__/ [Vasos-Peter] on Monday 06 February 2006 21:08 \__
> [Albutt Bore claims to have invented the bimbo nation super
> bottleneck. That's the problem. It is based on a Star-Trek-Commie
> anticommercial view of the world. It is time to charge users by their
> usage, at each gateway. The free-love, free-money, free-AIDS
> mentality of the canker sore sandal wearers of the 1960s is the
> problem! When the Red Chinese downed a USA plane near Taiwan in 2001
> they retaliated in part by publishing computer virus kits on the
> web. However, the Chinese government strictly censors and controls the
> internet going into China. Why do we not censor the internet coming
> OUT of China? It didn't seem to bother anyone when the slightest
> information from the Serbian side was censored in the 1990s. In the
> summer of 2003 a wave of spam paralysed the internet and we have not
> been able to use the internet in a normal way since then.]
Use a filter.
> The Internet Is Broken By David Talbot [Cover story in MIT
> Technology Review Dec 2005]
> In his office within the gleaming-stainless-steel and orange-brick
> jumble of MIT's Stata Center, Internet elder statesman and onetime
> chief protocol architect David D. Clark prints out an old PowerPoint
> talk. Dated July 1992, it ranges over technical issues like domain
> naming and scalability. But in one slide, Clark points to the
> Internet's dark side: its lack of built-in security.
> In others, he observes that sometimes the worst disasters are
> caused not by sudden events but by slow, incremental processes -- and
> that humans are good at ignoring problems. "Things get worse
> slowly. People adjust," Clark noted in his presentation. "The problem
> is assigning the correct degree of fear to distant elephants."
>
> Today, Clark believes the elephants are upon us. Yes, the Internet
> has wrought wonders: e-commerce has flourished, and e-mail has become
> a ubiquitous means of communication. Almost one billion people now use
> the Internet, and critical industries like banking increasingly rely
> on it.
>
> At the same time, the Internet's shortcomings have resulted in
> plunging security and a decreased ability to accommodate new
> technologies. "We are at an inflection point, a revolution point,"
> Clark now argues. And he delivers a strikingly pessimistic assessment
> of where the Internet will end up without dramatic intervention. "We
> might just be at the point where the utility of the Internet stalls --
> and perhaps turns downward."
It already has, but matters seem to improve. There are still platform and
browser discriminations and cases where usability is forsaken in favour of
flash (or Flash).
> Indeed, for the average user, the Internet these days all too often
> resembles New York's Times Square in the 1980s. It was exciting and
> vibrant, but you made sure to keep your head down, lest you be offered
> drugs, robbed, or harangued by the insane. Times Square has been
> cleaned up, but the Internet keeps getting worse, both at the user's
> level, and -- in the view of Clark and others -- deep within its
> architecture.
>
> Over the years, as Internet applications proliferated -- wireless
> devices, peer-to-peer file-sharing, telephony -- companies and network
> engineers came up with ingenious and expedient patches, plugs, and
> workarounds. The result is that the originally simple communications
> technology has become a complex and convoluted affair. For all of the
> Internet's wonders, it is also difficult to manage and more fragile
> with each passing day.
With improvement often comes complexity. The least one can do is embrace
standards, not break them or independently 'extend' them.
> That's why Clark argues that it's time to rethink the Internet's
> basic architecture, to potentially start over with a fresh design --
> and equally important, with a plausible strategy for proving the
> design's viability, so that it stands a chance of
> implementation. "It's not as if there is some killer technology at the
> protocol or network level that we somehow failed to include," says
> Clark. "We need to take all the technologies we already know and fit
> them together so that we get a different overall system. This is not
> about building a technology innovation that changes the world but
> about architecture -- pulling the pieces together in a different way
> to achieve high-level objectives."
>
> Just such an approach is now gaining momentum, spurred on by the
> National Science Foundation. NSF managers are working to forge a
> five-to-seven-year plan estimated to cost $200 million to $300 million
> in research funding to develop clean-slate architectures that provide
> security, accommodate new technologies, and are easier to manage.
The knowledge is already there and proposals for better hypermedia systems
exist too. There are also several prototypes, but bringing them into broad
use is the real challenge. Live with and accept the flawed protocols and
continue plastering them, where possible. CSS, microsformats, and XML are
examples of 'fixes' or enhancements to the Web.
> They also hope to develop an infrastructure that can be used to
> prove that the new system is really better than the current one. "If
> we succeed in what we are trying to do, this is bigger than anything
> we, as a research community, have done in computer science so far,"
> says Guru Parulkar, an NSF program manager involved with the
> effort. "In terms of its mission and vision, it is a very big
> deal. But now we are just at the beginning. It has the potential to
> change the game. It could take it to the next level in realizing what
> the Internet could be that has not been possible because of the
> challenges and problems."
>
> The Internet's original protocols, forged in the late 1960s, were
> designed to do one thing very well: facilitate communication between a
> few hundred academic and government users. The protocols efficiently
> break digital data into simple units called packets and send the
> packets to their destinations through a series of network routers.
> Both the routers and PCs, also called nodes, have unique digital
> addresses known as Internet Protocol or IP addresses. That's basically
> it. The system assumed that all users on the network could be trusted
> and that the computers linked by the Internet were mostly fixed
> objects.
I fail to see how this addresses the issue of censorship in China. I'm
beginning to suspect it's a hit-and-run post, unless you can prove me wrong.
> The Internet's design was indifferent to whether the information
> packets added up to a malicious virus or a love letter; it had no
> provisions for doing much besides getting the data to its destination.
> Nor did it accommodate nodes that moved -- such as PDAs that could
> connect to the Internet at any of myriad locations. Over the years, a
> slew of patches arose: firewalls, antivirus software, spam filters,
> and the like. One patch assigns each mobile node a new IP address
> every time it moves to a new point in the network.
Anti-virus issues are attributed to bad O/S and software design. Firewalls
and spam filters are intended to block 'junk' traffic, which you could never
truly avoid altogether. You could hinder it however.
> Clearly, security patches aren't keeping pace. That's partly
> because different people use different patches and not everyone
> updates them religiously; some people don't have any installed. And
> the most common mobility patch -- the IP addresses that constantly
> change as you move around -- has downsides. When your mobile computer
> has a new identity every time it connects to the Internet, the
> websites you deal with regularly won't know it's you. This means, for
> example, that your favorite airline's Web page might not cough up a
> reservation form with your name and frequent-flyer number already
> filled out. The constantly changing address also means you can expect
> breaks in service if you are using the Internet to, say, listen to a
> streaming radio broadcast on your PDA. It also means that someone who
> commits a crime online using a mobile device will be harder to track
> down.
>
> In the view of many experts in the field, there are even more
> fundamental reasons to be concerned. Patches create an ever more
> complicated system, one that becomes harder to manage, understand, and
> improve upon. "We've been on a track for 30 years of incrementally
> making improvements to the Internet and fixing problems that we see,"
> says Larry Peterson, a computer scientist at Princeton University. "We
> see vulnerability, we try to patch it. That approach is one that has
> worked for 30 years. But there is reason to be concerned. Without a
> long-term plan, if you are just patching the next problem you see, you
> end up with an increasingly complex and brittle system. It makes new
> services difficult to employ. It makes it much harder to manage
> because of the added complexity of all these point solutions that have
> been added. At the same time, there is concern that we will hit a dead
> end at some point. There will be problems we can't sufficiently
> patch."
>
> It's worth remembering that despite all of its flaws, all of its
> architectural kluginess and insecurity and the costs associated with
> patching it, the Internet still gets the job done. Any effort to
> implement a better version faces enormous practical problems: all
> Internet service providers would have to agree to change all their
> routers and software, and someone would have to foot the bill, which
> will likely come to many billions of dollars. But NSF isn't proposing
> to abandon the old network or to forcibly impose something new on the
> world. Rather, it essentially wants to build a better mousetrap, show
> that it's better, and allow a changeover to take place in response to
> user demand.
And who exactly will be that Big Daddy to have the opportunity to change the
world? Will it be Google and their rumoured private network? Whatever is
proposed, people will turn their backs at it, which leads to fragmentation
of content. That is the last thing the world needs.
> To that end, the NSF effort envisions the construction of a
> sprawling infrastructure that could cost approximately $300
> million. It would include research labs across the United States and
> perhaps link with research efforts abroad, where new architectures can
> be given a full workout. With a high-speed optical backbone and smart
> routers, this test bed would be far more elaborate and representative
> than the smaller, more limited test beds in use today. The idea is
> that new architectures would be battle tested with real-world Internet
> traffic. "You hope that provides enough value added that people are
> slowly and selectively willing to switch, and maybe it gets enough
> traction that people will switch over," Parulkar says. But he
> acknowledges, "Ten years from now, how things play out is anyone's
> guess. It could be a parallel infrastructure that people could use for
> selective applications."
>
> Still, skeptics claim that a smarter network could be even more
> complicated and thus failure-prone than the original bare-bones
> Internet. Conventional wisdom holds that the network should remain
> dumb, but that the smart devices at its ends should become smarter.
> "I'm not happy with the current state of affairs. I'm not happy with
> spam; I'm not happy with the amount of vulnerability to various forms
> of attack," says Vinton Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet's
> basic protocols, who recently joined Google with a job title created
> just for him: chief Internet evangelist. "I do want to distinguish
> that the primary vectors causing a lot of trouble are penetrating
> holes in operating systems. It's more like the operating systems don't
> protect themselves very well. An argument could be made, 'Why does the
> network have to do that?'"
Exactly.
> According to Cerf, the more you ask the network to examine data --
> to authenticate a person's identity, say, or search for viruses -- the
> less efficiently it will move the data around. "It's really hard to
> have a network-level thing do this stuff, which means you have to
> assemble the packets into something bigger and thus violate all the
> protocols," Cerf says. "That takes a heck of a lot of resources."
> Still, Cerf sees value in the new NSF initiative. "If Dave
> Clark...sees some notions and ideas that would be dramatically better
> than what we have, I think that's important and healthy," Cerf says.
> "I sort of wonder about something, though. The collapse of the Net, or
> a major security disaster, has been predicted for a decade now." And
> of course no such disaster has occurred -- at least not by the time
> this issue of Technology Review went to press.
The Net has not collapsed because of all that 'glue' people have spewed out,
whether it's challenge/response filters one employs or the many firewalls
that intend to prevent DDOS attacks. Referrer spam, copyrights infringement
and content denial, censorship or mirroring are more issues, among many.
> - = -
> Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Columbia'81+, Bio$trategist
> BachMozart ReaganQuayle EvrytanoKastorian
> http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vjp2/vasos.htm
> ---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
> [Urb sprawl confounds terror] [Remorse begets zeal] [Windows is for Bimbos]
> [Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards]
Just a few comments: while the above is an intersting read, the page says
"(Uses any browser - avoid stupid incompatibilities.)" and also
"(Problems? Increase font size and number of colors)". Even with fonts
resized, the text remains illegible.
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | Have you hugged your penguin today?
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
4:20am up 20 days 23:36, 11 users, load average: 0.46, 0.49, 0.55
http://iuron.com - Open Source knowledge engine project
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