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Panama Decrees Block To Kill VoIP Service
An anonymous reader writes "In an apparent attempt to stem telephone company revenue losses due to Internet telephony, the government of Panama has decreed that 46 UDP ports be blocked by all Internet service providers. The ports include ones that are commonly used for voice over IP as well as some that are used for other purposes, apparently with the idea that these, too, could be used to circumvent the POTS (plain old telephone system, a term of art) in making telephone calls."
If person2person chat programs with voice capabilities, then whoever provides the software (I know Yahoo messenger and ICQ can do that, although it's not VoIP) should be able to make it switch ports easily.
If companies (such as the one I use to call Russia if/when I ever do
Or is my logic flawed somewhere and the port block like that would achieve the desired effect?
Cheers,
DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
The obvious solution is going to be a transmission tax on VoIP calls. Cheaper than the old way, but it will begin to cost you money. Hate them you might, but the phone companies have real expenses in physical property, technical services, and customer service. They need to get paid. It will be less than they are used to, but they won't be giving it away for free much longer.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
In fact, I think it would be a piece of cake to cobble together a proxy server that did just that. The clients wouldn't even have to change their software other than to point to the intermediate proxy server.
The problem here though comes in talking to the rest of the world. The above-mentioned servers have to direct the traffic to the destination servers at some point. Those servers are completely outside the control of the subversives to be. Those servers have to know that the traffic being received is actually VoIP and deal with it appropriately.
It can be done, but it will require servers outside of Panama to cooperate with the scheme.
Of course, once the Panama government locates those sites (shouldn't be hard) they'll start gopher whacking them with a variety of tactics: legal shutdowns through warrants, DOS attacks, etc. Vendors from outside of Panama will also rush to fill the void, and that software will also subsequently be outlawed.
The bottom line though is that the government will not be able to control the VoIP "problem" entirely without just pulling the plug on all Internet activity. That would be a steep price and they will face economic pressure to not do it.
Oh well, they'll learn this one the hard way I guess.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
port 80 as used for http is a tcp port, not a udp port.
Some of the protocols that will eventually have to be blocked as a result include tftp, whois++, bootp/dhcp, ntp, udp portions of netbios, snmp (ISPs and large businesses, including the phone company, will love that one.) hsrp, (another favorite of large businesses) quake, traceroute, both MySQL and Postgres, and a few others that may not have tcp vairents, or who's tcp varients are too expensive in network bandwidth to use politely.
Additionally, there is nothing preventing users from building a ppp, ssh, httptunnel or other tunnel over tcp and completely bypassing the UDP blocks from their workstation. It may even become a part of the software for DialPad or other platforms.
-Rusty
You never know...
What this article really demonstrates - and it's something that has been demonstrated before on countless occasions - and that is that most governments of the world believe the internet is something tangible and easilly controllable.
This has been demonstrated here in Australia with the federal goverments push to sensor content and make ISP's liable for content that is served up from their service.
It's been demonstrated by the Chineese government with their sensorship and blocking of sites like google.
It has been shown by the USA's government in their restriction of encryption technology export.
All of these things are easilly worked around by even the most non techsavvy user.
Those of us who understand what the internet is and how it works understand that this sort of filtering will not work. These type sof things just show that until governments actually gain an understanding of the things they are trying to control they will continue to make fools of themselves. (btw: I'm surprised they dont want to block tcp ports 25, 110 & 143 (smtp,pop,imap) as people might send electronic mail rather than using the snail mail service).
the U.S., as well as many other countries, already do, albeit in a different industry. When the U.S. says: "You, as a citizen, are not allowed to circumvent insuring your automobile, say by having infinity cash [sic] that you're willing to use to pay for any damages that you might inflict, but must go through a PRIVATE, government regulated insurance agency in order to use the public roads..."
Except for satellite and other wireless communications, ALL VoIP in Panama (as elsewhere) goes through wires that sit on the Government's land (that would be everything). If I can't use a public road except by playing by the rules of regulated private companies, (even if I know of a cheaper alternative), why should Panamians be allowed to use data lines going through public land, except by playing by the rules of a regulated private company?
Okay, that's the most contrived example I could think of. I don't think there's a closer equivalent -- some candidates were Edison (the electric company) - run public schools (look it up -- but you're not required to go to one, since you can homeschool) and private appraisals mandated in certain cases by the government.
Anyway, uh, yeah, HOW DARE THEY.
On the positive side, this should kill the Windows Messenger popup spams, which propagate over UDP ports.
On the negative side, it will kill Quicktime, which needs UDP ports for negotiating a connection.
Out of simple curiosity, I plugged 'panama phone company' into Google.. after all, what could this little pissant country have in the way of phone companines? And what are the first two links to pop up?
Privatization - Phone Company: and A Case of Privatization Gone Wrong: Panama's Wires Crossed. Perhaps this is the start of some revenue-generating stunt to pull some dumbass decision-maker's ass out of a fire somewhere?
-fester (capt. conspiracy?)
ps.. I'm sure Panamanians by and large dislike this as well.. the 'pissant' is directed at the governmental representation of Panama, which right now looks suspiciously like a boil on someone's ass.
-'fester
This is very embarassing, but not a surprise.
This is yet another example of our British friends at Cable & Wireless adapting to the local culture of the country which they're sucking the blood out of. They obviously have quickly learned the Panamenian way of politics and have paid off all the necessary politicians, which can often be bought very cheap.
Cable & Wireless is privatization gone totally wrong. The previous phone company was a government owned company called INTEL, and Cable & Wireless beat US GTE and took over the phone system of Panama. The results have been horrible.
Local calls in Panama used to be like in the US, you paid your minimal fee and could talk all the minutes you wanted. Cable & Wireless brought the wonderful European model of paying for each minute for local calls.
If that wasn't enough, they also charge you per minute (I think) for calls from a land line phone in your house to a cell phone. That is, you pay for calling a cell phone and the person on the cell phone pays too. I had to find this the hard way after making a few calls to some friends from my grandmothers house.
So, people are fed up with them, and the internet savy are using Voice over IP a lot. I used to receive a lot of calls from a cousing over dialpad.com (when it was free). This was the ideal system to make a call to the US, dialpad was for US calls only, but the funny thing is that this worked great if you lived in another country.
Here's a good article on the whole mess Cable & Wireless is creating;
A Case of Privatization Gone Wrong -
Panama's Wires Crossed
- sigs are for wimps.
GTE insisted that they couldn't possibly have been hacked, but next month, her phone number was *still* racking up $1000s in 900 porn. They claimed her teenage son was the hacker, so she told them to physically cut all phone wires to the house at the connecting point, which in the rural area was several miles away.
Next month, the 900 porn continued to rack up $1000s. So then, GTE took her to court. They actually claimed, in court, I kid you not, that her teenage son was hacking the phone company using mental telepathy! The whole small town believed it too, and started treating her son like a space alien. Fortunately, the judge was not a country yokel, and threw the case out of court.
The real hackers were eventually caught when they got tired of 900 porn, and hacked the White House phone system so they could eavesdrop on Clinton's phone calls. This was noticed, and brought the FBI down on their case. The story of their capture was on Slashdot, but I can't find it at the moment.
It's already been done. The VoIP software "Fobbit Fone" is public domain or shareware, I can't remember which - freely available, anyway... It works with the Creative VoIP blaster and one of the configuration settings is to use TCP only and you pick the port. It uses port 80 (normal HTTP) for initial access, then goes to the same port as it normally would but uses TCP instead of UDP if configured that way. I'm using it sucessfully TCP only because I'm lazy and only wanted to turn on one port in my firewall :) Seriously, it does make it easier to connect through a firewall when using TCP only. In fact that software is the only choice if you are behind a firewall, as the stock Creative Labs driver and UI software doesn't work at all thru the firewall.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
...that's the same Cable and Wireless, aka Exodus, where Slashdot currently hosts all of its servers.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I've wondered this for some time now, and with such developments as VoIP and G3, why don't telco's increase audio fidelity?
I think that if a telephone call could have the same bandwidth as (for example) a 22khz 16bit wav file, then people would feel better about using such archaic technology as the telephone. If 3G phones used more bandwidth for audio, rather than using some crappy lossy compression scheme, more people would think "hey, cool, my new cell phone sounds much better than my landline"
in short, if you can't compete with the same ol' bag of tricks, improve your service so it's at least on par with the competition.
Handicapping competing technologies is a silly way to innovate.
I say fuck em. Just drop all packets from panama netblocks. Once the people realize their Internet is shrinking fast, they will pressure their government to quit being such asses.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I lived in the country in the Mid-90s (after Manuel).
And it once again sounds like the corrupt workings of their ruling junta.
Typical situations:
Transito (traffic cops) targetting rich foreigners for some BS violation, so they could receive bribe money. It was so common, that my friends always planned on taking extra cash to pay corrupt traffic cops.
The railroad system turned over by the US (at the time already "turned over" to the Panamanian govt) which in a few years had became totally non-operational due to local inept management.
Many reliable stories of gov't for hire (much like the US) where the politicos where bought off, not by campaign contributions, but people bought by large amounts of cash for personal gain.
All in all the ordinary people of Panama were friendly and had the attitude: oh well it happens, might as well be happy. (Papas e chulatas) Potatoes and bacon. oh well.
Personally I am surprised the Canal still operates. But one thing most Americans don't realize is that a provision in the treaty stipulates the US can reclaim it if it becomes non-operational. That in my opinion, is the reason the canal hasn't followed the fate of everything else "turned over" and ruined by its corrupt govt.
I didn't say it would be easy. You would have to access the raw TCP packet, before the OS has done anything with it. You could technically get the packet after the IP header ahd been processed, but before the OS had looked at the TCP header. To do that would involve re-writing part of the OSs TCP stack, making the task harder then it needs to be.
You'd be better off grabbing the raw Ethernet frame before the OS sees it, and rely on a firewall rule to drop the packet. If you wanted to you could use tcpdump and a shell script to grab the data, but I don't know any shell utilities that would let you send an arbitrary UDP packet with fake source information.
Trust me, I do know what I'm talking about. Something like this would probably be implemented as a gateway, rather then from the end system itself, but it is do-able. Not trivial, but do-able.
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
A decade or so ago, when Joe Nacchio was working for AT&T before he started Qwest, he gave us a talk at Bell Labs where he drew a curve on the screen that showed the market price of long-distance voice telephone minutes. It took a steep dive, settling down asymptotically toward zero; given the prices of the time, he was showing it going from a quarter to a dime to a nickel to a penny. What could we do about it? Well, the choices were adapt or die. Use technology to cut costs, and use lower prices (plus advertising) to get people to make more phone calls.
Many countries' PTTs were abusing their monopoly positions by charging excessively non-cost-based prices for their service, ripping off their customers and damaging their overall economies by interfering with international communications and therefore international trade. In the past couple of years, they've been taken down not only by callback companies, but by wholesalers using VOIP technology to keep their costs much lower than the PTTs costs. Everybody wins from that, except the greedier PTTs, and most of them were using excess international prices to cross-subsidize local calling.
What's the next step? What happens if VOIP drops costs to the equivalent of $0.001 per minute? The most likely big impact turns out not to be the costs, but the fact that you no longer need a gigantic expensive #4ESS telephone switch to route large numbers of calls - internet routing technology works quite well for that, with something DNS-like to help with end-user location. Unlike those of you who aren't in the telephony business, yes, we do care that our last several business models have gotten the chairs kicked out from under them, but the problem of proposing new business models for telcos is ours, not that of the people who are trying to make us obsolete.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Then how do you suggest people that live in small towns get to work and shop if they do not have a personal automobile/roads? Mass transist does not work in a small town.
I don't know whether you have lived in a small town. I have, in Europe. It took three minutes to walk to the supermarket, five minutes to walk to work, and three minutes to walk to the train station (which would take me directly to the airport and pretty much anywhere else). For short distance trips, I'd use a bicycle or the bus (fast and on-time).
The quality of life there was unmatched by anything I have found in the Bay Area (where I live now), even though I made a fraction then of what I make now. The sad thing is that most Americans don't realize how poor the quality of life in America actually is. (In case you are wondering why I didn't stay there--it's because my friends, family, and job are here.)
And some of those 'corrupt' politicians dismantled public transportation because it was/is a very large sinkhole for tax dollars.
Cars are a much bigger "sinkhole" for tax dollars than public transportation. Even disregarding all the infrastructure costs, health costs and lost productivity from cars alone are enormous and dwarf anything spent on public transportation.
They want to block UDP ports that *can* be used for VOIP? Why not *make* 'em block all UDP and let them find out how screwed that actually leaves them? Wanna see a government backtrack on a previous decision really quick?
Unless Panama wants to block all web browsing...
Bear with me while I explain
UDP is used for VOIP because TCP is a streaming protocol and as such isn't particularly useful for real-time data transmission -- as said by another poster elsewhere, it's preferable to just simply lose a packet every now and then rather than to have the connection pause suddenly while TCP handles congestion control.
So... what I imagine is this: a system running VOIP listens to a randomly chosen UDP port rather than a specifically chosen one. The exact port to try to connect to is found by connecting to the system via the TCP port 80, and the VOIP system responds to the connection request letting the caller know which UDP port to actually use, and then the TCP connection is closed. The caller can then use the UDP port it was informed about. Since the system can be listening on ANY UDP port, possibly even one that would normally be used for some other well-known service, the government would have no choice but to create a ruling that would unilaterally block all UDP.
Seriously... I think it would be close to hilarious to see what they would come up with to try to stop that.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In other news, Panama sees increased use of Linux VPN gateways and WindowsXP's builtin IPSec stack, which uses protocol 50 and 51 and UDP port 500 for standardized encrypted communication, transforming all information about application ports into seemingly random static.
It used to be public domain. I think it's GPL now.
A while back Captain Crunch made a little bit of history by placing his first VOIP call with Speak Freely - from India, where VOIP has long been illegal and I'm pretty sure the ports are supposed to be blocked.
The way people can find what port to use for you is that you can have your name and IP address listed on a webserver. When people look you up they'll see your port. You'll have to instruct people you talk to to set the port, not just the IP address.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Just goes to show that a properly regulated free market is best! And of course that a poorly regulated free market, like in Panama and a lot of other places, is worse than a government owned monopoly.
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
All the comments I've seen about this are along the lines "this is bad for progress", "you can't step on my rights", or "there are easy technical workarounds". But noone has actually acknowledged that there is a sound economic reason for this action, which is being contemplated by many governments around the world.
Governments have a responsibility to provide basic services to their citizens. Communication is considered (by the UN and most governments) to be a basic service. Thus the sector needs regulation to prevent abuse by the providers and the consumers.
VoIP sounds like a wonderful idea: use more advanced technology to reduce the cost of calls, especially international calls, thereby improving value to the consumer.
Sadly, this is one side of the equation. Using/allowing VoIP means a select number of consumers who have access to VoIP equipment are able to make international calls at local call cost, while still using some (perhaps less than a conventional call) international bandwidth without really funding it.
In order to afford the international bandwidth, the telecom company must recoup the cost, and it can do this in one of three ways:
No matter how you look at it, VoIP is a specialised service with a usage pattern such that non-users are expected to subsidise the cost. This is grossly unfair to those users, which is precisely why telecoms companies are keen to prohibit the use of VoIP on their networks.
Until such time as ALL international calls can be VoIP (which basically means making all phones VoIP equipment), the ecnonomic concerns are going to be the same.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Although John Dvorak was speaking about copyright law when he said this, It still sounds appropriate:
What's happened, and the point I keep trying to make, is that technology has changed the economics of these industries.
This is indeed true of teh VOIP scene. What a pathetic lack of understanding of the technology the Panamanian governement has displayed. Many of those ports are just as easily used by many apps that they definately don't want to ban. Exchange Sever is one example, but there are many more.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
True. But there is no reason why you couldn't run your VoIP system on UDP:80. A better bet though would be to choose UDP:53, provided that the remote end wasn't also running DNS of course. They'd have a fun time if they tried to firewall off *that* particular UDP port on their "great fireall of Panama". ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
thats just the way that capitalism 'works'
No, this is an example of goverment interference in a capatalistic society. Perhaps it is correct to say that this is how elected (some might say corrupt) government (such as the US has) works.
The capatalist thing to do is to let companies that cannot respond to new technologies and markets die a natural death while new companies take their place.
Unfortunately this means that people will be displaced from jobs, and they must be willing to learn new things in order to be employable at new positions. People don't like this, they want to just stay doing the same old thing forever, so they get their elected officials to try to maintain the status quo.
In the end it will result in stifling of new technologies and that country will ultimately pay a price.
But what's much more important: There are butchers with high-quality meat and sausages (self-made, not those that just resell stuff), family-run bakeries that have a wide variety of bread, shops with daily fresh fruits and vegetables from all over Europe, etc. Hope you get it.
Granted there are European areas where the US mall concept is now prevalent, too - but IMNSHO it's much easier to find a small town with a more-than-decent living standard in Europe than in the US. Of course, it depends on your definition of "living standard."
E.g., I don't really think it's a big problem that most of our shops (as I've said, family-run) close around 7pm. As long as the bars stay open... I have been to so many small US towns where it was impossible to get a drink after one's dinner - but where one could buy T-shirts 24x7. And all the time, for me, at 11pm it was more important to have a drink with friends than being able to buy T-shirts... ;-)
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]