Going Fourth

This Fourth of July has probably got to be one of the most depressing in recent memory for me.  It's depressing because what has been for almost two and a half centuries a celebration of freedom feels so unspeakably hollow to me.  And it shouldn't.

The Great Firewall of America

For the last year or so, I've been keeping an eye on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) with a slightly more than casual level in interest.  It is a far reaching and expansive "trade" treaty that seeks to impose harsh penalties on copyright infringers and those who deal in counterfeit goods.  A little over a year ago, the Obama Administration refused to divulge any information about ACTA in the first place, citing "national security concerns."  Over the last ten years, anybody citing "national security concerns" over anything that isn't remotely related to defense spending, intelligence activities, or military deployments automatically falls into the category of suspicious as hell in my mind.  Naturally, the text of the draft agreement leaked out on to the Internet.  At that time, the most heinous portions of the agreement were provisions that demanded DMCA-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that demanded material be removed from websites by ISPs if the ISP received word that the material was infringing on somebody's copyright, without any actual effort or mechanism to investigate the veracity of the complaint or appeal the decision.  Additionally, there were provisions that prohibited breaking DRM for any reason (again, shades of the DMCA), and rules requiring ISPs to actively police sites with user-contributed material for potential copyright violations, as well as cutting off Internet access to accused (not convicted) infringers.  The entire Blogger site, not just this blog, would doubtlessly shut down because of the literally prohibitive cost involved in trying to cover the costs of lawyers who did nothing all day but scour blogs looking for POSSIBLE copyright infringements.

A year later, things have not gotten any better.  Two months ago, the MPAA sent a representative to an information meeting about ACTA down in Mexico.  It's not terribly surprising in and of itself, since the MPAA has championed the cause of ACTA by crying foul over piracy and believing that ACTA (or the analogous American version of it, COICA) would allow it to finally crush movie piracy in much the same way that the Death Star was supposed to crush the Rebel Alliance.  What was surprising at this meeting was that the MPAA rep asked the seemingly innocuous question of whether or not ACTA could be used to block "dangerous" web sites such as WikiLeaks.  Keep in mind that this was coming shortly after WikiLeaks dumped almost a hundred thousand pages worth of documents that the Pentagon had classified which contained some of its dirty laundry.  The government was pissed off at WikiLeaks and such a question answered in the affirmative could very easily be used as justification to go after equally "dangerous" web sites, though the danger the MPAA is most afraid of is the danger to the bottom lines of the studios as opposed to any trifling concerns about the safety of troops in the field or American civilians potentially targeted by terrorists.

Recently, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) left the Senate Judiciary Committee.  As the EFF reported earlier today, the bill probably won't come up to the full Senate until the start of the next session, but it's troubling given bipartisan opposition to the bill and a host of engineers who basically helped assemble the Internet piece by piece, protocol by protocol.  The first most troubling element of the bill is the blacklist.  The Attorney General (or those underlings acting in the name of the Attorney General's Office) would suddenly have the power to kill a website if it allegedly had infringing material.  Much like the DMCA and ACTA, there's no mechanism in place to contest or appeal such an action, nor is there any provision for an investigation into verifying a claim of copyright infringement.  DMCA claims aren't 100% right, what's to say that the COICA would have a better average?  It's an unregulated, unchecked, and unspeakably dangerous power.  There is simply too little in the way to prevent a gross abuse of the power.  The Attorney General's Office and the Attorney General are not elected officials, but rather filled by executive appointment, which means there is absolutely no means of accountability that can effectively be exercised against them.  Unaccountable bureaucrats given unchecked power is completely anathema to every principle America claims to hold dear.

The second most troubling element of COICA is the subversion (or perversion, if you prefer) of the DNS infrastructure currently under U.S. control.  For the last sixteen years, ever since the Internet became open to public and commercial use, the U.S. has rightly maintained a very hands-off policy towards Domain Name System servers.  You type in "Google" in the address bar of your browser, your command brings up Google by directing the request to one of the many servers which hold an IP address owned by Google.  This simple mechanism allows used to access sites both puritanical and prurient, commercial and crass, polished and amateurish.  Nations like China, Iran, Burma, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia have various filters and cutouts in place to divert requests for "undesirable" sites to sites that are "approved" by the existing regimes, or outright block the requests from ever reaching the undesirable sites, essentially cutting them off from being seen on the "official" Internet by their inhabitants.  Such filtering and blocking, exemplified by "The Great Firewall of China," is in place to crush dissent, inhibit communication, and ultimately control the population to keep the existing regimes in power by attempting to mask the inherent flaws and weaknesses in the system.  Yet this bill proposes that we emulate those countries, countries that the State Department, the United Nations, and various private organizations have been hectoring for years about their repressive Internet policies.  Worse, the bill proposes we do so not to prop up the existing government, but to prop up media conglomerates, businesses that have grown bloated over the years and are deathly afraid of technologies that have the potential to render them extinct.  The fact that the U.S. government would have the means to do precisely the same thing as the aforementioned nations is merely poisonous gravy.

The COICA, much like the PATRIOT Act, has been rushed through with absolutely indecent haste, previous efforts to table the bill notwithstanding.  Like the PATRIOT Act, the stated benefits cannot possibly outweigh the potential liabilities.  Unlike the PATRIOT Act, the single purpose motivating this unholy abortion of a bill is pure unadulterated greed, whatever high minded language might be employed to claim otherwise.

Normally, I don't ask much of my readers.  I take it as a given that my work will eventually percolate through the Internet and people will read it.  This once, I'd take it as a personal kindness if people who read this would pass a link along to friends and family members.  I want people to get mad about this, because it's something they rightly should be mad about.  I know that it doesn't seem as important as the unemployment situation, or the financial markets, or the fact that gas and food prices are going up.  It's not one of those issues that seemingly has any survival value.  Rather, it's an issue that affects the value of survival, and it's important for that reason.  What does it gain you to have food in your gut and gas in your tank, but live under threat of being silenced and cut off from the larger world just because some rich bastards in Hollywood are crying foul?  Nothing, which is precisely what you have to lose by spreading the word.  Thanks.

Totally Uncalled For

I have a pretty simple outlook as far as the Internet goes.  I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me.  It's a system that has served me pretty well up to this point.

However, somebody over in China thought it would be a tremendously fabulous idea to hack my Gmail account, and my Facebook account, and otherwise poke around where they should not be poking.  I do not appreciate it.  I do not like it.  While I'm somewhat glad they didn't mess around with anything as far as I can tell, I'm a little annoyed that they didn't leave a note saying "This is how we got in.  Please close your door more securely."  As it turns out, Google was good enough to give me a warning.  It would have been nicer if they'd warned me when it happened instead of two days later.

Since somebody, or more likely several somebodies, felt it was fine to hack my account for no good reason, I feel no particular compunctions about keeping silent on the matter.  Below are the IP addresses of the individuals that hacked my accounts, along with the providers for those IPs.  Yes, I know, somebody could be spoofing the IPs, but it's a place to start.  Special thanks to All-Nettools for their free SmartWHOIS tool which helped make all this possible.

183.90.187.126
183.90.187.0 - 183.90.187.255
Asia Data (Hong kong) Inc. Limited
Block B 08/Floor
Hi-Tech Industrial CTR
No. 491-501 Castle Peak Road

ASIA DATA HONG KONG INC LIMITED - network admin
FLAT/RM 24 BLK B 08/F HI-TECH INDUSTRIAL CTR NO 491-501 CASTLE PEAK RD
TSUEN WAN HONG KONG
+852 39043643
+852 60618724
stanley@adi.hk

220.200.49.192
220.192.0.0 - 220.207.255.255
China United Network Communications Corporation Limited
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China

Xiaomin Zhou
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China
+86-10-66259626
+86-10-66259626
zhouxm@chinaunicom.cn

118.124.16.163
118.124.0.0 - 118.125.255.255
CHINANET Sichuan province network
China Telecom
A12,Xin-Jie-Kou-Wai Street
Beijing 100088

Chinanet Hostmaster
anti-spam@ns.chinanet.cn.net
No.31 ,jingrong street,beijing
100032
+86-10-58501724
+86-10-58501724

Remember, folks, I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me, and everybody's happy.

What Goes Around

Tuesday wasn't exactly a banner day for the FCC as a federal appeals court unanimously decided that the agency had overreached itself when ordering broadband provider Comcast not to block its customers from using BitTorrent.  Comcast's spokesman was clearly pleased with the ruling when relaying the company's official statement: "our primary goal was always to clear our name and reputation."  And yes, I just threw up a little in my mouth typing that.

This particular case has me feeling highly ambivalent.  On the one hand, I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the expansion of government power, and the FCC has demonstrated that when they use their power, they're about as subtle as a sequoia falling down, and not nearly as intelligent.  One slipped nipple and the Super Bowl halftime shows have largely suffered for it for the last several years (though I did like it when Tom Petty went on).  On the other hand, I'm not exactly a firm believer in the inherent goodness of the average American corporation either, particularly not one who's in the position to dictate how a measurable percentage of Americans access the Internet.  The old saw about being between the Devil and the deep blue sea certainly comes to mind.

So, what exactly happened on Tuesday and how is this going to affect the country?  To begin with, while I am not at all happy about the ruling, I do have to tip my hat to the judges for at least recognizing that the stated goal of the FCC in attempting to keep the Internet "free and open" wasn't at issue, merely their efforts to go about making it happen.  In a nutshell, the court ruled that the FCC's policies did not have the force of law.  By and large, this is a quite reasonable position to take, since the ruling doesn't just prohibit sound policies from being applied as law, but it also prohibits stupid policies from being applied as law.  If the FCC wants to enforce net neutrality, they have a few options available to them.  The first option would be to go to Congress and tell them to give the FCC the necessary power to make Comcast stop blocking subscribers.  This is probably the least likely to happen, mainly because it could possibly be years before such a bill got out of committee and up for a vote.  Moreover, Congress isn't exactly beloved of the people right at the moment, and all it would take to kill any bill would be a few whispers placed in the right ears of the right talking heads.  "Look!" the heads would say with gravity and outrage, "Look how Congress is trying to ram more government down our throats!"  The second option would be to appeal up to the Supreme Court.  This one might actually take longer than having to deal with Congress.  With Congress, you can always reintroduce a bill.  If the Supremes decide to take a case, or decline to take it, that's it.  Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Probably as we speak, Comcast technicians are putting the port blocking in place for BitTorrent and other file sharing programs, and probably other programs that it feels "unfairly competes" (read: free) with their subscription services, all while the suits are chortling and thinking that they showed the FCC who's boss.  That would be a fatally foolish attitude to be adopting, because there is a third option, one that is not only the most expeditious but also potentially the most troublesome.  The FCC could decide that that broadband services are to fall under the same rules as phone lines, with all of the attending "common carrier" regulations.  It's less of a "nuclear option" and more of a "neutron bomb option," meaning that all the infrastructure will still be there, but nobody will be around to use it.  Why will nobody be around to use it?  Because once those regulations are in place, the broadband ISPs like Comcast and Cox will not be lowering prices, they will be raising them. Purely for "administrative costs" to defray "traffic generated by other networks."  The increase in prices, particularly in a recessionary climate, will cause people to cut back or even abandon their broadband connections, as much as it will pain them to do so.  This will cause the ISPs to raise prices further, to cover the costs of "maintaining our award winning broadband services."  In turn, more people abandon their broadband.  When it's all said and done, ISPs won't be offering broadband anymore because they'll claim that "there's no interest in the product."  Nevermind the fact that people once had broadband and were quite happy with it as a general rule.  The difference between a ripple effect and a blast wave is a matter of perspective.

It's not going to be just the average American consumer who's going to get hit by this.  The earliest victims will be bandwidth-intensive but incredibly popular sites and services.  YouTube?  Reduced to a shell of its former self.  Skype?  Gone.  Hulu?  The biggest disappointment for NBC Universal since they screwed Conan O'Brien.  From there, the carnage spreads out into other areas, predominantly into the game sector.  The twelve million plus players on World of WarCraft will suddenly find themselves brought down by a foe more terrible than Onyxia or The Lich King.  Microsoft's XBox Live and Sony's Playstation Network will become shadows of their former glory, reduced to branded patch servers.  Steam and Impulse will collapse as gamers are cut off from the virtual marketplaces.  All those stupid bastards who went and bought the PC version of Assassin's Creed II will howl at the money wasted because Ubisoft wasn't smart enough to foresee the possible amputation of broadband, and the guys at Blizzard will probably be living out of their cubicles to try and change Diablo III to avoid that same mistake.  Would there be any survivors of this apocalypse?  Twitter might well survive, despite some people's desire to the contrary, since anybody with a cell phone could update on that.  Facebook and MySpace will probably take a hit, but continue on as before.

I can hear somebody out in the Peanut Gallery saying, "The world will not end because you stupid Americans don't have broadband!"  Whoever that is, you're right.  The world will not end.  But it will change.  If the last fifteen years or so have been any indicator, what happens on the Internet and to the Internet in one geographic area can have almost incalculable changes to the rest of the world.  And there is no guarantee that those changes will be good for any other part of the world.  It would be a sorry state of affairs that America entered the Information Age equivalent of a Dark Age simply because one ISP went and sued the FCC because of a spat over the use of bandwidth for a program that competed with the ISP's non-Internet products.  Some will doubtlessly argue that such a nightmare scenario could never possibly happen.  Perhaps not to the degree that I've outlined here, but don't think for one instant that the blowback from this case won't touch anybody beyond Comcast and the FCC.

Even today, karma is a vital and active force within the Internet.  What goes around does come around.  And I don't like to think what will happen when it finally comes around.

A Tale of Three Cities

Earlier this week, I was sent out on assignment to San Mateo, CA to cover an event hosted by Capcom to show off the multiplayer component of their upcoming title Lost Planet 2.

This is not about that event.

This is something of a "behind the scenes" look at what a roving (or even raving) reporter goes through when their editor hands them an assignment that takes them out of town.  I spent a good chunk of two days sitting in airports or up in the air trying to get to San Mateo and back home.  I know there are some folks who went to the same event who had their own trials and tribulations getting there.  This is not meant to belittle or diminish their suffering.  Just as every family is unhappy in its own unique way, every traveler is inconvenienced in their own unique way.

For those of you that have never flown into or through Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport, it's not a bad experience by any stretch of the imagination.  For a town that gets disparaging looks and upturned noses from folks in Tucson, Sky Harbor could very nicely serve as an art gallery, if not for the fact that you'd have to hop from terminal to terminal to see all the pieces collected there.  I felt particularly fortunate on this trip that one of the gallery sections in Terminal 4 had an exhibition of artwork from legendary animator Chuck Jones.  While there were some animation cells and sketches from various Warner Brothers cartoons, there were some original pieces of his work that were completely unrelated to his animation career but were still quite impressive.  Once I was through the TSA checkpoint, I found my gate and hunkered down with my laptop to while away a couple hours.  Sky Harbor is particularly nice for the Wi-Fi equipped traveler because the only thing between you and the Internet is a brief warning message about all the myriad dangers the Internet poses and a disclaimer of liability if you get hacked or infected with a virus.  I had considered writing a blog post from Sky Harbor but decided I didn't really have the material yet.  In retrospect, that was probably a mistake.

The booking of my tickets for the event was not handled by myself, or even by Armchair Empire, but rather through a PR firm.  Even PR firms can't guarantee direct flights.  Which is how I found myself in Las Vegas' McCarran Airport early Monday afternoon.  I haven't been in Vegas since I was a year and a half old and was inhaling the prime rib from the plates of various family members.  Part of me would have liked to be able to bum around for a day or so, maybe even check out Konami and see what they were cooking up.  Alas, it wasn't meant to be.  Originally, I was projected to have a one hour layover.  This was pushed back to almost two hours.  I didn't get a chance to hop on the Internet at McCarran.  The gate area had a marked lack of free outlets, and the ones that it did have were taken up.  I should also point out that the presence of slot machines, and such a considerable number of them, was decidedly different than what I've seen in other airports, though it is by no means totally unexpected.

San Francisco International had something of the inverse problem from McCarran.  There were plenty of places to plug in, but their Wi-Fi was provided by T-Mobile, which meant that you weren't going to be getting on unless you were willing to shell out $8 for a "day pass" or $50 to start a monthly subscription.  Given the hippie nature of the city, you'd think they'd be all about peace, love, and free Wi-Fi.  Apparently, it is not to be.  Admittedly, getting a chance to get on when I arrived at SFO was not in the cards, but with a two hour delay on my return flight, finding a socket and a comfy chair was definitely a priority.  So, no Facebook, no email, no chat.  Good thing I had those Baen e-books saved to my hard drive.  It would have been a long time sitting around otherwise.

But  I am now home, back from the event, and hopefully back on a quasi-regular writing schedule again.

Now we just need the Trilateral Commission . . .

Amid all the brouhaha over the health care bill, there's another bill currently in committee in the Senate which probably will make it out of committee without much in the way of serious debate. As reported by Declan McCullagh on this CNET news piece, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has reintroduced a bill that went nowhere fast last year.  While a large chunk of the text of the bill appears to be proposed rules for certification of cybersecurity professionals, there are some elements of the bill that are particularly disturbing despite language which states that civil liberties will be protected.

Towards the start of the so-called Cybersecurity Act of 2010 (S.773), one of the stated goals of the bill is to grant the President the power to designate a specific system as a "United States critical infrastructure information system" which meets sufficient criteria (to be determined later) such that if said system was compromised, it would constitute a threat to "strategic national interests."  While there is a phrase buried halfway into the text that states the act is not to be construed as an expansion of existing Presidential authorities, it seems exceedingly difficult not to quantify what is essentially nationalization of currently held private sector Internet assets by Presidential fiat under the guise of a "cybersecurity emergency" as anything less than such an expansion.  Language further down in the text may delimit how long such an emergency may be used as justification, but the language doesn't feel like it is sufficiently robust to guarantee a showdown between Congress and the President will end well for Congress, or by extension American users of the Internet.

I'll be the first to admit that when it comes to cybersecurity, America could probably learn to do a lot better keeping the doors locked.  And while there's a part of me that wouldn't mind seeing cybersecurity get some genuine attention from the government, I think this is the wrong way to go about it.  I think federally mandated and designed certification schemes do not carry any inherently greater likelihood of effectiveness than MCSE, A+, Net+, CCNA, or any one of the other dozens of alphabet soup certifications that overpromise and underdeliver.  If I've learned anything in my hunt for employment, it's that hiring managers are desperate to see those certifications on resumes while recruiters are perfectly aware that the certs aren't worth a damn.  They look pretty but they're proof only that somebody paid to take a test and didn't flunk it.  While the bill calls for people who have plans for a career in cybersecurity to be the primary beneficiary of the training programs, I can't help but suspect that it will soon become the latest "trendy" certification.  The shiny new degree that everybody will be scrambling to get and nobody will actually be able to practice.

Cybersecurity should not be quantified by committees and academics.  It should not be raised to the level of a specialized discipline divorced from the larger fields of computer science and information technology.  It should be a brutal Darwinian process that recognizes only the quick and the dead, or the l33t and the pwned if you prefer.  It should be an endless battle of wits between the most vicious, most brilliant, most fearless and inventive minds who ever got root access on a box.  Let the private sector take care of the private sector and the feds take care of the feds.  If a company or government agency wants to go hunting for talent, let them pony up for contests where "capture the flag" becomes "own the box" and pick out the people who've proven they're the best at what they do instead of smiling at the shiny little acronym on their resume.

However great it sounds on the surface, this bill is not going to help America figure out how to protect itself on the Internet.  It's an unworthy effort for unsavory ends by means of ineffective policies.