After the French Armistice on 22 June 1940 the UK, alongside the Commonwealth (Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa) was the sole remaining major power that was still fighting Nazi Germany. She did fight alongside the other nations that were invaded (Greece comes to mind) but those nations capitulated fairly quickly, leaving the UK to fight on alone.
The UK remained alone until the launch of Barbarossa exactly one year (22 June 1941) after the signing of the French Armistice. Even at that, it seemed likely (at the time) that Germany would beat the Soviet Union and Churchill wasn't sure the Allies would win until after Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war.
So yes, I give the UK a lot of respect for standing alone against the Nazi War Machine during that period. It was arguably the finest moment in British history and likely saved the Western Democracies from becoming conquered slave-states to Nazi Germany or Communist Satellites of the Soviet Union.
What's your point? The UK isn't perfect? Did I say that it was?
My point was that the UK has a proud history and that it would be more productive for it's citizens to fight for their rights (as did their parents and grandparents) then to whine about losing them without doing anything about it. My point was that for all it's flaws I'd much rather live in the UK then Pakistan.
The GP seemed to imply that Pakistan was more "free" then the UK. If "free" means a censoring military dictatorship that allows the opposition to be assassinated then, yeah, I guess Pakistan is "free".
How, exactly, are citizens of the UK (and less so the USA) supposed to fight for their rights again?
Maybe by using the freedom of speech that our forefathers died to give us? Maybe by holding our Congressman/MPs accountable to the voters instead of the corporations/lobbyists that donated money to their political campaigns? Maybe by doing what we can to limit the power of the party (be it the Republican/Conservative/Democratic/Labour one) at the expense of the people? Maybe by getting people involved in the process again?
I'm working with the Barack Obama campaign here in the United States. He has generated a lot of excitement and gotten a lot of new people involved with politics. One of the things that I'm trying to do is encourage all of those people to remain involved with the political process after the election. We can bemoan the state of affairs in Washington/London until we are blue in the face but nobody has bothered getting involved with the process and trying to change that state of affairs. If there is anything that we should have learned from the past it's that our involvement with Representative Democracy does not end at the ballot box.
and a strong enough military (including globally targeted nuclear missiles) not to be pushed around by the countries interested in censorship
Oh. Shit. Well, ya had to muck things up with that requirement, huh?
Wait, I know! The United States can take over Sweden! Then we'll have one country with no history of censorship and nuclear missiles! It's perfect!
Hmm, free software/movies and Swedish chicks for me..... warmer weather and cheap blue jeans for them. Sounds like a win win for everybody concerned... and if any of those Swedes complain we'll just censor them;)
If you already know whose IP address are whose, then what do you need the routing protocol for in the first place?
Because multi-homed networks may wish to have finer control over which links traffic comes in on then allowed for with simple static routes. Because my above example (A/B & C) was a drastic oversimplification and the actual internet involves tens of thousands (hundreds?) of different networks connected in different ways and trying to manage static routes for all of them would be virtually impossible.
Imagine if the process of connecting a new network to the internet involved having to update static routing tables in every core router on the internet and you'll start to understand why BGP exists. Hell, there are routing protocols meant for internal usage (OSPF), because static routes become unmanageable if you have more then a few routers/netmasks to contend with.
BGP inherently depends on the honor system - that is the crux of the problem
Not strictly. The "honor system" should really be limited to the Tier 1 providers. Anybody else really should be filtering the routes that they will accept. There are already provisions in place to remove the "honor system" from consideration -- it seems that Pakistan's upstream provider choose not to use them.
This really isn't anything new. This kind of stuff has happened before. It's not even unique to the internet either -- the POTS network has a routing protocol used to setup calls/announce which switch is responsible for which number/range. One would suspect that SS7 can be abused by "bad" telcos as easily as BGP can be abused by "bad" ISPs.
Closely followed by the award for most incomprehensible summary. I've re-read it twice. I have no idea what is happening
Basically a Pakistani ISP decided to implement the block of Youtube by announcing a new route for the IP addresses owned by Youtube that presumably directed all of that traffic into/dev/null or elsewhere. By accident (one would presume -- there is no reason to do this on purpose) those routes were announced outside of Pakistan by said ISP, whose upstream provider then relayed them to the rest of the internet (sheer stupidity on their part -- their configuration should have prevented this). Said upstream provider then decided to cut Pakistan off until they are able to correct the problem.
All I know is living in the UK I'm in no position to criticize the Pakistanis, because their country is much freer than mine.
Yeah, I can't help but remember how Gordon Brown seized power in a military coup and allowed a leading member of the opposition to be brutally assassinated by extremists. It's amazing how far the UK has fallen, isn't it?
C'mon! As an American I can certainly sympathize with your disillusionment over your own Government's policies but get some perspective. It's not yet that bad. Freedom in the United States or United Kingdom isn't dead until people stop fighting for it and become as apathetic as you sound when you make statements like that.
Your country gave us the Common Law, the Magna Carta and the foundations of Representative Democracy. You stood alone against Hitler for all those lonely months between the Fall of France and the involvement of the Soviet Union and United States. That stand likely saved Western Democracy from Communism or Fascism. Start fighting for your freedoms instead of whining online about how much better Pakistan is. I suspect that the people fighting and dying for Democracy right now within Pakistan would have zero sympathy for your point of view.
I cannot imagine that BGP allows IP-address hijacking
That's exactly what it allows, if your upstream provider isn't smart enough to filter the routes that you are allowed to announce. In theory your upstream provider won't accept any routes for IP addresses you don't own. In practice that isn't always the case, apparently.
They don't have any authority over that resource/address-space, so how and why are they allowed to create a black hole affecting the entire net?
Because their upstream provider is apparently too stupid or lazy to filter the networks they can announce. Once you get to a certain point (peering links between Tier 1 providers for example) it may be easier to just trust the people you are peering with and accept everything -- but to accept all routes announced by a leaf link is just plain stupidity. I'm really kind of surprised that this happened.
The BGP article on Wikipedia is as good a place to start as any. Beyond that you can do some Google searches for it.
Basically BGP is the protocol used by routers to exchange route information with each other. A real oversimplification would involve three networks/routers, A, B and C. C receives it's network connectivity through A. C announces the networks it's responsible for to A, whom aggregates them before announcing them (and it's own networks) to B.
In theory, A shouldn't accept any routes from C for IP addresses not owned by C. Apparently that wasn't the case here though, or Pakistan's little stunt wouldn't have impacted anybody outside of Pakistan.
Just because I'm criticizing the US government's policies doesn't mean I'm holding them solely responsible for everything that's wrong with the world. I really don't understand how that kind of assumption is justified.
You justified that assumption with this line:
First off, many instances of "massive violence" during WWII by the US was the testing of experimental weapons on populations. There was no need to fire bomb German (and Japanese) cities and nuke Japan except to try out some fancy new weapons
Had you chosen to point out some of our actions during the Cold War (like overthrowing the elected Government of Iran or our numerous interventions in Latin America) you might have had the beginnings of a meaningful discussion about US foreign policy. Instead you decided to attack the actions of the United States during WW2 using flamebait'ish statements like "we only nuked them to test our fancy new weapons". As if strategic bombing was unique to the United States during WW2. You realize that all of our enemies and one of our major allies (the UK) did it as well, right?
And WTF is "testing of experimental weapons on populations"? Are you referring to the nuclear bombings? Or were there other "experimental" weapons that we "tested on populations"? You realize that if we hadn't bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Japan probably would have wound up divided between the United States and the Soviet Union like Germany did, right? Do you really think that a divided Japan would have worked out better for World history? Try to imagine a Japanese "Checkpoint Charlie". Try to imagine a Tokyo airlift after the Soviets cut off road access for the allies and food supplies for the population. Imagine hundreds of thousands of Japanese women brutally raped by Red Army troops. Picture a militarized Japan complete with Iron Curtain and hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers staring across it at hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese ones.
All of that is what would have happened if we had to invade Japan. The Soviets would have invaded from the North and conquered at least half the country. All of Korea would have wound up communist, as opposed to only half of it. Millions of civilians would have died alongside of hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides. The war would have dragged on for at least another year.
I'm sorry, the United States has done some really hypocritical stuff throughout it's history but you lose all creditably by making blanket statements like you did earlier. Go read a history book and learn what was at stake during WW2 and then tell me that in FDR or Churchill's shoes you would have done it differently.
There was no need to fire bomb German (and Japanese) cities and nuke Japan except to try out some fancy new weapons
Yeah, damn the Americans and Brits for coming up with the concept of bombing cities. I mean it's not as though the Germans everbombedcivilians or anything like that. And we know that the Japanese would never have done it either.
After WWII the military industrial complex came into being, and has been used primarily to support corporations turn larger and larger profits at the expense of poor countries everywhere.
You do realize that we were in the process of dismantling the "military-industrial complex" until the Korean War started, right? The United States was discharging hundreds of thousands of men from it's armed forces at the same time as mutations plants were being converted back to the civilian economy. Korea (and the subsequent beginning of the Cold War) changed all of that.
We can argue about whether or not it was really necessary to build this war machine -- but don't pretend that it was just because the United States wanted to remain the global hegemony. Go read a history book and put yourself in the shoes of Truman or Eisenhower. Consider the actions of Stalin/the USSR at the time and tell me that you wouldn't have been legitimately worried about the Soviet Union. Keep in mind that just ten years prior the most bloody conflict in the history of the human race (with 72 million deaths on all sides) had been fought. Keep in mind that the Soviet Union had hundreds of divisions posed to march to the Bay of Biscay and a leader who took it upon himself to annex neighboring countries in violation of his wartime agreements with FDR and Churchill.
Fucking Christ! I don't agree with everything that my country does either but people like you make it next to impossible for Progressives/Liberals to have a meaningful debate about foreign policy/national security because your inclination is to automatically blame the United States first and to hell with history or a meaningful look at both sides of an issue. Newsflash: It's all the fault of the United States!
I love your little Libertarian/Republican rant there, but this part just made me fall over laughing:
The US gov't wouldn't have any problem increasing military spending if it stuck to its job (protecting people, property, and liberty as the Founders intended)
Really? We wouldn't have any problem increasing military spending if we just stuck to the job that the Founders intended? Newsflash: If we stuck to the job that the Founders intended we wouldn't have half (or even a quarter) of the military spending that we do today. Go read Washington's farewell address -- he specifically warned against getting the United States involved in "foreign entanglements", and especially foreign entanglements in Europe. If we were sticking true to the visions of the Founding Fathers we would likely have no standing army at all (or a very small one, such as existed prior to the Civil War) and rely more on state militia's to defend the United States in the event of invasion.
I'm sorry, I doubt the Founding Fathers would have condoned Social Security/Medicare/other "entitlement" programs, but they also wouldn't have condoned a fleet of B-2s or 13 Aircraft Carrier Battle Groups either. They wouldn't have supported NATO, ANZUS or any of our other alliances either.
Of course the United States of America as we know it won't be around for all eternity
And where is it gonna go? Are the Visigoths going to come rolling over the hills and sack New York and Washington?
America is on top now. The British Empire was on top a while ago. The Roman Empire was on top a bit longer ago
Why does everybody have to bring in the Roman Empire when we have these discussions? The British Empire might be a decent enough analogy -- but the Roman Empire is just plain dumb. Come back to me with the Roman analogies after an American President abandons Washington DC in favor of building a new capital on the West coast. Come back with them after the United States is torn apart by civil wars led by military generals seeking power for themselves and their troops. Come back with them after a new upstart religion replaces and outlaws the Abramic religions in the United States.
If the United States loses it's status as the sole superpower it will likely be a series of economic and military events, combined with the rise of a new world power or powers. Ya know, kinda like how the Brits stopped being the sole superpower after the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union after WW2. But even if that happens the United States is still going to be an economic and military power on the World stage -- we just might not be the only economic and military power.
Go look at the UK. They had some tough transitions but the fall of the empire didn't destroy the British culture or nation.
On the other hand, I hear that mobile phone owners in the US have to pay to *receive* phone calls, which seems absurd to me
Eh, it cuts both ways. In Europe (and Mexico for that matter) it costs more to dial a mobile number then it does to dial a landline. Here in the States it costs the same as dialing any other number -- if it's a local call it's free -- a long distance one is billed as any other long distance call would be.
Personally I think that's a bit more fair -- why should the people calling me have to pay for my privilege of having a mobile phone? In any case, cell phone minutes are ridiculously cheap in the US if you know how to play the game. By the time you factor in nights & weekends I wind up paying around $0.015/min - $0.025/min for my calls. Can't go wrong with that.
We say "You will get at least this amount up and down, and probably more." In reality most users get a lot more than my guaranteed minimum. This is how I am "up front' about my policies
Congratulations. You are one of the good guys. I still think you completely overreacted with your initial reply though. I've been in the small ISP business and I'd like to think that I know exactly what you are facing. The same rules that apply to you do not apply to the likes of Time Warner or Comcast. And even if they did, I still think the public should get some sort of say over their operations, seeing as how it's the public that was nice enough to grant them their monopolies (via cable franchising agreements) in the first place.
I'm also a nice asshole, and I actually give a slight priority to VOIP because hell, it works better for everyone that way
When I was in the ISP business I prioritized gaming, ssh/telnet and VPN over most other traffic. VoIP wasn't on the radar much back in those days but if it had been I would have prioritized that as well. Nobody advocating network neutrality is saying that you can't do that -- even the best engineered network is likely to see 100% utilization at times and if that happens without a decent QoS scheme performance for everything suffers.
Net neutrality will tie my hands on a lot of issues.
Don't blame me for that. Network neutrality wasn't even on the radar until BellSouth/AT&T started making noises about double dipping. For all your concern about the content providers offloading their bandwidth onto you via p2p I'd think that you would be able to appreciate their point of view -- I paid for my internet connection, as did Google -- my ISP shouldn't get to charge Google money to have "priority" access to me.
Net neutrality may have started the way you say, but mark my words, it will end up with content provider networks using eyeball networks as a way to offload expenses, meaning I will have to charge more to my customers because the content providers are costing me more money.
If that's actually the case then you could simply respond by offering tiered internet service. I tend to think that tiers are actually more effective and fair then metering or QoS schemes that discriminate against specific protocols. Offer most of your customers a 1.5/384 connection (just pulling those numbers out of my ass, but you get the drift) and offer a "turbo" tier at 3.0/768 that costs more money. Everybody wins in that scenario.
QoS/shaping is a useful tool to keep your network performance at a decent level if it occasionally maxes out (during peak hours for example) but it shouldn't be used as a replacement for network upgrades if you are dealing with saturated links a majority of the time.
Oh eat shit and die, sorry to be rude, but this is all bullshit. These beliefs are why people seem to actually buy into this net neutrality bullshit.
Ah, you must be from the school of 'any beliefs contrary to my own are bullshit'. Ya know, you have some perfectly valid points and that extra little insult really wasn't called for.
And yes, I work for an ISP.
Congratulations. I used to be in the business too. I worked for a small town ISP with a whooping 4 T-1s (6.0mbits) of edge capacity. We had to deal with the Napster and Kazaa kiddies sucking up all of our resources -- and we managed to do it without charging per-byte or interfering with specific protocols. We did this by being up-front with our customers and selling them the amount of capacity that we could actually provide (256kbits). We didn't try to sell them 6mbit connections while using the fine print to say they'd never actually achieve that speed. We allowed them to go above 256kbits as available but we never told them that we were selling them more then that.
Where does this belief that ISPs are insanely rich, money grubbing cheapskate operations?
I dunno, maybe from the SEC filings of companies like Time Warner and Comcast showing hundreds of millions of dollars in net profit? I don't pretend that applies to a smallish operation such as the one that you've described but I do get extremely skeptical when an outfit the size of Time Warner tries to convince us that they will go broke if they upgrade their networks.
Sorry to be so rude, but it is this uninformed bullshit that everyone buys into that has net neutrality on the verge of becoming a truth. Kiss VOIP goodbye, I won't be able to give priority to VOIP carriers anymore, I won't be able to reduce priority to Bit Torrent anymore so your video games work, even when your neighbor is beating the shit out of the backbone.
Then don't fucking over-sell your capacity by that amount! If you can't provide 10mbit connections to your users without impacting performance then provide them with 8mbit connections instead.
And net neutrality has nothing to do with being able to give VOIP priority over HTTP/Bittorrent. Net neutrality has to do with ISPs (both large and small) attempting to charge both sides of the connection (recall AT&T/BellSouth's musings about charging Google to reach their customers). Most sane people (myself included) aren't going to get upset if VOIP gets priority over bittorrent during peak hours. I am going to get upset if you go from 'best-effort' delivery of my bittorrent packets to forging RST packets to end my connections.
A very insightful and well thought out post, but I think you missed the point of what I was trying to say.
Therefore, "heuristic" providers that take advantage of stochastic load profiles and statistical node demand aggregation will probably outperform "dumb" providers installing backbones always the size of the aggregate maximum capacity of all nodes combined.
I've never disputed that an ISP has the right to oversubscribe their capacity. Paying for a dedicated pipe for Grandma who uses her connection two hours a month would be insanely stupid.
What I do dispute is that they have the right to interfere with specific protocols because they don't happen to like them. To be profitable and retain customers an ISP is going to have to look at the volume of bandwidth used by it's subscribers, peak times for that usage, the underlying network design, blah, blah, blah. But I really don't think it's unrealistic to expect that barring acts of god (submarine cable cuts or disasters like 9/11) that I should generally be able to use my internet connection's full capacity when I need it.
We can debate the pros and cons of a metered internet until the cows come home, but at the end of the day a metered internet will probably destroy a lot of the innovation that we've come to expect from it. Do you think services like Youtube or Netflix instant view would be successful if a metered model was the norm and not the exception?
Search for "IP Transit" and see how the major ISPs charge for it.
I'm quite familiar with IP transit, seeing as how I used to work for an ISP. We were billed via the 95th percentile, not via bytes transferred.
You can make the argument that heavy p2p users push up the average resulting in higher bills, but I'm just going to come back with "Don't give your customers bandwidth you can't afford to support".
Burstable bandwidth and/or lower bandwidth caps a much more fair solution to this problem then selectively interfering with specific protocols because you don't happen to like them.
consider your land line. No encryption whatsoever and an analogue signal (so no computer equipment or specialised unusual codecs required to tap) between you and the telephone exchange.
Well, FWIW, you can detect a bug like that on your POTS line by monitoring the voltage on the line. It won't help you with a bug placed at the exchange/central office, but that vulnerability exists regardless of the technology (POTS, GSM, VoIP, etc) that you are using.
More amusing then deliberate bugs is crosstalk on old/lousy wiring. I never had POTS hooked up in my old apartment building (cellular only) but I could plug a phone into the jack and listen to other peoples conversations/DTMF/dial tones. Some of them were hard to hear (guessing the pairs were fair enough apart to reduce crosstalk) but most of them came in loud enough to be understood quite clearly -- and I suspect it would have been child's play to hook up an amplifier to boost the weak signals to a usable level.
Any law that is violated by a sufficiently large percentage of it's population is an unjust law. They have power because we as a whole agreed to let them have some power to enforce ideas that society as a whole sees as worthy of enforcing. If a law reaches a certain point where the majority of the country doesn't support it (say, Prohibition as an example), then it should be repealed.
I don't even think it should require a "majority". If a statistically significant number of people are routinely flaunting the law then we should probably examine that law and find out whether or not it's just.
I won't argue in favor of limitless copyright infringement (even the Founding Fathers recognized the value of limited IP protection and included it in the Constitution), but off the top of my head I could mention marijuana prohibition as a policy that should probably be examined.
BT Wholesale, who in the UK actually supply the broadband capacity for most ISPs in the UK, *do* charge per GB, so all the ISPs who use them have to as well... the few who don't use BT Wholesale charge per GB because everyone expects them to....
Yeah, and in the UK you used to (still do?) get to pay for your local phone calls too. Which is ironic because a truly local phone call (i.e: one that stays within the same CO) costs the phone company nothing. Here in the states, "local" usually encompasses a whole city and the surrounding areas.
Maybe you should be holding your Government to account for allowing such a "marketplace" to exist in the first place. Then again, your Government seems to go along with a lot of these practices -- do you guys still get to pay the BBC tax when you buy a television?
You don't hear customers complaining they can't draw the max amperage their house's wiring will take, because they understood that if everyone did that, there'd be brownouts.
I can draw the max amperage in my house if I see fit to do so. You do have a point though that the network probably couldn't handle everybody deciding to do it at the same time, but at the end of the day the electric company isn't going to start restricting my use of specific appliances -- they will either provide me with the power I want or cut me off (rolling blackouts) if the grid can't handle it. They aren't going to tell me that my hot tub is a less legitimate use then my washing machine.
Anyway, you missed the point. Bytes themselves do not cost money. A kilowatt hour does. A kilowatt hour represents a specific amount of energy (3,600,000 joules if you are curious) that cost money (in the form of fuel for the power plant) to produce. A byte doesn't cost anything to transit -- the underlying capacity of the pipe itself is what costs money. An idle pipe costs the same amount of money as one running at 100% capacity.
I don't know if is true or not, but I've read that the holders of the major backbones do charge per GB for their use. Your ISP (unless it's a backbone holder) does have to pay per GB.
It's not true. They are typically priced for capacity and not per byte. Go take a look at the Wikipedia IP transit article.
End result: That bittorrent user pegging his connection at 3AM probably costs the ISP next to nothing. The peak user might have some sort of cost (since they rely on oversubscription) but it doesn't cost nearly as much as they would have us believe.
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After the French Armistice on 22 June 1940 the UK, alongside the Commonwealth (Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa) was the sole remaining major power that was still fighting Nazi Germany. She did fight alongside the other nations that were invaded (Greece comes to mind) but those nations capitulated fairly quickly, leaving the UK to fight on alone.
The UK remained alone until the launch of Barbarossa exactly one year (22 June 1941) after the signing of the French Armistice. Even at that, it seemed likely (at the time) that Germany would beat the Soviet Union and Churchill wasn't sure the Allies would win until after Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war.
So yes, I give the UK a lot of respect for standing alone against the Nazi War Machine during that period. It was arguably the finest moment in British history and likely saved the Western Democracies from becoming conquered slave-states to Nazi Germany or Communist Satellites of the Soviet Union.
What's your point? The UK isn't perfect? Did I say that it was?
My point was that the UK has a proud history and that it would be more productive for it's citizens to fight for their rights (as did their parents and grandparents) then to whine about losing them without doing anything about it. My point was that for all it's flaws I'd much rather live in the UK then Pakistan.
The GP seemed to imply that Pakistan was more "free" then the UK. If "free" means a censoring military dictatorship that allows the opposition to be assassinated then, yeah, I guess Pakistan is "free".
Maybe by using the freedom of speech that our forefathers died to give us? Maybe by holding our Congressman/MPs accountable to the voters instead of the corporations/lobbyists that donated money to their political campaigns? Maybe by doing what we can to limit the power of the party (be it the Republican/Conservative/Democratic/Labour one) at the expense of the people? Maybe by getting people involved in the process again?
I'm working with the Barack Obama campaign here in the United States. He has generated a lot of excitement and gotten a lot of new people involved with politics. One of the things that I'm trying to do is encourage all of those people to remain involved with the political process after the election. We can bemoan the state of affairs in Washington/London until we are blue in the face but nobody has bothered getting involved with the process and trying to change that state of affairs. If there is anything that we should have learned from the past it's that our involvement with Representative Democracy does not end at the ballot box.
Sweden!
and a strong enough military (including globally targeted nuclear missiles) not to be pushed around by the countries interested in censorshipOh. Shit. Well, ya had to muck things up with that requirement, huh?
Wait, I know! The United States can take over Sweden! Then we'll have one country with no history of censorship and nuclear missiles! It's perfect!
Hmm, free software/movies and Swedish chicks for me..... warmer weather and cheap blue jeans for them. Sounds like a win win for everybody concerned... and if any of those Swedes complain we'll just censor them ;)
Because multi-homed networks may wish to have finer control over which links traffic comes in on then allowed for with simple static routes. Because my above example (A/B & C) was a drastic oversimplification and the actual internet involves tens of thousands (hundreds?) of different networks connected in different ways and trying to manage static routes for all of them would be virtually impossible.
Imagine if the process of connecting a new network to the internet involved having to update static routing tables in every core router on the internet and you'll start to understand why BGP exists. Hell, there are routing protocols meant for internal usage (OSPF), because static routes become unmanageable if you have more then a few routers/netmasks to contend with.
BGP inherently depends on the honor system - that is the crux of the problemNot strictly. The "honor system" should really be limited to the Tier 1 providers. Anybody else really should be filtering the routes that they will accept. There are already provisions in place to remove the "honor system" from consideration -- it seems that Pakistan's upstream provider choose not to use them.
This really isn't anything new. This kind of stuff has happened before. It's not even unique to the internet either -- the POTS network has a routing protocol used to setup calls/announce which switch is responsible for which number/range. One would suspect that SS7 can be abused by "bad" telcos as easily as BGP can be abused by "bad" ISPs.
Basically a Pakistani ISP decided to implement the block of Youtube by announcing a new route for the IP addresses owned by Youtube that presumably directed all of that traffic into /dev/null or elsewhere. By accident (one would presume -- there is no reason to do this on purpose) those routes were announced outside of Pakistan by said ISP, whose upstream provider then relayed them to the rest of the internet (sheer stupidity on their part -- their configuration should have prevented this). Said upstream provider then decided to cut Pakistan off until they are able to correct the problem.
All I know is living in the UK I'm in no position to criticize the Pakistanis, because their country is much freer than mine.Yeah, I can't help but remember how Gordon Brown seized power in a military coup and allowed a leading member of the opposition to be brutally assassinated by extremists. It's amazing how far the UK has fallen, isn't it?
C'mon! As an American I can certainly sympathize with your disillusionment over your own Government's policies but get some perspective. It's not yet that bad. Freedom in the United States or United Kingdom isn't dead until people stop fighting for it and become as apathetic as you sound when you make statements like that.
Your country gave us the Common Law, the Magna Carta and the foundations of Representative Democracy. You stood alone against Hitler for all those lonely months between the Fall of France and the involvement of the Soviet Union and United States. That stand likely saved Western Democracy from Communism or Fascism. Start fighting for your freedoms instead of whining online about how much better Pakistan is. I suspect that the people fighting and dying for Democracy right now within Pakistan would have zero sympathy for your point of view.
That's exactly what it allows, if your upstream provider isn't smart enough to filter the routes that you are allowed to announce. In theory your upstream provider won't accept any routes for IP addresses you don't own. In practice that isn't always the case, apparently.
They don't have any authority over that resource/address-space, so how and why are they allowed to create a black hole affecting the entire net?Because their upstream provider is apparently too stupid or lazy to filter the networks they can announce. Once you get to a certain point (peering links between Tier 1 providers for example) it may be easier to just trust the people you are peering with and accept everything -- but to accept all routes announced by a leaf link is just plain stupidity. I'm really kind of surprised that this happened.
The BGP article on Wikipedia is as good a place to start as any. Beyond that you can do some Google searches for it.
Basically BGP is the protocol used by routers to exchange route information with each other. A real oversimplification would involve three networks/routers, A, B and C. C receives it's network connectivity through A. C announces the networks it's responsible for to A, whom aggregates them before announcing them (and it's own networks) to B.
In theory, A shouldn't accept any routes from C for IP addresses not owned by C. Apparently that wasn't the case here though, or Pakistan's little stunt wouldn't have impacted anybody outside of Pakistan.
You justified that assumption with this line:
First off, many instances of "massive violence" during WWII by the US was the testing of experimental weapons on populations. There was no need to fire bomb German (and Japanese) cities and nuke Japan except to try out some fancy new weaponsHad you chosen to point out some of our actions during the Cold War (like overthrowing the elected Government of Iran or our numerous interventions in Latin America) you might have had the beginnings of a meaningful discussion about US foreign policy. Instead you decided to attack the actions of the United States during WW2 using flamebait'ish statements like "we only nuked them to test our fancy new weapons". As if strategic bombing was unique to the United States during WW2. You realize that all of our enemies and one of our major allies (the UK) did it as well, right?
And WTF is "testing of experimental weapons on populations"? Are you referring to the nuclear bombings? Or were there other "experimental" weapons that we "tested on populations"? You realize that if we hadn't bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Japan probably would have wound up divided between the United States and the Soviet Union like Germany did, right? Do you really think that a divided Japan would have worked out better for World history? Try to imagine a Japanese "Checkpoint Charlie". Try to imagine a Tokyo airlift after the Soviets cut off road access for the allies and food supplies for the population. Imagine hundreds of thousands of Japanese women brutally raped by Red Army troops. Picture a militarized Japan complete with Iron Curtain and hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers staring across it at hundreds of thousands of American and Japanese ones.
All of that is what would have happened if we had to invade Japan. The Soviets would have invaded from the North and conquered at least half the country. All of Korea would have wound up communist, as opposed to only half of it. Millions of civilians would have died alongside of hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides. The war would have dragged on for at least another year.
I'm sorry, the United States has done some really hypocritical stuff throughout it's history but you lose all creditably by making blanket statements like you did earlier. Go read a history book and learn what was at stake during WW2 and then tell me that in FDR or Churchill's shoes you would have done it differently.
It's not all the fault of....
Hmm, I bet some people are going to have fun with that typo at my expense :P Oh well!
Yeah, damn the Americans and Brits for coming up with the concept of bombing cities. I mean it's not as though the Germans ever bombed civilians or anything like that. And we know that the Japanese would never have done it either.
After WWII the military industrial complex came into being, and has been used primarily to support corporations turn larger and larger profits at the expense of poor countries everywhere.You do realize that we were in the process of dismantling the "military-industrial complex" until the Korean War started, right? The United States was discharging hundreds of thousands of men from it's armed forces at the same time as mutations plants were being converted back to the civilian economy. Korea (and the subsequent beginning of the Cold War) changed all of that.
We can argue about whether or not it was really necessary to build this war machine -- but don't pretend that it was just because the United States wanted to remain the global hegemony. Go read a history book and put yourself in the shoes of Truman or Eisenhower. Consider the actions of Stalin/the USSR at the time and tell me that you wouldn't have been legitimately worried about the Soviet Union. Keep in mind that just ten years prior the most bloody conflict in the history of the human race (with 72 million deaths on all sides) had been fought. Keep in mind that the Soviet Union had hundreds of divisions posed to march to the Bay of Biscay and a leader who took it upon himself to annex neighboring countries in violation of his wartime agreements with FDR and Churchill.
Fucking Christ! I don't agree with everything that my country does either but people like you make it next to impossible for Progressives/Liberals to have a meaningful debate about foreign policy/national security because your inclination is to automatically blame the United States first and to hell with history or a meaningful look at both sides of an issue. Newsflash: It's all the fault of the United States!
I love your little Libertarian/Republican rant there, but this part just made me fall over laughing:
The US gov't wouldn't have any problem increasing military spending if it stuck to its job (protecting people, property, and liberty as the Founders intended)Really? We wouldn't have any problem increasing military spending if we just stuck to the job that the Founders intended? Newsflash: If we stuck to the job that the Founders intended we wouldn't have half (or even a quarter) of the military spending that we do today. Go read Washington's farewell address -- he specifically warned against getting the United States involved in "foreign entanglements", and especially foreign entanglements in Europe. If we were sticking true to the visions of the Founding Fathers we would likely have no standing army at all (or a very small one, such as existed prior to the Civil War) and rely more on state militia's to defend the United States in the event of invasion.
I'm sorry, I doubt the Founding Fathers would have condoned Social Security/Medicare/other "entitlement" programs, but they also wouldn't have condoned a fleet of B-2s or 13 Aircraft Carrier Battle Groups either. They wouldn't have supported NATO, ANZUS or any of our other alliances either.
And where is it gonna go? Are the Visigoths going to come rolling over the hills and sack New York and Washington?
America is on top now. The British Empire was on top a while ago. The Roman Empire was on top a bit longer agoWhy does everybody have to bring in the Roman Empire when we have these discussions? The British Empire might be a decent enough analogy -- but the Roman Empire is just plain dumb. Come back to me with the Roman analogies after an American President abandons Washington DC in favor of building a new capital on the West coast. Come back with them after the United States is torn apart by civil wars led by military generals seeking power for themselves and their troops. Come back with them after a new upstart religion replaces and outlaws the Abramic religions in the United States.
If the United States loses it's status as the sole superpower it will likely be a series of economic and military events, combined with the rise of a new world power or powers. Ya know, kinda like how the Brits stopped being the sole superpower after the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union after WW2. But even if that happens the United States is still going to be an economic and military power on the World stage -- we just might not be the only economic and military power.
Go look at the UK. They had some tough transitions but the fall of the empire didn't destroy the British culture or nation.
Eh, it cuts both ways. In Europe (and Mexico for that matter) it costs more to dial a mobile number then it does to dial a landline. Here in the States it costs the same as dialing any other number -- if it's a local call it's free -- a long distance one is billed as any other long distance call would be.
Personally I think that's a bit more fair -- why should the people calling me have to pay for my privilege of having a mobile phone? In any case, cell phone minutes are ridiculously cheap in the US if you know how to play the game. By the time you factor in nights & weekends I wind up paying around $0.015/min - $0.025/min for my calls. Can't go wrong with that.
Congratulations. You are one of the good guys. I still think you completely overreacted with your initial reply though. I've been in the small ISP business and I'd like to think that I know exactly what you are facing. The same rules that apply to you do not apply to the likes of Time Warner or Comcast. And even if they did, I still think the public should get some sort of say over their operations, seeing as how it's the public that was nice enough to grant them their monopolies (via cable franchising agreements) in the first place.
I'm also a nice asshole, and I actually give a slight priority to VOIP because hell, it works better for everyone that wayWhen I was in the ISP business I prioritized gaming, ssh/telnet and VPN over most other traffic. VoIP wasn't on the radar much back in those days but if it had been I would have prioritized that as well. Nobody advocating network neutrality is saying that you can't do that -- even the best engineered network is likely to see 100% utilization at times and if that happens without a decent QoS scheme performance for everything suffers.
Net neutrality will tie my hands on a lot of issues.Don't blame me for that. Network neutrality wasn't even on the radar until BellSouth/AT&T started making noises about double dipping. For all your concern about the content providers offloading their bandwidth onto you via p2p I'd think that you would be able to appreciate their point of view -- I paid for my internet connection, as did Google -- my ISP shouldn't get to charge Google money to have "priority" access to me.
Net neutrality may have started the way you say, but mark my words, it will end up with content provider networks using eyeball networks as a way to offload expenses, meaning I will have to charge more to my customers because the content providers are costing me more money.If that's actually the case then you could simply respond by offering tiered internet service. I tend to think that tiers are actually more effective and fair then metering or QoS schemes that discriminate against specific protocols. Offer most of your customers a 1.5/384 connection (just pulling those numbers out of my ass, but you get the drift) and offer a "turbo" tier at 3.0/768 that costs more money. Everybody wins in that scenario.
QoS/shaping is a useful tool to keep your network performance at a decent level if it occasionally maxes out (during peak hours for example) but it shouldn't be used as a replacement for network upgrades if you are dealing with saturated links a majority of the time.
Touché
Perhaps I should have included the phrase "victimless crime", though I hope that people are smart enough to realize what I meant.....
Ah, you must be from the school of 'any beliefs contrary to my own are bullshit'. Ya know, you have some perfectly valid points and that extra little insult really wasn't called for.
And yes, I work for an ISP.Congratulations. I used to be in the business too. I worked for a small town ISP with a whooping 4 T-1s (6.0mbits) of edge capacity. We had to deal with the Napster and Kazaa kiddies sucking up all of our resources -- and we managed to do it without charging per-byte or interfering with specific protocols. We did this by being up-front with our customers and selling them the amount of capacity that we could actually provide (256kbits). We didn't try to sell them 6mbit connections while using the fine print to say they'd never actually achieve that speed. We allowed them to go above 256kbits as available but we never told them that we were selling them more then that.
Where does this belief that ISPs are insanely rich, money grubbing cheapskate operations?I dunno, maybe from the SEC filings of companies like Time Warner and Comcast showing hundreds of millions of dollars in net profit? I don't pretend that applies to a smallish operation such as the one that you've described but I do get extremely skeptical when an outfit the size of Time Warner tries to convince us that they will go broke if they upgrade their networks.
Sorry to be so rude, but it is this uninformed bullshit that everyone buys into that has net neutrality on the verge of becoming a truth. Kiss VOIP goodbye, I won't be able to give priority to VOIP carriers anymore, I won't be able to reduce priority to Bit Torrent anymore so your video games work, even when your neighbor is beating the shit out of the backbone.Then don't fucking over-sell your capacity by that amount! If you can't provide 10mbit connections to your users without impacting performance then provide them with 8mbit connections instead.
And net neutrality has nothing to do with being able to give VOIP priority over HTTP/Bittorrent. Net neutrality has to do with ISPs (both large and small) attempting to charge both sides of the connection (recall AT&T/BellSouth's musings about charging Google to reach their customers). Most sane people (myself included) aren't going to get upset if VOIP gets priority over bittorrent during peak hours. I am going to get upset if you go from 'best-effort' delivery of my bittorrent packets to forging RST packets to end my connections.
you uninformed luserYeah, that's productive.
A very insightful and well thought out post, but I think you missed the point of what I was trying to say.
Therefore, "heuristic" providers that take advantage of stochastic load profiles and statistical node demand aggregation will probably outperform "dumb" providers installing backbones always the size of the aggregate maximum capacity of all nodes combined.I've never disputed that an ISP has the right to oversubscribe their capacity. Paying for a dedicated pipe for Grandma who uses her connection two hours a month would be insanely stupid.
What I do dispute is that they have the right to interfere with specific protocols because they don't happen to like them. To be profitable and retain customers an ISP is going to have to look at the volume of bandwidth used by it's subscribers, peak times for that usage, the underlying network design, blah, blah, blah. But I really don't think it's unrealistic to expect that barring acts of god (submarine cable cuts or disasters like 9/11) that I should generally be able to use my internet connection's full capacity when I need it.
We can debate the pros and cons of a metered internet until the cows come home, but at the end of the day a metered internet will probably destroy a lot of the innovation that we've come to expect from it. Do you think services like Youtube or Netflix instant view would be successful if a metered model was the norm and not the exception?
I'm quite familiar with IP transit, seeing as how I used to work for an ISP. We were billed via the 95th percentile, not via bytes transferred.
You can make the argument that heavy p2p users push up the average resulting in higher bills, but I'm just going to come back with "Don't give your customers bandwidth you can't afford to support".
Burstable bandwidth and/or lower bandwidth caps a much more fair solution to this problem then selectively interfering with specific protocols because you don't happen to like them.
Well, FWIW, you can detect a bug like that on your POTS line by monitoring the voltage on the line. It won't help you with a bug placed at the exchange/central office, but that vulnerability exists regardless of the technology (POTS, GSM, VoIP, etc) that you are using.
More amusing then deliberate bugs is crosstalk on old/lousy wiring. I never had POTS hooked up in my old apartment building (cellular only) but I could plug a phone into the jack and listen to other peoples conversations/DTMF/dial tones. Some of them were hard to hear (guessing the pairs were fair enough apart to reduce crosstalk) but most of them came in loud enough to be understood quite clearly -- and I suspect it would have been child's play to hook up an amplifier to boost the weak signals to a usable level.
I don't even think it should require a "majority". If a statistically significant number of people are routinely flaunting the law then we should probably examine that law and find out whether or not it's just.
I won't argue in favor of limitless copyright infringement (even the Founding Fathers recognized the value of limited IP protection and included it in the Constitution), but off the top of my head I could mention marijuana prohibition as a policy that should probably be examined.
Wow, I think this is the first time I've ever seen a discussion about p2p Godwin'ed.....
Yeah, and in the UK you used to (still do?) get to pay for your local phone calls too. Which is ironic because a truly local phone call (i.e: one that stays within the same CO) costs the phone company nothing. Here in the states, "local" usually encompasses a whole city and the surrounding areas.
Maybe you should be holding your Government to account for allowing such a "marketplace" to exist in the first place. Then again, your Government seems to go along with a lot of these practices -- do you guys still get to pay the BBC tax when you buy a television?
No, it's really not.
You don't hear customers complaining they can't draw the max amperage their house's wiring will take, because they understood that if everyone did that, there'd be brownouts.I can draw the max amperage in my house if I see fit to do so. You do have a point though that the network probably couldn't handle everybody deciding to do it at the same time, but at the end of the day the electric company isn't going to start restricting my use of specific appliances -- they will either provide me with the power I want or cut me off (rolling blackouts) if the grid can't handle it. They aren't going to tell me that my hot tub is a less legitimate use then my washing machine.
Anyway, you missed the point. Bytes themselves do not cost money. A kilowatt hour does. A kilowatt hour represents a specific amount of energy (3,600,000 joules if you are curious) that cost money (in the form of fuel for the power plant) to produce. A byte doesn't cost anything to transit -- the underlying capacity of the pipe itself is what costs money. An idle pipe costs the same amount of money as one running at 100% capacity.
It's not true. They are typically priced for capacity and not per byte. Go take a look at the Wikipedia IP transit article.
End result: That bittorrent user pegging his connection at 3AM probably costs the ISP next to nothing. The peak user might have some sort of cost (since they rely on oversubscription) but it doesn't cost nearly as much as they would have us believe.