Letter on “Egypt’s Autocrats Exploited Internet’s Weaknesses”

Letter on “Egypt’s Autocrats Exploited Internet’s Weaknesses“

Regarding “Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet“:

Dear James and John,

Interesting article. However, the following paragraph and much of what follows is incomplete or inaccurate.

Because the Internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed that the Mubarak government succeeded in pulling the maneuver off.

The fundamental “building block” of the Internet is the Autonomous System (AS). Each AS is uniquely identified by an Autonomous System Number (ASN). In short, the internet is comprised of independent networks which voluntarily connect to each other by following the internet standards documents, known as RFC’s (“Request for Comments”).

How do systems know how to route traffic to other systems?

Today this is accomplished via BGP (Border Gateway Protocol).

Generally speaking, each AS broadcast routes via BGP over port 179.

What happened in Egypt is that, on January 28, most Egyptian AS stopped broadcasting routes via BGP, and thus became suddenly unreachable by almost all other internet AS. This was not a mystery to experts or even run-of-the-mill system engineers. It was immediately understood and documented.

How is it you did not talk to a single person with a clue as to what they were talking about? Or, did they know and simply not want to tell you so other governments would not exploit the same technique? In any event, had you googled “Egypt BGP” the answer would have become blindingly obvious to you instead of a “mystery.” The BGPmon post was referenced by at least 105 other blogs in the days following Jan 28, so the information was, and is, widely known and available.

See http://bgpmon.net/blog/?p=450
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_system_%28Internet%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol

best regards,

Henry

Note: Article was being revised, and retitled, by nytimes as I wrote this letter.

Copyright © 2011 Henry Edward Hardy

Comments on ‘Net Neutrality’

I sent the below to some friends when asked to join a letter advocating “Network neutrality”:

I am generally opposed to any federal or state regulation of what internet service providers can do vis a vis routing and BGP, packet prioritization etc. I do think that telcos should continue to function as common carriers, and that all commercial ISP’s should be required to reveal their packet prioritization and bandwidth clamping as part of consumer protection regulation, rather than being allowed to use the “up to 1.5 megabytes per second fast” kind of formulation in advertising.

There is no capital-I “Internet”. And there has not been since the NSF backbone shut down April 30, 1995. There is merely a loose association of networks who have agreed to share traffic over RFC-documented protocols. Each of the networks is entirely autonomous and self-governing.

It is the autonomous, voluntary, and self-governing aspects of the internet which are most important to preserve, not “net neutrality”. Internet freedom means that we allow other people to do things on their network which we personally don’t like (and may not allow on our network).

“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code”

–Dave Clark, “An Input/Output Architecture for Virtual Memory Computer Systems”, Ph.D. dissertation, Project MAC Technical Report 117, January 1974

Networks belong to the people who own them. There is no reason that I, as a person who owns a network, should have to pay for additional bandwidth charges to say, backhaul traffic for AT&T or Google over my network if they are not clients of mine, or that I should route their packets over my net at all if I don’t want to. Nor should I have to give a non-subscriber equal priority on my network as say, medical imaging facilities for a customer.

“Net neutrality” is a shibboleth; I think we should avoid using the term and talk instead about “common carrier” status for the telcos and large ISP’s and voice carriers.

Links to previous stuff I have posted on my blog regarding “net neutrality”: http://scanlyze.wordpress.com/?s=net+neutrality

I am posting the above comment also to my blog, http://scanlyze.wordpress.com/

–HH.

Autonomous System (wikipedia)

Copyright © 2009 Henry Edward Hardy

Riese: A Girl and her Wolf

Riese: A Girl and her Wolf

Riese and Fenrir

I recently ran across a new web-only action/adventure production called Riese. The eponymous main character, played by Christine Chatelain, is fleeing from a tyrannical regime in the steampunk kingdom of Elysia. I like the Mad Max look of the costumes and the Dr. Horrible like semi-pro abandon with which the series is being edited and shot. The general premise, good kingdom overtaken by evil cult; heir(ess) on the run… is as old as the stories of Theseus and Oedipus. The show has an appealing during/post apocalypse sense which puts one in mind of A Boy and His Dog, Mad Max, especially the third installment, Beyond Thunderdome, V for Vendetta, Children of Men, The Handmaid’s Tale and many others. However it is a nice place from which to explore good versus evil, individual versus society and such tropes. The heroine has at least one supernatural seeming ability: to keep her eyeliner and eyeshadow lipstick and foundation pristine and unsmeared despite being pursued through the woods while wearing goggles and bleeding from a side wound and then engaging in a rather clumsy knife fight with several Mad-Maxian attackers.

I am generally happy with people taking their vision directly to web rather than letting it be ground up and homogenized by the “entertainment” industry.

Whether it be “Star Trek Phase II”, Star Wars Revelations, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, lonelygirl15, or the semi-professional docu-humor of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, such efforts can be good even if writing/acting/scripting/editing are not all that they could be because they are fun and true and come from the heart.

So bon chance to Riese. Here’s hoping it is not too horrible.

Copyright © 2009 Henry Edward Hardy