Slashdot Mirror
US Military Blocks Websites To Free Up Bandwidth
DJRumpy writes "The US military has blocked access to a range of popular commercial websites in order to free up bandwidth for use in Japan recovery efforts, according to an e-mail obtained by CNN and confirmed by a spokesman for US Strategic Command. The sites — including YouTube, ESPN, Amazon, eBay and MTV — were chosen not because of the content but because their popularity among users of military computers account for significant bandwidth, according to Strategic Command spokesman Rodney Ellison. The block, instituted Monday, is intended 'to make sure bandwidth was available in Japan for military operations' as the United States helps in the aftermath of last week's deadly earthquake and tsunami, Ellison explained."
U.S. Pacific Command made the request to free up the bandwidth. The sites, 13 in all, are blocked across the Department of Defense's .mil computer system.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
That's a good, though unsurprising decision. Bandwidth should be used for the purposes that the infrastructure has been built for. Recreational uses are completely optional, IMO, and no one sane should expect them to be available during a conflict or a crisis. There's job to be done that you signed up to do, so go ahead and do it. And may God stand between you and harm.
* Youtube.com ...
* Googlevideo.com
* Doubleclick.com
* Eyewonder.com
Ad networks are that bad huh?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
PHProxy on home comp -> DynDNS mapped to your home computer IP address. Fixed.
So, wont people just use alternate sites for veiwing the same content? Also, wouldnt this lead to an increase in traffic as people search for alternate sites?
I think the US Army would be decent enough to respect the reasoning behind it and would refrain from viewing alternatives.
Or were you just reflecting your own (lack of) moral on them?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Porntube.com is still unblocked.
I don't understand why they don't just throttle lower priority traffic. The same problem I have with ISPs. Look, I understand that if I'm a very high capacity user, I might be impacting others during my usage (MAYBE). But the rest of the time, what does it matter how much bandwidth I use, if the rest of the traffic is low? So rather than blocking or limiting sites or total transfer, just fucking set up some throttling rules so that during times when traffic is truly an issue (not based merely on time of day, but actual real current bandwidth consumption and availability), it trims me down.
At any rate, there doesn't seem to be anything questionable about this action. It's not like they're blocking access to information to keep people in the dark about anything. They're just carefully metering their bandwidth for urgent needs during an emergency.
So how is this "Stuff That Matters"?
Probably not, especially if users are aware of why the ban is in place. Generally military staff have the intelligence to not intentionally disobey instructions/request. The use of these sites could be decreased dramatically, just be telling them not to use them for a while, the block is simply a way of putting a low barrier in place to discourage the final 25% or so of use.
It's like trying to diet. Many people know they should snack less, but struggle to resist temptation. Not having snacks in the house doesn't stop you going out and buying them, however it provides a slight disincentive which helps some people stop snacking.
If they really want to free up bandwidth, block porn.
No. If they want to free up bandwidth, then make sure each office has a large local cache for pr0n. LAN traffic might increase, but WAN traffic would plummet.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
It's much easier to just add the sites to their blocked list than implement a throttling system.
All that bitching about useless ads, menus in flash, images in the wrong format, all that crap... we were right!
The internet is running out of bits!
Probably not, especially if users are aware of why the ban is in place. Generally military staff have the intelligence to not intentionally disobey instructions/request. The use of these sites could be decreased dramatically, just be telling them not to use them for a while, the block is simply a way of putting a low barrier in place to discourage the final 25% or so of use. It's like trying to diet. Many people know they should snack less, but struggle to resist temptation. Not having snacks in the house doesn't stop you going out and buying them, however it provides a slight disincentive which helps some people stop snacking.
Plus lots of sites embed youtube videos. Someone could easily end up watching one without explicitly going to youtube without a block.
from the but-why-is-virgin-mobile-doing-it-to-me? dept.
I'm pretty sure Virgin mobile isn't doing it with anybody.
Of course. That's why its Virgin.
Can't they just make them low-priority? That's a bit worrying: if a disaster in Japan can make the army block some websites just for bandwidth reasons, what would happen if they had to deal with an emergency in the US ? And what if in the middle of this emergency, someone wanted to see a video on Youtube containing info that he needs?
I agree. At my workplace, a lot of sites are blocked. But when you try to access a blocked site, it says roughly: "This site has been blocked to safeguard bandwidth for core business processes. If you are sure you have a business reason to visit this site, please click here." And if you click the link, you're redirected to the actual site. And that's enough to discourage people - if they click the link, they can't say they went to the site by mistake, or didn't know it wasn't allowed.
Nope, it justs comes up with a military version of the 404... something along the lines of "this is not approved on this network..."
We know that PACCOM made the initial request, but one thing I always find lacking in these sensationalized news stories is the lack of investigative work that would help us understand the decision making process.
The reason that I ask, is because I remember when I was deployed with an Infantry Battalion, we more or less managed our own usage internally, but everything above the Battalion level (brigade or god-forbid base wide) seemed to have been handled by outside consultants who when I look back now, weren't all that great.
Also, Google hasn't told me what the process was, before any LMGTFY comments come up...
You'd need one heckuva large sign to be seen by everyone in the US military.
I conclude that you are either
a. a troll,
2. really dumb, or
c. in the sign business.
Indeed. Getting court martialed for refusing to stay away from a forbidden web site will certainly reduce internet contention.
you'd think that would be a 403
We do something similar but the list is smaller and easier to bypass. The reason being that at one point about a quarter of our traffic was Facebook and that has little or no value for our work. Personally, I would have smacked the users but that's too hard for management.
The Defense Information System Agency (DISA) periodically blocks, unblocks, and restricts access to various sites as they deem necessary. Generally, the most popular and trafficked sites are affected. Back in 2005 myspace was blocked off, but other networking sites were open. From Iraq, I could get on AIM's web portal (and google chat when it was unveiled), but not Yahoo for instant messaging. Some time later, it was allowed again.
.gov and .mil computer systems is so Uncle Sam can do his job and complete the missions. Everything else is absolutely auxiliary and unnecessary. DISA recognizes the importance of keeping people in contact with their friends and families, and that they can often not access the internet anywhere except while at work, so they appropriately authorize things like social networking, news, personal email, etc., so long as it does not negatively affect the organization's mission(s). It may be nice to burn some downtime on Break.com or Hulu, etc., but if that bandwidth is slowing down other high-priority functions, then the line is clearly drawn.
:P
/. in all these years.
The reason the NIPR exists on
This doesn't happen too often, in large part due to the fact that multiple non-internet networks exist for higher classifications of information systems. You don't want to display Top Secret data on an Unclassified machine, after all. That may land you in Quantico or Ft. Leavenworth
Luckily, they've never decided to block
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
Many deployments of the IWF censorship list in the UK use a 404 Not Found rather than 403. I've never found any official explanation for this, though I've read suggestions that it's to make people just assume that censored content isn't available rather than tip them off that it's being hidden from them.
I don't know what US military policy is, but it gives you an idea of how censors in the Western world think.
Holy shit you're right!!! The tubes are getting clogged!! Quick, get the dump truck!!!!!
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
I doubt anyone would get court martialed. At worst, they'd get an Article 15. Unless maybe they'd already gotten 2 other article 15s for watching porn. Then maybe they'd get court martialed.
Someone save me from this sanity.
It's called email, man. It is the next big thing!
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
http://www.facebook.com/USNavy
Badges!?! We don't need no stinking badges!
My first thought about what it would be like to be a user in this situation is that, upon seeing the "site blocked" message, I would simply go hunting around for a similar site - maybe MSNBC instead of CNN for example. It's the content I'm looking for after all - news in this case - that matters. I might have to Google around a bit to find that content of course and try a few alternative sites. So wouldn't this approach actually increase the bandwidth usage? As noble as the cause is, this approach doesn't seem very effective to me.
That would be fine, except most people don't understand what bandwidth is or how they can avoid wasting it (Note: this is not to say that they are stupid or ignorant, they simply don't have a reason to give a shit as computers are not in their interest/skill set). For the people who wouldn't understand the sign about wasting bandwidth, trying to go to YouTube.com and seeing a blocked message would most likely make them give up and find something better to do with their time.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Depends. Will you pay me a salary for helping?
Dilbert RSS feed
An embedded video would still be blocked, the request still goes out to youtube's server. If this were the case, then ad-blocking software/extensions would be totally useless.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Especially since typically when you say throttle the low priority traffic, it's often done by protocol, or even port. So, your ISP would be blocking your bittorrent protocol, and maybe news for your porn. All of the services mentioned are http:80 or similar, so they'd be blocking a lot of what they DO need access to. Yes, just adding the most popular destinations is a much simpler solution. KISS
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Yes, it's going to be very confusing when they are forced to change their name to "Mobile".
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
I think less bandwidth is used for 100 searches and an ultimately unsuccessful result, than in one single video.
Add to that, a large percentage of videos are direct link to the content, and the viewer doesn't really care that much about seeing it. How many times have you loaded up a page and it had a youtube video embedded that just starts spooling up, but you never watched it? They're not trying to censor videos here, they're just going after the low hanging fruit, and this is a VERY effective way to do it.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE
This email serves as official notification on behalf of the Army Reserve Enterprise Network Operations Security Center to inform you that USCYBERCOM has directed the temporary restriction to the internet sites listed below until further notice.
The intent of the restriction is to alleviate bandwidth congestion to assist with HIGH Availability/Disaster Relief efforts in the PACIFIC Area Of Responsibility (AOR).
As of 0310Z 13 March all 13 Internet sites below have been temporarily restricted:
Youtube.com
Googlevideo.com
Amazon.com
ESPN.go.com
Ebay.com
Doubleclick.com
Eyewonder.com
Pandora.com
streamtheworld.com
Mtv.com
Ifilm.com
Myspace.com
Metacafe.com
Loading...
A couple of them came together and suggested we could all listen to the same radio station to limit bandwidth used...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I think you forget you're talking about the same people who did not refuse to take part in a criminal war that caused the death of 100k civilians. I don't think it's unreasonable to question their ability to think of how their actions affect other people.
Note: I'm not BLAMING soldiers for going to Iraq. I'm just observing that they did not demonstrate an ability to think of others, especially not foreign civilians, at a time when this was badly needed. Whether they are or aren't at fault for this is an entirely different topic that I am not discussing here.
That's pretty insulting to anyone in the military that risked their lives in Iraq specifically to make it a better place. Most of the soldiers over there have done truly stunning, selfless acts risking their lives to help out the people over there. You may disagree with the reasons for going to war, but not everyone who disagrees with you is stupid, ignorant, or evil. To think of them that way just shows you as the one lacking empathy.
No, not every order is debatable. Then again, due obedience is not an excuse. It is the soldier's responsibility to know when he has grounds to disobey an order.
I'm saying that people in the army do get paid for that, so it's unfair to compare. I have to work to pay my bills, obviously I can't afford to help as much.
Dilbert RSS feed
Clearly the military does not believe in capitalism and letting the free market decide where to allocate resources. Socialism is WRONG!!!
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Yes, because in an emergency, I really want to see the DoD spin up a multi-million dollar "Uncle Sam wants you to use less bandwidth!" awareness campaign that will take months to design and implement. I'm sure the people of Japan won't have any problem with hearing, "Sorry, we can't support a mission to go rescue your family right now, because Bob just really needs to watch that funny Charlie Sheen cooking video again."
That's a much better solution than the 30 minute solution of blocking the sites, displaying a 404 or 403 page indicating that the site is blocked for bandwidth purposes, and implying that administrative action may result if repeated attempts are made to access the content.
This is an entirely appropriate response in an emergency management situation, where real lives are at stake.
Remember that this isn't done all sneaky like. We aren't finding out about this because some clever individual took it upon themselves to find out what was blocked and complied a list. We are finding out about this because the military told everyone. They sent out a notice to their soldiers saying "These sites are blocked so that there's more bandwidth available for things relating to the Japanese emergency." So the soldiers know why it is being done and know that they aren't just supposed to get around it. That will likely lead to people complying.
Please remember the military isn't full of a bunch of petulant geeks who see every kind of authority as a challenge. People like that are either retrained or weeded out in basic. The military is an environment of "When you are told to do something you do it because that's the way it is." So the powers that be say "No video sites to save bandwidth," and the soldiers say "Ok."
All the military's structure aside, they've provided a rather good reason for it.
MWR (Morale, Welfare, ad Recreation). Since most military network decisions are service wide, the military has been fairly lenient in allowing access to "fun" sites as an MWR resource for soldiers deployed in places where they don't have a lot of civilian Internet access (Mostly Middle Eastern areas, but there's other smaller deployment location with limited access). I was in Iraq 5 years ago before Facebook and the like exploded, but LiveJournal was one of the big ways I kept in touch with people.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Yeah, that's called "shitting in your own bed", and teenagers are known for it. Then we sit at the board meeting and listen to sob stories about how they have to share computers.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Failure to obey a lawful order is a crime and a violation of oath. The order to deploy is a lawful order. "Go kill that civilian" is not a lawful order and you'd have a case if any significant numbers of troops were being given or obeying such an order. It's also worth pointing out that most (for a very high value of most) of the 100K civilian casualties have not been caused by US troops. Accidents do happen in combat and they are both tragic and rigorously investigated when they do, but something like 90% of the civilians casualties have been caused by someone else.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
My ISP (Rogers Canada) actually has a feature whereby if there is available bandwidth, they actually do give it out in order to boost your current speed, automatically. The result is that my 3Mbit connection runs almost entirely at 10Mbit, because, at least as I've seen, they always seem to have extra bandwidth floating around. The not so great part is that I still have a 25 GB cap. I could pay for a higher cap, up to 175 GB, and a higher speed, up to 50 Mbit, but I don't have much of a use for that.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
We already block one of those domains here where I work. Can you guess which one?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That's his point. If you go to a site with an embedded video, *you* may not realize that you're watching youtube, but the network does and helpfully blocks it prevent you from inadvertently breaking the rules. If there were just rule in place that says "Don't watch youtube videos," Private Joe might spend all day breaking the rules without even realizing it. Hence blocking is more effective than merely asking, even if everyone involved legitimately wants to comply.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Also, without a block, you'd get the "oh one person couldn't hurt" syndrome where individuals in a large population defy good stewardship out of convenience because they think their individual impact is insignificant. Multiply that mentality to thousands and that's why we get polluted rivers, streets with litter, etc. So a block is indeed more effective than any notice, even though people are able and willing to make the sacrifice.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Most of these sites are a pretty big MWR resource for deployed troops, they'll likely restore access after the crisis. They've blocked and unblocked sites on a bandwidth and use basis for years. I couldn't get to LiveJournal for two weeks on three occasions when I was in Iraq in 2005 becasue they had some bandwidth constraint or other. It always came back after the constraint lifted.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Exactly. I was on Adak Island back in 1976, and we had no access to Youtube, Facebook, or any of that stuff. Oh - wait. Nevermind . . . .
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Maybe they'll go with "Mobile Slut" ?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how would access to the public Internet affect "military operations" (per the article)? Should I be scared that our military relies in anyway on the Internet to function? I understand maybe they backhaul Internet traffic across a private network, but if that's the case, why not just prioritize the important traffic? Then people can use the leftover bandwidth to do whatever they please.
It's not, it's 2011
This can't be 2010, because in 2010 you would have the technology to throttle a set of sites that were less important to give important network traffic a guaranteed level of throughput--without having to block the sites completely.
And that would be an entirely appropriate and worthwhile solution if one were an ISP dealing with too many torrents, instead of the military trying to save lives.
Implementing and testing a dynamic throttling system is - or should be - a very low priority when one is in the middle of major disaster recovery. (The loss of eBay or ESPN doesn't count as a 'major disaster'.) Just cutting off these domains is the simplest, most effective, least failure-prone way to free up bandwidth.
~Idarubicin
Go out and watch the movies....
Yes. That is how you should make informed decisions on everything
... Wikileaks still up?
Have gnu, will travel.
MWR (Morale, Welfare, ad Recreation)
So what's wrong with going out, getting drunk and starting fights with the locals?
Who needs YouTube, in my day we made our own entertainment, etc...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I think the US Army would be decent enough to respect the reasoning behind it and would refrain from viewing alternatives.
On the other hand, shouldn't the US Army be decent enough to ask its soldiers to not use them instead of outright blocking them?
Well, to be fair, it's not like they can expect their soldiers to follow or-
...nevermind.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Yes, it is. We never signed any international treaty which forbade us from invading Iraq. No treaty or convention was nullified, no international agreement breached. Was it wrong to do it? Maybe. Saddam was an asshole who murdered a ton of his own people to maintain a stranglehold on power. On the other hand, if that's our criteria for invasion we need a much bigger Army. Should we have waited for a UN mandate? I think so, sadly no one asked me. Was it illegal? Not by any national law or International agreement I am aware of.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I thought I'd check into your initial statement, since I COMPLETELY misread it initially, thought you said that 100 searches would cost more, and I wanted to prove you wrong. Reading comprehension ftl.
Anyway, I just did a test search for the word "video" on Google. The resulting page had about 349KB of data that needed to be downloaded for the first 10 results, including thumbnails for videos and whatnot. Of that, I estimate that only about 96KB would not be cached content, since the other 253KB is stuff like Javascript or logo images that would be cached after the first time you visited Google's search results. Over 100 searches, assuming it wasn't cached for the first search, it'd cost about 9.6MB of bandwidth.
I then loaded a 3:23 long clip from YouTube (this one, since it was a result on the search page), which, based statistics from various places that I found online, seems to be about the average length of a video for YouTube. The video I loaded was at 360p, and, by my estimation, was approximately 8.8MB in size (I had to do some guesswork for that estimation, so I may have undershot it by a bit). That said, there was around 750KB worth of data that would need to be loaded in addition to the video.
In the end, it's a bit of a wash, assuming that you can actually get a soldier to sit down and do 100 unsuccessful searches. Most people I know would give up after 5-10 searches though. And most people I know also like to view their videos at 480p or higher, rather than 360p. So, I'd say it's pretty obvious that searches cost less bandwidth.
Yes. That is how you should make informed decisions on everything
... including your choice of Slashdot alias, no less.
Unless you really are Jackie, and you really are Brown, in which case I am Clod, Insensitive.
*Still* negative function...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Free healthcare, the same pay amongst peers (regardless of the profession), food and shelter paid for by the government. The military is socialist, you insensitive capitalist pig!
Gawdz, I miss it some days. Mostly while doing my insurance forms >.>
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Wouldn't it be amazing if the military developed the means to communicate information to its members?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I wonder if the mobile versions of websites, which are less bandwidth-intensive, still work?
Disobeying a direct order from a comissioned officer carries a maximum sentence of dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 5 years.
I.e., it's a felony.
Same reason they're reading books, making phone calls and playing cards.
They haven't heard of it. At least top officials, so the order was "block".
Why not block all ad servers, and simply use QoS on the other major bandwidth chewers? That way, if there's a lull in the Japan-related traffic, people can still access the other sites.
Wow, thanks for the math.
And add to that the issue of many videos embedded from youtube are spooled without being viewed.
And the people who are emailed "Hey check this funny video on youtube LINK" and when the link doesn't work, they don't give it a second thought.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
The implication of your post at least as I read it is that the suggested solution of all listening to the same station would NOT reduce bandwidth usage.
Well, if you're doing it right, and depending on where your bandwidth bottleneck was and the topology of the network, they were right, listening to the same internet radio station /could/ free up bandwidth.
Assuming the congestion is on the internet link(s), setting up a single (or even two or three) icecast/shoutcast/whatever station proxies would work. You'd then have only that single (double/triple) Internet stream, with it in turn re-streaming to as many local machines as its LAN connection allowed. If a dozen or folks end up connected to that local stream, that's an order of magnitude worth of Internet link bandwidth saved....
If the bottleneck's on the LAN, you either have really big LAN bandwidth needs, or need to update your LAN to something modern, switches for hubs, gigabit Ethernet for 10 megabit, 10-gig LAN trunks if the data needs are big enough, etc. Really large companies could replicate the above proxy solution locally, for each office, floor, etc.
Of course, multicast tech would help here as well, and I'd assume that's what the Engineers were assuming, but just because that's relatively rare doesn't mean bandwidth savings from the idea are impossible; one just has to do the streaming proxy thing, instead.
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
Sure there are options like multicast or a proxy but those are not our core business so it would never be implemented.
And as you say, the LAN will still have to handle all the separate streams.
The problem I noticed is our engineers thought of the internet as a sort of coax cable where there's one signal that many can tack onto.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
To be fair, the fact that I run privoxy between my browser and the web... and have since I switched to Linux starting the week eXPrivacy came out... and ran The Proxomitron in the same role on the MS side for several years before that... so I've been proxies at least for the www for nearly as long as I've been browsing the www ...
And the fact that while I don't tend to run Inet radio proxies or *casting servers personally, they're relatively well documented as options in the streaming clients I've run over the years... plus multiplexed ssh connections and the like altho that's multiplexing for a rather different reason... probably has something to do with proxy options being rather close to the top of the heap of solutions that spring to mind when I read about sharing streaming bandwidth.
As for being implemented, if the company's already bandwidth rationing as it sounded like, all it takes is one person having the idea and running the icecast/shoutcast server, and they were already half-way there with the idea to share bandwidth.
But the illustration remained effective in that they immediately thought about sharing bandwidth, but didn't equally immediately realize that they'd need, effectively, a proxy (or the use of some special multicasting setup) to do it, well illustrated the concept of even rather highly intelligent people in their field not really grasping even these relative basics outside it ...
Says the geek who once failed to realize that stapling a message to a football wasn't a particularly good idea! Talk about not grasping the basics! =:^( To be fair, I was "impared" at the time, by perhaps a half hour of sleep in 24, 3 in 48, and maybe 8 in 72. I like to think I'd have caught the folly in my reasoning had I been rested and thinking straight.
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman