Auerbach on Internet Cruft

Captain Beefheart writes "Karl Auerbach has a story on CircleID in which he declares '...Between spam, anti-spam blacklists, rogue packets, never-forgetting search engines, viruses, old machines, bad regulatory bodies, and bad implementations, I fear that the open Internet is going to die sooner than I would have expected.' The Balkanization of the 'Net appears to be upon us."

Never reuse a IP

[Pac]

With IPv6 we may simply use an IP number only once (for one machine, one service, even one connection if this is desirable). As the topmost poster points, when we run out of IPv6 numbers we may well start over, since most old numbers will have been used in another Galaxy, in planetary systems whose stars had long gone Nova, so whatever contamination they suffered probably died too.

linear vs. exponential

[Anonymous Coward]

It's important to ask if he means there is a linear growth rate of crap or an exponential growth rate of crap. If it's the case that the crap is growing exponentially then increasing the available space once will only stave off the problem a little while -- the only solution would be an exponentially growing address space, growing faster than the growth rate of crap.

ya dig?

Eye of the Beholder

[lowqwashus]

Remember 9-10 years ago when the good 'ole research-oriented Internet was first defiled by the masses? This article may have actually mattered then. Now, who bloody cares? Yes, the amount of crap on the Internet is increasing but so what? Strip malls and outlet shopping are where farms used to be. And before that, there were those who lamented farms that replaced the wilderness. If you don't like the strip malls, don't go there.

Re:Unclear on the concept-uh, just who is unclear?

[stratjakt]

If the level of background traffic ever nearly approached the danger levels he's spouting about, then the big backbone providers will correct the situation.

They can do a lot to stop spam and ddos attacks the like, but the problem is they get paid for bandwidth - so they arent inclined to care where the traffic comes from.

But if it gets to the point that its going to erode their customer base, they'll start dropping bad traffic, adding more pipes, whatever it takes to keep the system rolling.

I'm not worried.

Re:The scariest part about Balkanization.

[Bonker]

The 'Open' Internet was never unbiased or ucensored. It sure seemed that way, until you remember that a handful of sysadmins controlled which groups got created on usenet and which groups were censored. Those with more networking hardware got to make more of the decisions because more of the traffic passed through their equipment. You blocked 'alt.borkborkbork' in one key place and it got blocked to a great deal of the people who could keep it alive today.

'Unbiased' will never enter into the equation. Sorry.

'Uncensored', however, describes the vast number of people who can and do use the Internet and any other communication outlet they can in a myriad of ways to spread their own ideologies, their own software, their own news coverage, and their own gossip. As soon as one avenue for this kind of information is blocked, another springs up.

As soon as Napster was shut down, Kazaa and Gnutella became more popular. With Kazaa and Gnutella's decline in popularity due to the rabid, power-mongering influence of copyright interests (RIAA Lawsuits), other, more immune file sharing apps are gaining acceptance.

Think of the net as a huge, self-regenerating organism. Its cells are not computers, but people who want to spread information via whatever method possible.

At first it's simple and dedicated solely to its own task. As it's attacked and parisited, it begins to develop defenses and immunities to those attacks. Unlike natural selection, which required brute-force trial and error combinations to build those defenses, the Internet has thinking logical minds building its defenses, which include spam filters, intelligent routing, firewall, mail, and other message protocols, data encryption, steganography, high-bandwidth transmission pipes, error correction, and other tools to control the 'background radiation'.

I, for one, use data encryption in almost every kind of computer-to-computer file transmission I make, just out of habit. Do you?

If you don't beleive that the net is building its own defenses, note the truly desperate measures the aforementioned copyright interests are going to now in order to try to stop the evolutionary tide. The RIAA knows it can't keep up technologically with the HUGE number of people people sharing files, so it's attempting to change they way they behave with organized legislation and 'public education' drives.

The Internet, the people who write software and share data of any kind, is disorganized and seems unable to act in response fast enough. The million monkeys on a million typewriters eventually spouts software like Freenet. Freenet, while hard to use when compared to Kazaa or Napster, is almost completely immune from RIAA, MPAA, or publishing industry attacks, and may even be immune from the best efforts of law enforcement and repressive governments.

Just today, the RIAA leaked that it can track files by their MD5 sums. How long will it be (later this evening) before someone writes code that will pad MP3s in a way that skews their MD5 sums but leaves the music listenable? How long will it be before that code or something very much like it makes its way into WASTE or Gnutella? Even if this code is made illegal and the writer/perpetrator goes to jail, how will the media industry stop it when it's already in the hands of the public?

We're not just developing technological defenses either, but mental and social defenses. The EFF makes it possible for anyone to fax their senator and other legislators for free. (http://action.eff.org/ [eff.org]) Various internet websites publish details about public figures and public officials, especially those with the clout to make change.

Remember who originally reported on Monica Lewinsky? Matt Drudge. Who all will report on the fact that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld more or less set up undercover CIA agents to take the fall for the Iraq-Nigeria scandal [onlinejournal.com]?

The Internet is under attack, but without attack, it will never become stronger and immune to those attacks.

Re:The scariest part about Balkanization.

[mi]

I agree. However, there are simply too many decisions to make in today's life, so some/most of them are delegated to a specialist. Be that your friendly sysadmin deciding on which blacklist to use or your friendly FCC comissioners deciding, what radio jockeys must "beep out" as obscene...

Note, that although the two sample specialists above are appointed in a totally different manner, they both act as censors (an honorable and coveted position in ancient Rome, BTW).

The discussion in this forum is somewhat distorted, because most of the participants are their own sysadmins, while FCC is a remote entity. But the point is, censorship can be good -- as long as you control the censors...

Re:what is balkanization?

[mrchaotica]

I think it refers to fragmentation by social groups; alluding to the collapse of yugoslavia (in the balkan peninsula) into a bunch of little racially-divided countries (bosnia etc) from google [google.com], it apparantly is an antonym of globalization oh, by the way... RTFD[ictionary] [reference.com] : )

Re:Waaah

[Concerned Onlooker]

I presume you don't count yourself among the morons. In fact, just like everybody else around here who complains about "stupid people" you must be a genius. In all aspects of life at that. Sheesh, who hasn't been stupid or ignorant about something at some point each week of our lives? Besides, you ought to be thankful there are so many stupid people about, otherwise you wouldn't look so good.

This really isn't meant as a flame, it's just that the holier than thou attitude and the everybody-else-is-stupid-but-I'm-not mindset ticks me off.

Sorry for being OT.

Don't Panic, Noise is a just a by-product of Life

[jrifkin]

File this under Chicken Little.

The author concludes, mistakenly IMHO, that an increase in noise from undetectable to "noticeable lines on my MRTG graphs" will inevitably lead to "a Niagara-like roar that drowns the usability of the Internet". I don't think so. Noise is a by-product of life, it is unavoidable, and not an indication of impending system failure. The author is another victim of that classic mistake, linearly extrapolating a relation from a small domain to a much larger scale.

The author mentions three main sources of noise

1. Stale IP addresses, such as defunct Name Servers.
2. DOS Viruses
3. Spam

(1) will not scale with the growth of valid traffic, and thus should be ignored. (2) will go away over time as security holes are patched and MS learns how to avoid the buffer overrun mistakes that have created their stunning vulnerabilities. (3), I believe, depend on the same MS security holes, and thus will decrease as MS security holes decrease. The net result is that over time (say 1 to 5 years) the current noise to signal ratio will decrease. I'll check back in 2008.

Re:Off topic...

[Grunschev]

It's just one of those social mores things. My favorite example is "shit" vs "poop". Both are words for the same thing, but it's perfectly okay for a 4 year old to say "poop" but if he says "shit" it's bad.

My son is 7 now. He doesn't say "poop" and his mother won't like it if he says "shit", but he has found out it's okay for him to say "crap."

It's all a bunch of guano if you ask me.

Igor