Let's say you're right. The government conspiracies are going to ruin the people who help Wikileaks. Then why are you trying to convince people not to help them? Better that they fight the good fight and some of them get taken down by The Man than that we all continue to live as serfs, no? You've pretty much established that you're more afraid of the CIA than you are brave enough to stand up for what's right; the least you could do is not try to convince other people to be cowards.
It shouldn't be a crime to reveal information which was improperly classified.
You don't want every private in the military second guessing whether something is properly classified. They have to be punished merely because it was supposed to be classified, or you'll get people releasing things that are properly secrets merely because they don't understand why and think that they won't be punished.
On the other hand, once the information gets out and no one can justify why it was previously classified? You ought to punish the people who classified it, too. And that never seems to happen.
Should we only be happy with companies that pull sites when we agree with them? Or, what? Is there some difference between these two cases? How should we resolve this cognitive dissonance?
In this case it seems like companies are doing it more in response to government pressure than anything else. If one company decides to drop unpopular speech, the speaker has many others to choose from -- they can still be heard. It's different if the government is intimidating everybody.
Once upon a time we had this thing called the First Amendment which prohibited that sort of thing, but apparently they had to take it out to make room for the amendment that says they can shut down the websites of foreigners without an adversarial hearing.
Then using an independent set of hardware/software have the photographer retrieve the encrypted copy, decrypt it, print it out with the meta-data in human-readable form and a signed digest in a human-readable form, attach a human-readable affidavit saying "I took this photo at this date and location and the metadata is true and accurate" and have him store that with his files. Have witnesses if it's that important.
But only the photographer's private key can read it. Which means that nobody else can verify. What stops the photographer from replacing the first step with "retrieve encrypted copy, discard, use encrypted copy of modified version"?
There is no obvious point along the way where it makes sense to switch which party is paying.
I'm not sure that changes much. Yes, when you have a connection between e.g. a large Tier 2 and a Tier 1, there is some question as to whether the Tier 2 should pay the Tier 1 or whether there should be "settlement free peering". In either event, the Tier 2 would be paying far less for the same bandwidth as a Tier 3 would.
The problem is that if you go the other way, things start to break. So Comcast (Tier 2) says Level 3 (Tier 1) has to pay them because Comcast has control over access to their customers and no one may send them data without paying Comcast. Now Level 3 has to squeeze the other endpoint for more money in order to pay off Comcast. The endpoint starts to feel the pinch.
Unless the endpoint is Hulu (which is owned in part by Comcast/NBC) in which case they can just get a good deal on bandwidth from Comcast/NBC. Which is why people are talking about network neutrality. ISPs charging Tier 1 providers for access to their customers means the ISP gets to pick winners and losers in the content market because all they have to do is refund some of their tithe to specific content providers while pricing all of the others out of the market.
Why is it already the case? Can you point out any retail customers for, for example, Savvis?
I think I may have been defining "retail customer" very broadly. I was thinking that anyone who is paid by an endpoint for access, or who in turn pays their uplink provider for access which is resold to downstream endpoints, is a retail customer. So then you get a hierarchy in which everyone pays the network closer to the core of the internet and is paid by the network farther from the core, and the core networks peer with each other but not with others, who they charge.
Given that definition of "retail customer" do you agree with me? Or can you identify a specific flaw that this simplification hides? Because the idea that there is no transit does not seem to happen: the network providing transit is closer to the center and so gets paid by both networks it is providing transit for.
If every network operator were required to let other network operators connect to them for free, where exactly is the revenue going to come from for ISPs that don't have any retail customers?
Assume there is a world where there are no ISPs that have no retail customers. (Never mind that that is already basically the case.) Why is that a bad thing?
Comcast and Level3 had a settlement free peering agreement based on a roughly 1:1 traffic exchange. Level3 now wants to send 5:1 more traffic to Comcast, meaning their settlement free peering agreement is no longer valid. Comcast is just trying to negotiate a new peering agreement.
It's a little more complicated than that.
Here's what the dispute is really about: The way the Internet works (obviously) is that you buy access from your ISP (e.g. Comcast), they in turn (perhaps through some number of additional intermediaries) buy access to the backbone from a Tier 1 provider (like Level 3). If you were a big enough network, you could 'peer' without paying anything (since there was no particular reason for one network to pay the other vs. vice versa). The way it worked in the Old Days was that data centers would always be uploading more than they download, so the rule of thumb became that if you upload too much data without downloading, you can't peer for free -- a rule of thumb to distinguish data centers from ISPs and make them pay. But it is unheard of for a backbone provider to pay an ISP -- because it is inefficient. ISPs like Comcast always used to have approximately symmetrical load to their uplink providers: Their customers would download more than they upload, which means they would have "surplus" upload bandwidth "for free" which they could sell to local data centers. Selling to data centers like this is efficient because otherwise the surplus upload bandwidth is lost -- use it or lose it.
Some of these data centers in modern times turned into CDNs like Akamai. The CDNs kind of messed with the model. Instead of connecting Comcast's network to buy Comcast's surplus upload bandwidth to the backbone, they connected to Comcast networks to serve content only to Comcast's customers. In other words, they evened out Comcast's uplink to Level 3, not by increasing upload traffic as was the traditional model, but by decreasing download traffic from the backbone. But that still works.
So now what's happening with Level 3? Netflix is moving from Akamai to a data center operated by Level 3 which is only connected to Comcast through Level 3's backbone. What this does from Comcast's perspective is a) deprive them of the money Akamai was paying them, but b) give them a huge amount of "free" upload bandwidth. What Comcast is then supposed to do is the efficient thing: to shop this surplus bandwidth around to data centers. Or sell Comcast Business customers higher upload rates. Or whatever. They're supposed to sell it, because they can sell it most efficiently -- there is a pipe going into Comcast which is only full in one direction and the only way to fill it is to put something which uploads a lot on the Comcast side.
Comcast apparently doesn't want to do that. I can really only think of two possible reasons for this: First, there is so much upload bandwidth that no one would possibly want to buy it. (I find this to be pretty unfathomable. Supply and demand says that if the price is right, someone will pay.) And second, Comcast is double dipping and trying to sell access to their customers as a scarce resource; in other words, trying to force Level 3 to pay more for the bandwidth than it would sell for on the open market because buying it from Comcast is the only way to get access to Comcast's customers and they want to charge monopoly prices.
Funnily enough, Level3 was in Comcast's EXACT position back in 2005 with Cogent. Cogent wanted to send more traffic than Level3 was sending, and Level3 said "Nope, no more settlement free agreement. Get out your wallet!"
No, Cogent was sending traffic over Level 3's network to third party networks. In this case Level 3 is sending traffic to Comcast customers. Level 3 has no monopoly on access to third party networks. There are other backbone providers. Comcast has a monopoly over access to Comcast customers -- that's what makes it different.
This assumes that everyone agrees as to what the "right thing" is.
No, it doesn't. If you think what Amazon did was right, you can just keep on giving them money. If lots of other people think they shouldn't be bowing to government pressure and take their business elsewhere, "the market will decide," so to speak. But if no one ever puts their money where their mouth is when they think companies are behaving badly, companies will continue to behave badly, no matter whether you agree with other people on the definition of bad behavior or not.
I'm for free speech and take my rights under the constitution very seriously, but I also think WikiLeaks has stepped over the line that divides responsible and irresponsible behavior. This latest leak has reduced the ability of nations to communicate freely, and reduced communications between nations is not a good thing. The less likely nations are to communicate, the more likely they are to go to war among themselves. That's the unintended consequences of Wikileaks behavior, and it's a very serious side effect. It shows quite clearly that Wikileaks and Assange are reckless and dangerous.
No doubt confidentiality is sometimes important during negotiations. But the public has a right to know what the government is doing on their behalf. So we have two choices: Either we trust the government to only keep those things confidential that need to be, even though they clearly have a huge perverse incentive to use that discretion to cover up misconduct, or we trust Wikileaks and the New York Times not to publish information that will put lives in danger even though they might have a bias in favor of releasing things near the borderline. I don't know about you, but as an arbiter of what the public gets to know, I'll take newspapers over the government any day.
That's the same kind of idiot logic that leads people to say "it's only illegal if you get caught".
It's more like saying "it's only illegal if the judge says it is", which is basically true. If the law says you have to knowingly distribute classified information, and what actually happened is that someone who deals in classified information was working with a journalist on a fluff piece and accidentally switched the mailing labels on two envelopes so that classified information went to the journalist and fluff went to some intelligence analysis, it's very possible that they didn't actually break the law. Assuming that law requires knowledge and not merely negligence. (And it still won't stop them getting fired, but that's a different question.)
I don't necessarily fault those who give in to pressure from governments, pressure groups, and self-styled vigilantes. In a capitalist system they are responsible to the people who own the company to maximize return on their investment, and acting on principle often defies that.
Only when you "don't necessarily fault" them. If doing the Wrong Thing causes them to lose customers, they would be maximizing shareholder value to do the Right Thing. If doing the Wrong Thing causes everybody to say "well, that's capitalism for you" and go right on paying them, well, let's just say we're all going to die.
A perfect example of how that goes bad was the issuing of the bogus microsoft.com signing cert that compromised microsoft's active X controls. A little bit of social engineering, and poof, there goes another rubber tree plant.
This is the problem with any trusted party. You get the same thing with existing DNS. Basically any solution you can come up with to prevent Go Daddy from changing your DNS entry to point at some other server can be used to prevent your CA from signing certificates on your domain for people who aren't you.
But the only entity I can trust is the LORD GOD and if we could get him to sign certificates (root@universe.org), then we could really have a chain of trust.
Right, trust is a problem. But you only have two choices: Either you trust someone who doesn't fully deserve it, or you verify everything yourself. And good luck convincing the general public to do the latter.
The advantage with CAs is that nobody actually has a monopoly and there is, monetarily at least, a low barrier to entry. The biggest barrier is that if you want to be a CA you have to be someone people trust. And I agree that most of the existing CAs are "commercial assholes" -- but why does it have to be that way? Don't we have people that we can trust, at least as much as we trust Verisign? Why can't we have the people who make Debian or run the Pirate Party or work for the EFF or La Quadrature du Net operate a noncommercial certificate authority that could sign a certificate for wikileaks.org? Don't we have all kinds of great encryption schemes where you can let any five out of a group of eight people in eight countries sign a certificate without any of them being able to do it individually even under coercion? This can't be an unsolvable problem.
You're talking about specific methods of collecting information. That isn't the point. The problem is that Facebook knows your real name, address, phone number, who your friends are, where you hang out, plus every website you visit and when and for how long, plus (with their partners) what books you read, how much you pay for what products when, on and on. It's too much power. Raising prices and convincing people to buy stuff they don't need is the least evil it could be put to. Must we even go into what happens when the government starts to subpoena this stuff?
And the real answer to this really ought to be technology. Web browsers shouldn't be disclosing this much; there should be plug-ins in the default install that neutralize tracking scripts but not website features, etc. The problem is that the marketers have more resources than the defenders and there are too many conflicts of interest. Google and Microsoft have little interest in making browsers harder to track when they're the ones doing the tracking. So until such time as individuals are winning the war on the technological front here, we need to be considering laws to protect people.
I'm all for a standard GUI for doing so, but the "other side" (those who do the tracking) must also cooperate by actually observing the setting (no matter how it should be delivered to them; perhaps via HTTP header). If observing it would be mandatory, then hooray; otherwise, meh.
Baby steps. Create a protocol and get it implemented in the major web browsers. Then you play the same game as they did with movie ratings: Threaten passing a law requiring the flag to be respected if companies don't do it voluntarily; suddenly everyone is volunteering to do it and no law is necessary.
If you ask me, you lose the right to complain about sucky products when you let companies stop collecting data one what interests you.
It's not just about products. If all they did was make products better that would be one thing.
Example: Product X is a perishable product that expires after about 3 weeks and people use more during the last week of the month. X Corp learns that if they advertise only during the first and fourth weeks of the month, more people will buy because what they bought during the first week expires and they have to buy again in the fourth week. This clearly benefits X Corp (they sell more product), but how does it benefit those people?
Another example: Price discrimination. If they can accurately mark you as willing to spend more, you end up paying more for the same stuff. In theory this will benefit certain people who get classified as willing to pay less and are offered a discount, but let's not be naive here: They wouldn't be doing it if it didn't make them money, which means there is a net increase in the amount of money going from the average buyer to the seller.
And this is one of those "fuck the middle class" mechanisms, because corporations and rich people have bulk discounts and professional purchasing negotiators while the middle class has just enough disposable income to get price gouged but not enough to be able to do anything about it.
It all comes down to "knowledge is power". If they have more information about you, they have more power. The most direct way for them to profit from that is to make you pay more for less.
It might be that giving *serious consideration* to a competitive system would do a lot of good, but a competition between two systems in which both survived would almost certainly be a bad thing.
So why not design a system that peacefully coexists with the existing system? For example, do something like this but if you would get NXDOMAIN in the specified system (perhaps the site has no certificate or has not uploaded it to the distributed root) then forward to the existing ICANN DNS root. If that system then fully succeeds and the ICANN DNS root becomes redundant, the ICANN root falls into disuse and the system perpetuates without it. If it ends up only being used by greybeards and EFF members then it still provides the stated benefits to those people without really hurting anything.
The centralised nature of DNS has been a huge flaw in the Internet for a long time, and it should really be replaced. The problem is coming up with a better solution.
OK, how about this:
You take the existing SSL certificate authorities and the existing certificates for websites, which contain their domain names. You create a new "root" which is really a distributed collection of root servers in which anyone may participate. Website operators send their SSL certificates to any one of the root servers (ideally one trusted enough to propagate it), showing that their domain has been verified by a certificate authority as belonging to them. The website operator also signs the IP address of the website with the website's public key and a timestamp (so that updated IP addresses have newer timestamps) and sends the signed IP address(es) to the root server. The root server propagates the website's certificate and the signed IP address to all of the other root servers. If the certificate is signed by a CA which is trusted by the root server, it then starts handing out the signed IP address in response to queries for that domain name (we can even use the existing DNS protocol for this). If a CA starts maliciously signing certificates for websites for people who don't really own them, "your" root server can stop trusting that CA (and if it doesn't, you can get a new root server).
The advantage of this design is that you can't remove websites from the system except by the CA revoking their SSL certificates, which if it happens will just create a market for "bulletproof" certificate authorities. The website is using its own key to sign its IP address and once that signature is distributed to all the thousands of distributed root servers, there is no central location to remove it. At best a different CA under the influence of a censorial government could be coerced into signing a certificate for the domain name to the government instead of the owner, but all that requires is for your root server in the case of conflict between CAs for the same domain to prefer the bulletproof/incorruptible CAs to the corruptible ones.
At that point you can eliminate ICANN's role in DNS and replace it with a covenant between all the certificate authorities not to issue a certificate for a domain already issued by another certificate authority to anyone other than the same party, the consequence for violating the covenant being that the various distributed root servers will stop trusting that CA.
Since anyone sufficiently trustworthy can be a CA and anyone can run a root server because all the root servers are doing is caching a bunch of signed certificates and signed IP addresses, you get fully-distributed secure DNS with no ICANN.
Of course that doesn't prove that Wikileaks isn't a CIA front, but why would the CIA leak documents that make themselves look bad?
The same reason they would plan 9/11: It provides something to point at and demand new invasive laws. "We need to be able to see your junk and remove websites from the DNS to stop these evil terrorists" etc.
Of course, like the 9/11 conspiracies, it seems implausible. The government doesn't need to fabricate actors when they can just conduct a PR campaign against people they didn't much like in the first place until those people are sufficiently "evil" in the minds of most people that "defeating" them can be used to rationalize whatever horrific invasion of rights they're hawking this month.
Please look into "asset forfeiture", especually for drug related offenses. The ACLU is already active in this, as described at http://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/easy-money-civil-asset-forfeiture-abuse-police. Neither a conviction, nor a court order, is required for these seizures, and you _can_ have your assets or vehicle seized without a charge ever being filed.
And people say there is no slippery slope.
The War on Drugs has brought some of the most serious abuses of government power in this country. It demands to be rolled back, not pointed to as precedent to be emulated.
Either control of data can have a real world value worthy of legal protection or it can't, but the position of the freeloaders in this discussion appears to be that information they want to take has no value but the information they want to control is sacrosanct.
You seem to be confusing creation with destruction. Nobody is saying that the government or industry should not be allowed to use these DNS entries to resolve IP addresses or make copies of them or anything of the sort. The objection is to using the threat of violence to prohibit others from doing so. Which is the same objection that people have to copyright. So why do you feel the positions are inconsistent?
And what's wrong with saying that the ACLU is astroturfing for the newspaper biz?
It fails to comprehend what astroturfing is? The ACLU and the EFF are not "trade organizations" by any stretch of the imagination. EFF argues against prosecutors that say violating the terms of service at your company makes you guilty of a computer crime, and voting system manufacturers who make defective voting machines, and governments that violate the Freedom of Information Act, and against government limitations on software like TrueCrypt, on and on. I don't see how that stuff helps Google or "cloud companies" or hardware manufacturers moreso than it helps everybody else, and even if it did in some tenuous way, so what?
What I'm saying is that just because party A benefits from party B's position on an issue and for that reason donates to party B, doesn't mean that party B is controlled by party A. It just means they have shared interests.
Now, if you want to play word games and say things like "they're supported by the folks in Silicon Valley who make more money when the content producers get nothing" so that you can disingenuously imply that the reason they advocate individual freedom is because they've sold their principles for a check from corporations rather than getting a check from corporations who benefit from individual freedom, you can be that guy. But you should at least try to get a working premise: If content producers "get nothing", and (as Hollywood tells us) they won't as a result make as much or as good content, that doesn't help hardware makers. People don't need as many drives to fill with new movies if there are fewer new movies people want to watch. The hardware companies, then, have a very close proximity the constitution's (and hence the court's) position: Balance copyright so that you get a) the largest amount of good new content b) into the hands of the largest number of people.
Also: If you don't think the EFF is a "friend of the court", then who is? By your logic anyone advocating a policy position is a lobbying group who should be barred, but no one without anything to say is going to have any reason to write a brief. Or is it just your position that we should eliminate all third party briefs?
Er? This is like saying that the ACLU is astroturfing for the newspapers when they advocate freedom of the press because the newspapers donate to the ACLU and benefit from a free press. I'm pretty sure the EFF would be submitting the same brief regardless of how much money they get from specific donors -- people give them money as a result of their positions, not to get them to change their positions.
Or, to put it a different way, EFF gets plenty of donations from "readers like you", so to speak. How many non-music-industry-executive/lawyer individuals do you think willingly donate money to the RIAA lobbying & litigation fund? My guess would be somewhere between zero and none.
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Do you want your life ruined over Wikileaks?
Let's say you're right. The government conspiracies are going to ruin the people who help Wikileaks. Then why are you trying to convince people not to help them? Better that they fight the good fight and some of them get taken down by The Man than that we all continue to live as serfs, no? You've pretty much established that you're more afraid of the CIA than you are brave enough to stand up for what's right; the least you could do is not try to convince other people to be cowards.
It shouldn't be a crime to reveal information which was improperly classified.
You don't want every private in the military second guessing whether something is properly classified. They have to be punished merely because it was supposed to be classified, or you'll get people releasing things that are properly secrets merely because they don't understand why and think that they won't be punished.
On the other hand, once the information gets out and no one can justify why it was previously classified? You ought to punish the people who classified it, too. And that never seems to happen.
So it cannot be independent. It serves the US Government as all who don't have an Army must do.
They don't need an army. They need leverage. And they have it.
You just forgot what they want. They want profit. They sell what they can. Silence frequently pays better than truth.
There might be government pressure, but it is totally within the right of each company to stop providing services.
And it is totally within the right of people everywhere to lambast them for it.
Should we only be happy with companies that pull sites when we agree with them? Or, what? Is there some difference between these two cases? How should we resolve this cognitive dissonance?
In this case it seems like companies are doing it more in response to government pressure than anything else. If one company decides to drop unpopular speech, the speaker has many others to choose from -- they can still be heard. It's different if the government is intimidating everybody.
Once upon a time we had this thing called the First Amendment which prohibited that sort of thing, but apparently they had to take it out to make room for the amendment that says they can shut down the websites of foreigners without an adversarial hearing.
Then using an independent set of hardware/software have the photographer retrieve the encrypted copy, decrypt it, print it out with the meta-data in human-readable form and a signed digest in a human-readable form, attach a human-readable affidavit saying "I took this photo at this date and location and the metadata is true and accurate" and have him store that with his files. Have witnesses if it's that important.
But only the photographer's private key can read it. Which means that nobody else can verify. What stops the photographer from replacing the first step with "retrieve encrypted copy, discard, use encrypted copy of modified version"?
There is no obvious point along the way where it makes sense to switch which party is paying.
I'm not sure that changes much. Yes, when you have a connection between e.g. a large Tier 2 and a Tier 1, there is some question as to whether the Tier 2 should pay the Tier 1 or whether there should be "settlement free peering". In either event, the Tier 2 would be paying far less for the same bandwidth as a Tier 3 would.
The problem is that if you go the other way, things start to break. So Comcast (Tier 2) says Level 3 (Tier 1) has to pay them because Comcast has control over access to their customers and no one may send them data without paying Comcast. Now Level 3 has to squeeze the other endpoint for more money in order to pay off Comcast. The endpoint starts to feel the pinch.
Unless the endpoint is Hulu (which is owned in part by Comcast/NBC) in which case they can just get a good deal on bandwidth from Comcast/NBC. Which is why people are talking about network neutrality. ISPs charging Tier 1 providers for access to their customers means the ISP gets to pick winners and losers in the content market because all they have to do is refund some of their tithe to specific content providers while pricing all of the others out of the market.
Why is it already the case? Can you point out any retail customers for, for example, Savvis?
I think I may have been defining "retail customer" very broadly. I was thinking that anyone who is paid by an endpoint for access, or who in turn pays their uplink provider for access which is resold to downstream endpoints, is a retail customer. So then you get a hierarchy in which everyone pays the network closer to the core of the internet and is paid by the network farther from the core, and the core networks peer with each other but not with others, who they charge.
Given that definition of "retail customer" do you agree with me? Or can you identify a specific flaw that this simplification hides? Because the idea that there is no transit does not seem to happen: the network providing transit is closer to the center and so gets paid by both networks it is providing transit for.
If every network operator were required to let other network operators connect to them for free, where exactly is the revenue going to come from for ISPs that don't have any retail customers?
Assume there is a world where there are no ISPs that have no retail customers. (Never mind that that is already basically the case.) Why is that a bad thing?
Comcast and Level3 had a settlement free peering agreement based on a roughly 1:1 traffic exchange. Level3 now wants to send 5:1 more traffic to Comcast, meaning their settlement free peering agreement is no longer valid. Comcast is just trying to negotiate a new peering agreement.
It's a little more complicated than that.
Here's what the dispute is really about: The way the Internet works (obviously) is that you buy access from your ISP (e.g. Comcast), they in turn (perhaps through some number of additional intermediaries) buy access to the backbone from a Tier 1 provider (like Level 3). If you were a big enough network, you could 'peer' without paying anything (since there was no particular reason for one network to pay the other vs. vice versa). The way it worked in the Old Days was that data centers would always be uploading more than they download, so the rule of thumb became that if you upload too much data without downloading, you can't peer for free -- a rule of thumb to distinguish data centers from ISPs and make them pay. But it is unheard of for a backbone provider to pay an ISP -- because it is inefficient. ISPs like Comcast always used to have approximately symmetrical load to their uplink providers: Their customers would download more than they upload, which means they would have "surplus" upload bandwidth "for free" which they could sell to local data centers. Selling to data centers like this is efficient because otherwise the surplus upload bandwidth is lost -- use it or lose it.
Some of these data centers in modern times turned into CDNs like Akamai. The CDNs kind of messed with the model. Instead of connecting Comcast's network to buy Comcast's surplus upload bandwidth to the backbone, they connected to Comcast networks to serve content only to Comcast's customers. In other words, they evened out Comcast's uplink to Level 3, not by increasing upload traffic as was the traditional model, but by decreasing download traffic from the backbone. But that still works.
So now what's happening with Level 3? Netflix is moving from Akamai to a data center operated by Level 3 which is only connected to Comcast through Level 3's backbone. What this does from Comcast's perspective is a) deprive them of the money Akamai was paying them, but b) give them a huge amount of "free" upload bandwidth. What Comcast is then supposed to do is the efficient thing: to shop this surplus bandwidth around to data centers. Or sell Comcast Business customers higher upload rates. Or whatever. They're supposed to sell it, because they can sell it most efficiently -- there is a pipe going into Comcast which is only full in one direction and the only way to fill it is to put something which uploads a lot on the Comcast side.
Comcast apparently doesn't want to do that. I can really only think of two possible reasons for this: First, there is so much upload bandwidth that no one would possibly want to buy it. (I find this to be pretty unfathomable. Supply and demand says that if the price is right, someone will pay.) And second, Comcast is double dipping and trying to sell access to their customers as a scarce resource; in other words, trying to force Level 3 to pay more for the bandwidth than it would sell for on the open market because buying it from Comcast is the only way to get access to Comcast's customers and they want to charge monopoly prices.
Funnily enough, Level3 was in Comcast's EXACT position back in 2005 with Cogent. Cogent wanted to send more traffic than Level3 was sending, and Level3 said "Nope, no more settlement free agreement. Get out your wallet!"
No, Cogent was sending traffic over Level 3's network to third party networks. In this case Level 3 is sending traffic to Comcast customers. Level 3 has no monopoly on access to third party networks. There are other backbone providers. Comcast has a monopoly over access to Comcast customers -- that's what makes it different.
This assumes that everyone agrees as to what the "right thing" is.
No, it doesn't. If you think what Amazon did was right, you can just keep on giving them money. If lots of other people think they shouldn't be bowing to government pressure and take their business elsewhere, "the market will decide," so to speak. But if no one ever puts their money where their mouth is when they think companies are behaving badly, companies will continue to behave badly, no matter whether you agree with other people on the definition of bad behavior or not.
I'm for free speech and take my rights under the constitution very seriously, but I also think WikiLeaks has stepped over the line that divides responsible and irresponsible behavior. This latest leak has reduced the ability of nations to communicate freely, and reduced communications between nations is not a good thing. The less likely nations are to communicate, the more likely they are to go to war among themselves. That's the unintended consequences of Wikileaks behavior, and it's a very serious side effect. It shows quite clearly that Wikileaks and Assange are reckless and dangerous.
No doubt confidentiality is sometimes important during negotiations. But the public has a right to know what the government is doing on their behalf. So we have two choices: Either we trust the government to only keep those things confidential that need to be, even though they clearly have a huge perverse incentive to use that discretion to cover up misconduct, or we trust Wikileaks and the New York Times not to publish information that will put lives in danger even though they might have a bias in favor of releasing things near the borderline. I don't know about you, but as an arbiter of what the public gets to know, I'll take newspapers over the government any day.
That's the same kind of idiot logic that leads people to say "it's only illegal if you get caught".
It's more like saying "it's only illegal if the judge says it is", which is basically true. If the law says you have to knowingly distribute classified information, and what actually happened is that someone who deals in classified information was working with a journalist on a fluff piece and accidentally switched the mailing labels on two envelopes so that classified information went to the journalist and fluff went to some intelligence analysis, it's very possible that they didn't actually break the law. Assuming that law requires knowledge and not merely negligence. (And it still won't stop them getting fired, but that's a different question.)
I don't necessarily fault those who give in to pressure from governments, pressure groups, and self-styled vigilantes. In a capitalist system they are responsible to the people who own the company to maximize return on their investment, and acting on principle often defies that.
Only when you "don't necessarily fault" them. If doing the Wrong Thing causes them to lose customers, they would be maximizing shareholder value to do the Right Thing. If doing the Wrong Thing causes everybody to say "well, that's capitalism for you" and go right on paying them, well, let's just say we're all going to die.
A perfect example of how that goes bad was the issuing of the bogus microsoft.com signing cert that compromised microsoft's active X controls. A little bit of social engineering, and poof, there goes another rubber tree plant.
This is the problem with any trusted party. You get the same thing with existing DNS. Basically any solution you can come up with to prevent Go Daddy from changing your DNS entry to point at some other server can be used to prevent your CA from signing certificates on your domain for people who aren't you.
But the only entity I can trust is the LORD GOD and if we could get him to sign certificates (root@universe.org), then we could really have a chain of trust.
Right, trust is a problem. But you only have two choices: Either you trust someone who doesn't fully deserve it, or you verify everything yourself. And good luck convincing the general public to do the latter.
The advantage with CAs is that nobody actually has a monopoly and there is, monetarily at least, a low barrier to entry. The biggest barrier is that if you want to be a CA you have to be someone people trust. And I agree that most of the existing CAs are "commercial assholes" -- but why does it have to be that way? Don't we have people that we can trust, at least as much as we trust Verisign? Why can't we have the people who make Debian or run the Pirate Party or work for the EFF or La Quadrature du Net operate a noncommercial certificate authority that could sign a certificate for wikileaks.org? Don't we have all kinds of great encryption schemes where you can let any five out of a group of eight people in eight countries sign a certificate without any of them being able to do it individually even under coercion? This can't be an unsolvable problem.
You're talking about specific methods of collecting information. That isn't the point. The problem is that Facebook knows your real name, address, phone number, who your friends are, where you hang out, plus every website you visit and when and for how long, plus (with their partners) what books you read, how much you pay for what products when, on and on. It's too much power. Raising prices and convincing people to buy stuff they don't need is the least evil it could be put to. Must we even go into what happens when the government starts to subpoena this stuff?
And the real answer to this really ought to be technology. Web browsers shouldn't be disclosing this much; there should be plug-ins in the default install that neutralize tracking scripts but not website features, etc. The problem is that the marketers have more resources than the defenders and there are too many conflicts of interest. Google and Microsoft have little interest in making browsers harder to track when they're the ones doing the tracking. So until such time as individuals are winning the war on the technological front here, we need to be considering laws to protect people.
I'm all for a standard GUI for doing so, but the "other side" (those who do the tracking) must also cooperate by actually observing the setting (no matter how it should be delivered to them; perhaps via HTTP header). If observing it would be mandatory, then hooray; otherwise, meh.
Baby steps. Create a protocol and get it implemented in the major web browsers. Then you play the same game as they did with movie ratings: Threaten passing a law requiring the flag to be respected if companies don't do it voluntarily; suddenly everyone is volunteering to do it and no law is necessary.
If you ask me, you lose the right to complain about sucky products when you let companies stop collecting data one what interests you.
It's not just about products. If all they did was make products better that would be one thing.
Example: Product X is a perishable product that expires after about 3 weeks and people use more during the last week of the month. X Corp learns that if they advertise only during the first and fourth weeks of the month, more people will buy because what they bought during the first week expires and they have to buy again in the fourth week. This clearly benefits X Corp (they sell more product), but how does it benefit those people?
Another example: Price discrimination. If they can accurately mark you as willing to spend more, you end up paying more for the same stuff. In theory this will benefit certain people who get classified as willing to pay less and are offered a discount, but let's not be naive here: They wouldn't be doing it if it didn't make them money, which means there is a net increase in the amount of money going from the average buyer to the seller.
And this is one of those "fuck the middle class" mechanisms, because corporations and rich people have bulk discounts and professional purchasing negotiators while the middle class has just enough disposable income to get price gouged but not enough to be able to do anything about it.
It all comes down to "knowledge is power". If they have more information about you, they have more power. The most direct way for them to profit from that is to make you pay more for less.
It might be that giving *serious consideration* to a competitive system would do a lot of good, but a competition between two systems in which both survived would almost certainly be a bad thing.
So why not design a system that peacefully coexists with the existing system? For example, do something like this but if you would get NXDOMAIN in the specified system (perhaps the site has no certificate or has not uploaded it to the distributed root) then forward to the existing ICANN DNS root. If that system then fully succeeds and the ICANN DNS root becomes redundant, the ICANN root falls into disuse and the system perpetuates without it. If it ends up only being used by greybeards and EFF members then it still provides the stated benefits to those people without really hurting anything.
The centralised nature of DNS has been a huge flaw in the Internet for a long time, and it should really be replaced. The problem is coming up with a better solution.
OK, how about this:
You take the existing SSL certificate authorities and the existing certificates for websites, which contain their domain names. You create a new "root" which is really a distributed collection of root servers in which anyone may participate. Website operators send their SSL certificates to any one of the root servers (ideally one trusted enough to propagate it), showing that their domain has been verified by a certificate authority as belonging to them. The website operator also signs the IP address of the website with the website's public key and a timestamp (so that updated IP addresses have newer timestamps) and sends the signed IP address(es) to the root server. The root server propagates the website's certificate and the signed IP address to all of the other root servers. If the certificate is signed by a CA which is trusted by the root server, it then starts handing out the signed IP address in response to queries for that domain name (we can even use the existing DNS protocol for this). If a CA starts maliciously signing certificates for websites for people who don't really own them, "your" root server can stop trusting that CA (and if it doesn't, you can get a new root server).
The advantage of this design is that you can't remove websites from the system except by the CA revoking their SSL certificates, which if it happens will just create a market for "bulletproof" certificate authorities. The website is using its own key to sign its IP address and once that signature is distributed to all the thousands of distributed root servers, there is no central location to remove it. At best a different CA under the influence of a censorial government could be coerced into signing a certificate for the domain name to the government instead of the owner, but all that requires is for your root server in the case of conflict between CAs for the same domain to prefer the bulletproof/incorruptible CAs to the corruptible ones.
At that point you can eliminate ICANN's role in DNS and replace it with a covenant between all the certificate authorities not to issue a certificate for a domain already issued by another certificate authority to anyone other than the same party, the consequence for violating the covenant being that the various distributed root servers will stop trusting that CA.
Since anyone sufficiently trustworthy can be a CA and anyone can run a root server because all the root servers are doing is caching a bunch of signed certificates and signed IP addresses, you get fully-distributed secure DNS with no ICANN.
It doesn't give you cancer, it makes it more virulent and harder to stop.
So tell me if I've got this right: You take injections of this stuff, it makes you stop aging, but it makes cancer more aggressive.
So if you get cancer, why don't you just stop taking it?
Of course that doesn't prove that Wikileaks isn't a CIA front, but why would the CIA leak documents that make themselves look bad?
The same reason they would plan 9/11: It provides something to point at and demand new invasive laws. "We need to be able to see your junk and remove websites from the DNS to stop these evil terrorists" etc.
Of course, like the 9/11 conspiracies, it seems implausible. The government doesn't need to fabricate actors when they can just conduct a PR campaign against people they didn't much like in the first place until those people are sufficiently "evil" in the minds of most people that "defeating" them can be used to rationalize whatever horrific invasion of rights they're hawking this month.
Please look into "asset forfeiture", especually for drug related offenses. The ACLU is already active in this, as described at http://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/easy-money-civil-asset-forfeiture-abuse-police. Neither a conviction, nor a court order, is required for these seizures, and you _can_ have your assets or vehicle seized without a charge ever being filed.
And people say there is no slippery slope.
The War on Drugs has brought some of the most serious abuses of government power in this country. It demands to be rolled back, not pointed to as precedent to be emulated.
Either control of data can have a real world value worthy of legal protection or it can't, but the position of the freeloaders in this discussion appears to be that information they want to take has no value but the information they want to control is sacrosanct.
You seem to be confusing creation with destruction. Nobody is saying that the government or industry should not be allowed to use these DNS entries to resolve IP addresses or make copies of them or anything of the sort. The objection is to using the threat of violence to prohibit others from doing so. Which is the same objection that people have to copyright. So why do you feel the positions are inconsistent?
And what's wrong with saying that the ACLU is astroturfing for the newspaper biz?
It fails to comprehend what astroturfing is? The ACLU and the EFF are not "trade organizations" by any stretch of the imagination. EFF argues against prosecutors that say violating the terms of service at your company makes you guilty of a computer crime, and voting system manufacturers who make defective voting machines, and governments that violate the Freedom of Information Act, and against government limitations on software like TrueCrypt, on and on. I don't see how that stuff helps Google or "cloud companies" or hardware manufacturers moreso than it helps everybody else, and even if it did in some tenuous way, so what?
What I'm saying is that just because party A benefits from party B's position on an issue and for that reason donates to party B, doesn't mean that party B is controlled by party A. It just means they have shared interests.
Now, if you want to play word games and say things like "they're supported by the folks in Silicon Valley who make more money when the content producers get nothing" so that you can disingenuously imply that the reason they advocate individual freedom is because they've sold their principles for a check from corporations rather than getting a check from corporations who benefit from individual freedom, you can be that guy. But you should at least try to get a working premise: If content producers "get nothing", and (as Hollywood tells us) they won't as a result make as much or as good content, that doesn't help hardware makers. People don't need as many drives to fill with new movies if there are fewer new movies people want to watch. The hardware companies, then, have a very close proximity the constitution's (and hence the court's) position: Balance copyright so that you get a) the largest amount of good new content b) into the hands of the largest number of people.
Also: If you don't think the EFF is a "friend of the court", then who is? By your logic anyone advocating a policy position is a lobbying group who should be barred, but no one without anything to say is going to have any reason to write a brief. Or is it just your position that we should eliminate all third party briefs?
The EFF is astroturfing for the hardware maker
Er? This is like saying that the ACLU is astroturfing for the newspapers when they advocate freedom of the press because the newspapers donate to the ACLU and benefit from a free press. I'm pretty sure the EFF would be submitting the same brief regardless of how much money they get from specific donors -- people give them money as a result of their positions, not to get them to change their positions.
Or, to put it a different way, EFF gets plenty of donations from "readers like you", so to speak. How many non-music-industry-executive/lawyer individuals do you think willingly donate money to the RIAA lobbying & litigation fund? My guess would be somewhere between zero and none.