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RE: Crackdowns don't slow Internet piracy
by Michel Py 15 Jul '04

15 Jul '04

>>> Fergie (Paul Ferguson) wrote: >>> "The popularity of file-sharing is costing the largest >>> Internet service providers $10 million per year each >>> in bandwidth and network maintenance costs, CacheLogic >>> said." >> Michel Py wrote: >> $10 million a year for the largest ISPs is a drop in the >> sea; _if_ the figure is accurate (sounds reasonable to me) >> what's the point anyway? The largest ISPs serve directly >> or indirectly millions of users that each pay $20/mo which >> is $240/yr, 10 million bucks a year is nothing. > Patrick W Gilmore wrote: > I don't care if you are Microsoft, $10MM a year is a large > enough sum that the company should not spend it if the > company can avoid spending it. The hard part is the caveat. > If you block customers from sharing music on your network, > will you still have customers? If not, then maybe the > $10MM is COGS? That's what I meant, thanks for rephrasing. $10M a year is definitely something that any size company will try to save; I remember posting here not that long ago that a $500k line card is definitely something I do not buy without a good reason. That being said, the speed that allows users to download faster large (and pirated, mostly) files is the #1 selling argument for broadband providers (look at their add campaigns). If you are a residential broadband provider and if you block customers from sharing music on your network, you will not have customers. Michel.

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RE: Spyware becomes increasingly malicious
by Michel Py 15 Jul '04

15 Jul '04

> John Underhill wrote: > [snip long post] One of the best posts I have seen in a long time; thanks, John. > So the question remains, what do we do about it? That's where it gets tough. Let's begin with what we can't do about it: - Declare that using IE is illegal. This literally takes an act of congress. And, it would be almost impossible to enforce. Anyway, let's pretend for a moment that congress does outlaw IE _and_ can enforce it, it still does not do us much good: whoever will replace Microsoft on the marketplace will quickly become very much like Microsoft because the market demands it. We (citizens of the world) have Microsoft because, short of wanting Microsoft itself we collectively wanted what Microsoft makes the way they make it, which comes at a price. - Make IE safe. The nature of the beast is that it can't be: it would require a tremendous reduction in features, which in turn will drive the market towards a more featured browser, which will be unsafe. Kind of the same argument as above. - In exchange for his life, appoint Saddam Hussein to rid us of spyware writers. As he's on a roll, let's put spammers in the deal, too. The guy has a proven track record, problem is most of us live in a society that oppose his methods, so this does not fly. - Hire a large number of the brilliant minds that read this list to write a counter-spyware solution that target the spyware writers. This does not fly either, because the battlefield is not level: we would target a limited and hard-to-find group of hijacking experts, that in turn have the entire world population of dumb users and unsecure browsers to play with. So, as it appears to me we can't solve for good hunger in the world, peace in the middle east, and the spyware problem. > John Underhill wrote: > So the question remains, what do we do about it? Save for legislative and/or legal action (that we do not do here), I'm afraid that the only thing we can do in here is to blackhole, and do it right. I don't like it much, but I have not heard any other suggestions so far. Michel.

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RE: Crackdowns don't slow Internet piracy
by Michel Py 15 Jul '04

15 Jul '04

> Fergie (Paul Ferguson) > "The popularity of file-sharing is costing the largest > Internet service providers $10 million per year each > in bandwidth and network maintenance costs, CacheLogic > said." $10 million a year for the largest ISPs is a drop in the sea; _if_ the figure is accurate (sounds reasonable to me) what's the point anyway? The largest ISPs serve directly or indirectly millions of users that each pay $20/mo which is $240/yr, 10 million bucks a year is nothing. > "It estimates Internet users around the globe freely > exchange a staggering 10 petabytes -- or 10 million > gigabytes -- of data, much of it in the form of > copyright-protected songs, movies, software and video > games." This sounds a reasonable figure to me if it's per day traffic. Ballpark figures are: - Common estimates are that there are 30 to 40 million Americans sharing files, less than 100 million worldwide. - My personal estimate is that at any given time some 15 million are on-line (a few large networks have 1+ million simultaneous users, plus some other with numbers in the hundreds of thousands). - 10 petabytes per day breaks out to an average of 60kbit/s per simultaneous user, which seems reasonable to me; some still have dial-up but broadband is widely deployed, NTM the few that operate a high-end P4T PC with a GE NIC connected to an OC-48 (someone checks my math please?). Michel.

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Re: VeriSign's rapid DNS updates in .com/.net
by william(at)elan.net 14 Jul '04

14 Jul '04

I reforward this email in hopes that it was by simple omission that nobody from Verisign is yet to respond to it. All questions in sections 1 - 3 are valid and something that directly concerns proposed changes, none of that had been asked before here in brief nanog discussion after Verisign's post on Friday. And of course, I'm still relying that its more then simple PR tactic that made verisign post to nanog originally and that they are going to consult internet engineering community before making any significant change to most widely used TLD infrastructure and that if there are any problems found that would arrise from the change that the plan to address them would be made available. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 04:35:36 -0700 (PDT) From: "william(at)elan.net" <william(a)elan.net> To: Matt Larson <mlarson(a)verisign.com> Cc: Subject: Re: VeriSign's rapid DNS updates in .com/.net On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Matt Larson wrote: > VeriSign Naming and Directory Services (VNDS) currently generates new > versions of the .com/.net zones files twice per day. VNDS is > scheduled to deploy on September 8, 2004 a new feature that will > enable VNDS to update the .com/.net zones more frequently to reflect > the registration activity of the .com/.net registrars in near real > time. After the rapid DNS update is implemented, the elapsed time > from registrars' add or change operations to the visibility of those > adds or changes in all 13 .com/.net authoritative name servers is > expected to average less than five minutes. Questions/Comments: 1. Currently SLD deligation info for .com/.net TLDs seems to be updated about twice a day and new entire TLD dns zone is published as one bulk operation. These changes seems to be synced pretty well to changes in whois database as seen at whois.crsnic.net, so listing of nameservers in whois seems almost always correct. Is it my understanding that after this change SLD dns delegation will not be synced to nameserver listing in whois? 2. Is it only changes in SLD delegation (listing of nameservers or ips of nameservers) that will be effected? Does that mean that changes to domain such as moving domain from one registrar to another, delition of domain will still be done once per day? Related - what about status codes as submitted by registrar? In particular, would change of status that causes domain to temporarily or permanently not be delegated (but keeps listing of nameservers in whois) also be processed immediatly? > VNDS will continue to publish .com/.net zone files twice per day as > part of the TLD Zone File Access Program. [2] These zone files will > continue to reflect the state of the .com/.net registry database at > the moment zone generation begins. 3. Is it my understanding that with this change those who participate in bulk whois program will not be able to see entire history of dns delegation changes for the domain? In that case, you remove value of participation in bulk TLD zone downloads for certain kinds of research activity and in addition may actually be breaking service agreement for providing this kind of data. To cover that "hole" you need provide a way to not only download entire TLD zone but also changes done to domain since last time entire TLD zone file has been published (to give an example what I'm asking is ability to download "UPDATES" as in routevews directory rather then entire bgp dump from "RIBS" directory). Please note that being able to find entire history of domain delegation changes is important in quite a number of cases, for example when you need to show that either your dns registrar or isp screwed up (and then corrected itself but does not want to admit it because that may cause them to pay compensation per SLA) or to show improper unathorized use of the domain, when its suspect that domain may have been hijacked (but dns has been changed for half an hour and then returned back) or when you're tracking domains used by spammers that change info from one zombie computer to another every 10-30 minutes (you want to be able to create entire list of zombies associated with such a domain and report these to ISPs, not just one or two taken once or twice per day, because otherwise spammers would just register different domain when that reported one is deactivated but they will still keep use of the same zombies) > VNDS does not anticipate any negative consequences of deployment of > rapid updates to the .com/.net zones. However, as a courtesy we are > providing the Internet community with 60 days advance notice of the > change to the update process. 4. Last comment is I believe that such public announcement of changes should to go other mail lists and not just nanog which covers primarily those concerned with network routing in US and Canada, but not necessarily with dns operations at your ISP. I'm subscribed to at least three dns specific mail lists and have not seen anything there. The onece I remember by name are isp-dns.com, the other is bind-users, third one is I think dns list at RIPE. I'm not suggesting you make announcement on exactly those lists (or only on those lists + nanog), but if Verisign is trying to have better involvement with community and making viable prior notices worldwide of changes it is making to dns system, some investigation on where is it best to make such notices that it would reach largest number of persons concerned with dns technical support worldwide should be done. > Some questions and answers about rapid updates for .com/.net are > available at http://www.verisign.com/nds/naming/rapid_update/faq.html. > > [1] http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/2004-01/msg00115.html > > [2] http://www.verisign.com/nds/naming/tld/ Additionally I notice that on the page you included as reference to TLD zone file information on Verisign website (link [2] above) does not seem to contain any reference to this upcoming change (or link to your own FAQ - another link above) or ability for public to comment on such things. -- William Leibzon Elan Networks william(a)elan.net

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Fwd: Crackdowns don't slow Internet piracy
by Fergie (Paul Ferguson) 14 Jul '04

14 Jul '04

This is an interesting article -- not necessarily off-topic, given snippets such as: "The popularity of file-sharing is costing the largest Internet service providers $10 million per year each in bandwidth and network maintenance costs, CacheLogic said." and "It estimates Internet users around the globe freely exchange a staggering 10 petabytes -- or 10 million gigabytes -- of data, much of it in the form of copyright-protected songs, movies, software and video games." and "CacheLogic, which provides filtering technology for many of the world's largest ISPs, derived its results by monitoring daily traffic flow across its clients' networks." I was wondering if the NANOG readership-at-large had any experiences in this regard, concerning any of these statements, since I couldn't find anything of any real technical substance on CacheLogic's web page. See: http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/13/technology/internet_piracy.reut/index.htm?c… Thanks, - ferg -- "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg(a)netzero.net or fergdawg(a)sbcglobal.net

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Re: Spyware becomes increasingly malicious
by sthaug＠nethelp.no 14 Jul '04

14 Jul '04

> Ok.. but has BSD been attacked on the scale that MS code has? I would argue > no, not even close. Do you believe BSD is invulnerable to attack? Hardly.. I don't believe anybody is claiming that. However, the BSD code has been out *and* has been publicly scrutinized for quite a bit longer than Windows. > Unless you want to go back to text based browsers and kernals that fit on a > floppy, it is extermely difficult to eliminate all vulnerabilities in the > code of a sophisticated OS. The more complex the system, the easier it is to > break, and with the level of automation currently expected by most users, > this requires a very complex build. However, Microsoft creates complexity by design, because they integrate more and more stuff into the basic OS, and because all the various applications gain more features with each new release. > Could MS be made more secure, of course. Do I think they are actively > working on the problem, yes. Looks to me like they are actively working in two directions: - Trying to make the systems more secure by teaching developers to think about security, etc. - Trying to make the systems less secure, by making them steadily more complex. (And please don't try to tell me the *users* are demanding all the new features that MS put into the systems.) It will be interesting to see which direction wins out in the long run. > If Novell or Mac had risen to the top of the OS > heap, would they be catching all the viruses now? I think they would. They would certainly be catching viruses. Would they be catching *as many* viruses as MS? We don't know. > Really, my point was not to argue this, but that there is no justification > for malicious code, that you can't simply pawn it off on MS as being the > real problem. However, you can certainly argue that MS is *part of* the problem, or that they have *created* a large part of the problem themselves. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug(a)nethelp.no

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video distribution
by Christopher J. Wolff 14 Jul '04

14 Jul '04

Hello, I have a "state of the state" sort of question for you guru's out there. If I wanted to make a number of video streams available across an IP WAN network, I have a couple of options. Unicast or Multicast. Unicast isn't the most efficient method necessarily so my preference would be Multicast. Now since it's been years since I've thought about Multicast, are there any hot new technologies or methods available for video transmission over an IP network? Thank you very much for your time. Regards, Christopher J. Wolff VP CIO Broadband Laboratories, Inc. http://www.bblabs.com

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Off-Topic: N.Y. Buyout Firm Has Its Eye on MCI
by Fergie (Paul Ferguson) 14 Jul '04

14 Jul '04

"Leucadia National Corp., a New York buyout firm, has expressed interest in acquiring a controlling stake in MCI Inc., raising new questions about the telecommunications giant's future just three months after it emerged from bankruptcy." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45160-2004Jul12.html/?nav=yb… - ferg -- "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg(a)netzero.net or fergdawg(a)sbcglobal.net

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Looking for historical BGP announcement information
by Alex Rubenstein 14 Jul '04

14 Jul '04

Hello, I am looking for a database that would have BGP inserts/withdrawals from mid 1999 time frame. Any help is appreciated. -- Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, alex(a)nac.net, latency, Al Reuben -- -- Net Access Corporation, 800-NET-ME-36, http://www.nac.net --

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OT: xDSL hardware
by Charles Sprickman 14 Jul '04

14 Jul '04

Hi, I'm wondering if there are any ISPs here that are Covad partners that have found a need to terminate a DSL line alongside a T1 for backup. The problem I'm finding is that the Covad-supplied/approved routers are fairly feature-less, making any type of backup application impossible without some ugly hacks (put DSL in bridge mode, run ospf across both links). Is anyone aware of a WIC card that will work with the lower end Cisco gear (1700 or 2600 series) that will allow me to terminate an ADSL or preferably an SDSL line directly on the router? The idea being that the router is then aware of link up/down status... I found an ADSL card (WIC-1ADSL), but Covad is unable to tell us if this works with their dslams or not. I seem to recall an SDSL modem with a v.35 interface, does anyone know of such a thing that will work with Covad's dslams? Sorry for the OT... Charles -- Charles Sprickman spork(a)inch.com

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