sean@donelan.com (Sean Donelan) writes:
The record labels don't want to give you that choice. If you read the complaint you'll notice the record companies never attempted to contact the immediate upstream ISP in China. ...
Am I the only one who finds it odd that it's illegal to export crypto or "supercomputers" to certain nations or to sell such goods with prior knowledge that the goods are going to be resold in those nations... or even to travel to certain nations... yet no law prohibits establishing a link and a BGP session to ISP's within those nations, or to ISP's who are known to have links and BGP sessions to ISP's within those nations? How long, in this new era of homeland security, can we expect it to last? How long before someone has to say "I'm sorry, I can't peer with you or sell you transit because you have downstreams or peers inside the axis of evil"? I'm not sure I'd be opposed to it, since economic blockades do appear to have some effect, and since data is a valuable import/export commodity. I think homeland security is a good thing if it means a mandate for IPsec, DNSSEC, edge RPF, etc... but if we *mean* it, then why are US packets able to reach ISP's in hostile nations? (My bet is that within 6.5 minutes of this message going out, there will be at least one public flame on the topic of "how freedom of information is the only way to bring down a totalitarian regime". Save it, please -- I can write, have written, and will write that whitepaper myself. This is not the same topic. I want to know what the homeland security department is likely to do about all this, not what is good/bad for the citizens of hostile nations or even nonhostile nations.) -- Paul Vixie