DPI and Net Neutrality's Overseas Weak Spot

Ian Lamont writes "An unnamed source at an American ISP says staff there briefly considered using Deep Packet Inspection to comply with an order from Argentina's Department of Justice to block access to a local gambling site. The ISP ended up not going that route, owing to the cost, but some engineers at the company worry that DPI will eventually be implemented on the ISP's overseas network, thereby positioning it for an easier US rollout should Net Neutrality lose out in Washington. Besides being used for traffic-shaping, DPI can also monitor the traffic of ISP subscribers to supply targeted advertising."

Comments

This is where customers put their foot down.

[MindlessAutomata]

And say "No".

Even if it hurts in the short run. The loss of consumer bargaining power in these instances, where the contracts possibly allow for this, is the fault of the general consumer to begin with.

Re:This is where customers put their foot down.

[snl2587]

And say "No".

I ask, "to whom?". The ISPs are not the only ones who want (to use a generalization) the traffic of subscribers to be monitored. I think you overestimate the power of the consumers in this case.

Re:This is where customers put their foot down.

[garett_spencley]

I'll encrypt what I need to be private. And let them block all they want within the SLA, I'll pay for the level of service I need.

What happens when ISPs start to throttle (or block all together) encrypted or binary data ?

I can already imagine the justifications: "binary data consists largely of pirated software and media!", "only terrorists, pedophiles and other criminals have something to hide and use encryption!" "yap yap yap!"

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I believe that the Internet is one of the greatest assets for human advancement and achievement since the printing press. It is far too important to us to allow certain groups with special interests to ruin it for everyone. One last resort is to force ISPs who succumb to government pressure out of business. In the meantime we have to use every single democratic and diplomatic means at our disposal to force government to make the decisions that serve the larger population's wishes, and not the small special interest groups that want to shut the rest of the world up.

Re:This is where customers put their foot down.

[PopeRatzo]

Tell you what: people are quickly learning about the means and meaning of the surveillance of our data and behavior.

Here in Chicago, tens of thousands of drivers have gotten little notes in the mail from the City of Chicago, telling them that they have to pay $100 or have their car seized, based on a picture taken at an intersection.

When a local, nationally prestigious university recently had a public symposium on the effect of electronic surveillance upon personal, public and political life, you would have been quite surprised at the number, and the variety, of the people who showed up. In fact, a lot of last-minute shuffling had to take place at the venue to accommodate the unexpected number of attendees. And a surprisingly small number of them were techies and geeks. A large number were under age 18.

Re:This is where customers put their foot down.

[philspear]

You convinced me. I'd like to get in on this boycott. Send me an e-mail when I need to cancel my internet, and then send me another email when the boycott is over and I can resume using the... internet...

I think I may see a problem here.

Out of interest

[sakdoctor]

How much extra resources are used in delivering a page by HTTPS instead of HTTP?

DIP will likely be rolled out to support QoS.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

IMHO Deep Packet Inspection will be rolled out to identify the protocols in use on connections, to support assigning the correct QoS to different protocols.

For instance: File transfers accelerate until they consume (and equally divide) all bandwidth at the most congested link in their path, but just slow down if they're artificially limited below that level. Meanwhile Streams are band limited but must go to the front of the line to meet their jitter and delivery reliability requirements, though delayed stream packets are useless and should be dropped to avoid also delaying their successors.

Unfortunately the tagging of the packet itself can't be trusted because there is an incentive to achieve improved service by cheating, requesting better service than necessary. (And a Microsoft IP stack, widely deployed, made just this "improvement".)

My take: The right solution is to write a contract for various rates of "premium" packets, then accept the labeling but demote the QoS on packets above the running limit. Then the incentive is on the user to obtain software that doesn't cheat, and the ISP doesn't need to deep inspect.

Unfortunately, the ISPs and equipment vendors seem to be going with the DPI identification approach. And that means deploying DPI, which can then be misused by the ISPs to do the bad kind of non-neutrality.

Re:Packet Encryption

[BountyX]

Ive been routing my internet through trusted nodes accross the net in encrypted form for a while now and have given up the "old internet". NSA has dpi level inspection at major fiber lines via light bending, especially with underwater fiber. They also use spoilia (spillage of communication signals caught by satalites due to the earths sphere shape) to intercept our activities on wireless communications. If your data is ever transmitted in the air, assume it is being watched. Fiber optics is harder to snoop in on since it requires a physical tap. I wouldn't worry about the US spying on its citizen. It dosn't need to. Under the UK-USA agreement, the NSA shares its intelligence info with the UK, Nz, and Aus and in return those countires share their info with us. The US does not engage in spying on citizens, instead, it usually asks one of its allies to spy on a specific person. By doing this, the US bypasses many laws on privacy. The NSA's largest establishment in the UK USA agreement is at menwith hills and fort mede, maryland. The two agencies (both controlled by the NSA) coordinate sigint. Bottom line, all of our traffic is monitored and run through thousands of different communication algorithms for data mining. Do not share any identifiable information online, to any one for anyreason. Even anonymous browsing is vulnerable to time analysis.

Re:ISPs in Canada already throttle encrypted traff

[Anonymous Coward]

They throttle https? How have online banks and retailers reacted?

Re:Packet Encryption

[ColdWetDog]

Mr. Bin Laden? I didn't realize you joined Slashdot. Do you run Linux? Welcome.

Re:All the more reason to move to IPv6...

[cbiltcliffe]

That actually makes me wonder if the whole reason IPv6 adoption is so miserably low is that the government and communication companies know that when they adopt it wholesale, they lose the ability to do easy DPI and other such shenanigans.

Re:All the more reason to move to IPv6...

[kriss]

I'd hand out a complimentary tinfoil hat if I had one.

IPv6 is on the radar and requested as a must-have, but normally only on a roadmap level ("Will your product support this some time in the future?"). In some parts of the world (there's more to it than the US), any device incapable of IPv6 won't get onto the network in the first place.

If you stop to think about the practical implications for a while, it's very unlikely that encryption will be that much more widespread than it is today (it's a processing power issue as well, not just one of protocol ease of implementation) while the whole NAT issue will be zapped. This means that DPI gear all of a sudden can pick out a whole lot more, since traffic that'd normally be aggregated by a NAT - won't be. Insta-higher-resolution.

There's no conspiracy here. Really.

Re:Packet Encryption

[BountyX]

Ironically, bin laden DID NOT encrypt his communications. Instead, he chose to plan is activities on the internet in sex chat rooms and other public locations on the internet. Bin laden, who had a relationship with the CIA before becoming a terrorist, knew that encrypting communication was one of the NSA's criteria that alerted the agency of an individuals suspicous activitiy. Encryption draws attention becuase its like feeding the NSA bad data. If enough people encrpyt their communications regularly, it will make it harder for the NSA to snoop...and yes, I do run linux :)

Re:Packet Encryption

[Braino420]

Dude, weren't you supposed to submit that anonymously or something?