Exactly. My intention with the post was not to advocate the sudden disconnection of the United States, but merely to illustrate the possible ramifications of the United States doing this to somebody else.
Actually blacklisting the entire U.S. would cause major disruptions. DNS would be thrown in to chaos, and many businesses would have to find new hosting. Such a move would put the internet, in general, into disarray for quite some time, until it can be adapted to function without the U.S.
I'm not in favor of blacklisting any country, not the U.S., not even Nigeria, in fact, I'm not in favor of any blacklisting at all, except where known spammers are concerned.
Sadly, I suspect that even if we do blacklist the entire U.S. for spam, your government would not react in the desired way. As we all know, the present American administration, and most of those that have come before it, find it very easy to point out a fault in others, but not to point out a fault in themselves.
For instance, if all European countries were to blacklist the U.S., your government would call it a first strike in an intercontinental trade war, instead of a desperate measure to block spam. They would probably leave it at that, because it is becoming hard to bully the E.U.
If, for instance, a small, push-over country like South Africa did it, the U.S. would most likely park half the Atlantic carrier fleet off our West Coast and demand we stop our actions, which are a threat to American interests. Simply because a lot of South African money is leaving the country through transactions with American web sites, which would stop happening if we took such an action.
If a country with no money did it, they would probably ignore it, as American businesses are a little bit like the Forangi from Star Trek. If there's no profit in it, they deny its existence.
I feel I should point out that blacklisting an entire country is probably not as good an idea as it sounds, as it may just inadvertently set a dangerous precedent.
Before starting my current job, I did some systems admiistration work for small ISPs here in South Africa. At one point last year, after long deliberations and searching for any other solutions we could find, we finally decided to blacklist seven U.S. ISPs, because of the never ending tidal wave of spam and worm attacks that originated from these. It worked.
Following from this, I have often wondered about the possible effect of completely disconnecting the United States from the rest of the internet.
Just think for a moment my fellow non-Americans, no more "legal" spam, no more pop-up adds that come from nowhere, because a hapless user clicked "Yes" somewhere, no more propaganda web sites telling us how wonderful they are and how bad we are, no more "you will use DRM because our laws say so, even though they are not your laws" attitude, no more open source projects being distributed with half the functionality removed, because it might infringe on some insignificant U.S. software patent, and someone from the States might download it, putting the author in violation of the patent, no more Carnivore servers reading every word I type as I compose this post, because I just might be saying something that could "endanger the interests or national security of the United States", ah, bliss...
Since the introduction of the CAN-SPAM Act, spam, even non-compliant spam, has been increasing. American businesses seem to interpret the Act as a free license to spam everyone with impunity. Oh sure, the very large spammers eventually get shut down by multi-million dollar law suits filed under the Act by the very large American ISPs, but that really doesn't help the rest of the world, does it?
We've all read the statistics about how China is such a large source of spam, but what the statistics fail to tell you is that this spam originates from Chinese companies, being payed by American spammers to do their dirty work. If spam from China could not reach the United States, because the United States isn't there in internet terms, there would be no point for the spammers to continue hiring the Chinese to do this for them, and spam from China would probably decline.
I'm sorry if this hurts the feelings of all the American readers, but I feel I must point out that the rest of the Western world is getting very tired of your incessant moaning and paranoia.
Inter-without-America-Net anyone? If they can justify doing this, so can we. ISPs of the world, blacklist with impunity!
I realise that this post will probably get me flamed or even moderated into oblivion, but I think it does serve to illustrate an important point, of which even the United States should take heed.
If the U.S. can justify blacklisting an entire country because of a minute security threat, do we, the rest of the world, not have more than sufficient justification to blacklist the entire United States?
This is a dangerous door for the U.S. to open, and it swings both ways. Yes, blacklisting the entire U.S. does seem to be impractical, as we would probably loose most of the internet, but to be brutally honest, the only American web site I would miss is Slashdot.
It depends on price, really. What ever is cheaper there. Just make sure you get digitally based satellite (asif anybody does analogue anymore)
Here in South Africa we can buy only satellite for R350 (aprox. $50 US) per month. We also used to have free analogue satellite, but the SABC scrapped it because nobody was watching anyway.
With the digital platform we have here, video is encoded into MPEG2 (at reasonable quality) with stereo and all such, and then encrypted with Irdeto2 crypto to try and stop people stealing the content.
The decoder I use is manufactured by a local company (I think called UPC) and comes with a particularly handy feature, ie, it has statistics on signal quality and decoded stream quality, etc etc.
Generally, even in heavy rain, signal quality rarely drops below 85% or so, and stream quality never drops below 100% unless signal quality goes below 70%. This has only happened once, in a particularly violant hail storm that managed to knock my LNB out of alignment.
You are bound to see some compression artifacts with explosions and fast moving objects passing, but that happens anywhere when things get compressed.
The only other times I've ever seen much artifacts is when the stupid irdeto system goes cranky and "forgets" to decrypt some part of the stream, leaving the MPEG decoder with garbled MPEG to try and work with.
The digital system (like DAB radios) is also resistent to polyphase interference (ie, signal bouncing off nearby buildings, mountains, etc) so as long as your dish has a clear view of the sky, you need never worry about such things.
Stay away from analogue satellite though, that is very vulnerable to interference, even complete cancellation of the signal, and goes very snowy when it rains.
Low flying aircraft are an annoyance, but something flying low enough to disrupt your signal will generally mess up other things too (interference with hi-fi gear, TV, computers, etc) so the same thing will happen to cable, although the signal will not be disturbed, your TV tube will probably be doing hoola hoops if a big chopper flies over the roof.
While people complain about the collateral damage caused by most spam prevention techniques, and others advocate Paul Graham's idea of Bayesian filtering, the one question remains:
Why are we still going after the symptoms of the problem, rather than the cause?
This brings me to my barrage of questions. What are your policies (as an ISP) on configuration of clients' mail servers?
This stems from a recent debate on the exim-users mailing list (archived at the Exim homepage) about interfering with customers's set-ups.
Some of the participants believed that it was not their duty, or their business, to tell people how to configure their servers. Some even go so far as saying that it's not good for business.
What these posters seem not to understand is that the whole Internet concept relies on all participants helping with the upkeep of the network.
As an ISP, what measures are you taking to insure your network is clean?
Are blocking access from DSL and dial-up subscribers to port 25 on servers other than yours, and checking the configuration of customers' mail servers for proper relaying restrictions, measures that would be acceptable to yourself and to customers?
On a second point:
What are your policies as to the records of new customers that you contract? Does your contract include a clause allowing you to investigate customers before granting them access, and is this at all legal?
Would you check for records such as those found on ROKSO (operated by the Spamhaus Project, before allowing a customer direct IP traffic to port 25, anywhere in the world, for instance?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. My intention with the post was not to advocate the sudden disconnection of the United States, but merely to illustrate the possible ramifications of the United States doing this to somebody else.
Actually blacklisting the entire U.S. would cause major disruptions. DNS would be thrown in to chaos, and many businesses would have to find new hosting. Such a move would put the internet, in general, into disarray for quite some time, until it can be adapted to function without the U.S.
I'm not in favor of blacklisting any country, not the U.S., not even Nigeria, in fact, I'm not in favor of any blacklisting at all, except where known spammers are concerned.
Sadly, I suspect that even if we do blacklist the entire U.S. for spam, your government would not react in the desired way. As we all know, the present American administration, and most of those that have come before it, find it very easy to point out a fault in others, but not to point out a fault in themselves.
For instance, if all European countries were to blacklist the U.S., your government would call it a first strike in an intercontinental trade war, instead of a desperate measure to block spam. They would probably leave it at that, because it is becoming hard to bully the E.U.
If, for instance, a small, push-over country like South Africa did it, the U.S. would most likely park half the Atlantic carrier fleet off our West Coast and demand we stop our actions, which are a threat to American interests. Simply because a lot of South African money is leaving the country through transactions with American web sites, which would stop happening if we took such an action.
If a country with no money did it, they would probably ignore it, as American businesses are a little bit like the Forangi from Star Trek. If there's no profit in it, they deny its existence.
I feel I should point out that blacklisting an entire country is probably not as good an idea as it sounds, as it may just inadvertently set a dangerous precedent.
Before starting my current job, I did some systems admiistration work for small ISPs here in South Africa. At one point last year, after long deliberations and searching for any other solutions we could find, we finally decided to blacklist seven U.S. ISPs, because of the never ending tidal wave of spam and worm attacks that originated from these. It worked.
Following from this, I have often wondered about the possible effect of completely disconnecting the United States from the rest of the internet.
Just think for a moment my fellow non-Americans, no more "legal" spam, no more pop-up adds that come from nowhere, because a hapless user clicked "Yes" somewhere, no more propaganda web sites telling us how wonderful they are and how bad we are, no more "you will use DRM because our laws say so, even though they are not your laws" attitude, no more open source projects being distributed with half the functionality removed, because it might infringe on some insignificant U.S. software patent, and someone from the States might download it, putting the author in violation of the patent, no more Carnivore servers reading every word I type as I compose this post, because I just might be saying something that could "endanger the interests or national security of the United States", ah, bliss...
Since the introduction of the CAN-SPAM Act, spam, even non-compliant spam, has been increasing. American businesses seem to interpret the Act as a free license to spam everyone with impunity. Oh sure, the very large spammers eventually get shut down by multi-million dollar law suits filed under the Act by the very large American ISPs, but that really doesn't help the rest of the world, does it?
We've all read the statistics about how China is such a large source of spam, but what the statistics fail to tell you is that this spam originates from Chinese companies, being payed by American spammers to do their dirty work. If spam from China could not reach the United States, because the United States isn't there in internet terms, there would be no point for the spammers to continue hiring the Chinese to do this for them, and spam from China would probably decline.
I'm sorry if this hurts the feelings of all the American readers, but I feel I must point out that the rest of the Western world is getting very tired of your incessant moaning and paranoia.
Inter-without-America-Net anyone? If they can justify doing this, so can we. ISPs of the world, blacklist with impunity!
I realise that this post will probably get me flamed or even moderated into oblivion, but I think it does serve to illustrate an important point, of which even the United States should take heed.
If the U.S. can justify blacklisting an entire country because of a minute security threat, do we, the rest of the world, not have more than sufficient justification to blacklist the entire United States?
This is a dangerous door for the U.S. to open, and it swings both ways. Yes, blacklisting the entire U.S. does seem to be impractical, as we would probably loose most of the internet, but to be brutally honest, the only American web site I would miss is Slashdot.
It depends on price, really. What ever is cheaper there. Just make sure you get digitally based satellite (asif anybody does analogue anymore) Here in South Africa we can buy only satellite for R350 (aprox. $50 US) per month. We also used to have free analogue satellite, but the SABC scrapped it because nobody was watching anyway. With the digital platform we have here, video is encoded into MPEG2 (at reasonable quality) with stereo and all such, and then encrypted with Irdeto2 crypto to try and stop people stealing the content. The decoder I use is manufactured by a local company (I think called UPC) and comes with a particularly handy feature, ie, it has statistics on signal quality and decoded stream quality, etc etc. Generally, even in heavy rain, signal quality rarely drops below 85% or so, and stream quality never drops below 100% unless signal quality goes below 70%. This has only happened once, in a particularly violant hail storm that managed to knock my LNB out of alignment. You are bound to see some compression artifacts with explosions and fast moving objects passing, but that happens anywhere when things get compressed. The only other times I've ever seen much artifacts is when the stupid irdeto system goes cranky and "forgets" to decrypt some part of the stream, leaving the MPEG decoder with garbled MPEG to try and work with. The digital system (like DAB radios) is also resistent to polyphase interference (ie, signal bouncing off nearby buildings, mountains, etc) so as long as your dish has a clear view of the sky, you need never worry about such things. Stay away from analogue satellite though, that is very vulnerable to interference, even complete cancellation of the signal, and goes very snowy when it rains. Low flying aircraft are an annoyance, but something flying low enough to disrupt your signal will generally mess up other things too (interference with hi-fi gear, TV, computers, etc) so the same thing will happen to cable, although the signal will not be disturbed, your TV tube will probably be doing hoola hoops if a big chopper flies over the roof.
While people complain about the collateral damage caused by most spam prevention techniques, and others advocate Paul Graham's idea of Bayesian filtering, the one question remains: Why are we still going after the symptoms of the problem, rather than the cause? This brings me to my barrage of questions. What are your policies (as an ISP) on configuration of clients' mail servers? This stems from a recent debate on the exim-users mailing list (archived at the Exim homepage) about interfering with customers's set-ups. Some of the participants believed that it was not their duty, or their business, to tell people how to configure their servers. Some even go so far as saying that it's not good for business. What these posters seem not to understand is that the whole Internet concept relies on all participants helping with the upkeep of the network. As an ISP, what measures are you taking to insure your network is clean? Are blocking access from DSL and dial-up subscribers to port 25 on servers other than yours, and checking the configuration of customers' mail servers for proper relaying restrictions, measures that would be acceptable to yourself and to customers? On a second point: What are your policies as to the records of new customers that you contract? Does your contract include a clause allowing you to investigate customers before granting them access, and is this at all legal? Would you check for records such as those found on ROKSO (operated by the Spamhaus Project, before allowing a customer direct IP traffic to port 25, anywhere in the world, for instance?