blueprints via a wireless handheld.
OOPS. He didn't have priority access through your router.
The fact is that the government is not a monolith; it is often individuals who are risking their lives to serve and protect the public, as we found out with vivid clarity six months ago.
The govenment wants the instantaneous communication in case of emergency... instead of the damn near instantaneous communication that all people on the internet have today.
Are their concerns that specialized? First rule, don't put the DOD on the net! Just a bad idea all around. Most everything they would be trafficking is standard office files stuff, right?
Would it kill them to not instant message with sub-20 pings?
I really don't see the concern here. If you can sit on top of a mountain and get your E-mail in a few seconds... then I suppose that I am misundrestanding the information needs that the government has. I don't suppose that they ALL need to have streaming video for their government purposes. Government decisions are not made in nanoseconds... and if they are, they are automated and definitely need not be automated on an open system.
So what is the real concern here? Do the Senators want to less lossy streaming prOn? Does the DoD want to really stream war footage back to the continent over the net? That is what their super expensive sattelites are for. Once again... why the speed when the net is almost instantaneous?
Besides, wouldn't any #1 priority packet get automatically sniffed by whoever was sitting a "listener" next to the routers, knowing that the US Gov't would be the only ones trafficking in #1 packets?
Just a bad idea all around, IMHO.