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Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired)Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired)Posted Aug 27, 2008 7:51 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)In reply to: Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired) by drag Parent article: Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired)
(Isn't it lovely that the internet is designed to work with no knowledge of the sort of information being transmitted on it? To bad people are working hard to subvert that..) Could you expand on this? Who is working to subvert it, and how?
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Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired) Posted Aug 27, 2008 17:01 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]
I took that as a reference to all the deep packet inspection and
anti-network-neutrality efforts going on. Blocking, deliberately RSTing, or severely throttling traffic somebody in power doesn't like, or in ordered to demand that an additional toll be paid to give the traffic what should be ordinary privileges.
Duncan
Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired) Posted Aug 28, 2008 1:09 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Yep. That and content filtering by governments and businesses.
It's just a few steps away if certain folks get what they want... It's well known that many governments filter web access heavily. As the technical savvy of it's citizens increase then that desire for control and censorship will want to spread to other protocols.
And it's not just places like China and the Middle East. In most places in Europe many types of political expressions are illegal. Imagery, docs, websites, etc etc. Being in possession and knowingly transporting banded forms of speech can be a very serious offense. In the U.S.A. we have rules against that sort of censorship (for now), but people will want to use the government control over the airwaves to extend to things like 'Free wireless internet, but with no porn for kids'.
Then there is big pushes to monitor communications in and out of the country. And most governments want the ability to filter and restrict information during times of war and social unrest. (if 'the people' are able to orginize and spread information outside of controlled media then it may be possible for them to out manuver police forces or spread riots on a much wider scale; for example.)
Once the luddites in government finally realize that 'OMFG Internet != WorldWideWeb' they are going to want to do a hell of a more then monitor and filter websites. They'll want to spend billions to develop technology to monitor and filter content on all sorts of different protocols.
Then you can probably imagine the next step.. People have already used encryption to try to work around perceived protocol manipulation by their ISPs, and evade piracy laws, regarding p2p systems like Bittorrent.
Once the average government person realizes that all the money they spend on monitoring and filtering content is completely and totally f-ing worthless if somebody sets up something as trivial as a https website in Cuba then they'll want to pass all sorts of horrific laws.
You can see all sorts of hints at it when people mention 'terrorists' and 'laptops' and how the terrorists are actually quite educated and savvy enough to encrypt information and hide communications on websites.
Back in the 90's there was a big push and fear surrounding things like the 'Clipper chip', government-mandated back doors into encryption protocols, and Encryption Key Escrow laws.
Us in the U.S. are not going to see this sort of push right now, due to the elections. But I expect that within 3 years people are going to start to fight hard again on restricting access of effective encryption technology to the common people.
Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired) Posted Aug 28, 2008 6:34 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
one point I disagree with you over.
you lump filtering by 'governments' and 'businesses' together and label them both evil, why didn't you list 'schools' and 'parents' as well?
businesses should have the right to filter content for their own networks just like parents should have the right to filter content on their own networks.
filtering isn't inherently evil (how many people run with not anti-spam filters for example), where it crosses the line is when you filter (or force a filter) on someone else's network.
Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired) Posted Aug 28, 2008 11:12 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Why is it any more ethical for a business to filter its network connection
(modulo spam of course) than it is for a business to tap its employees' use of its phones?
Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired) Posted Aug 28, 2008 19:28 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
becouse the company is paying for the line and the company is paying the employees.
there is no right to unfiltered internet access from work (there is no right to _any_ internet access from work)
and there are situations where it's perfectly legitimate for companies to record phone calls. and filter e-mail (inbound and outbound)
it's not legitimate to do these things without notice that they are happening, but with such notice it's legal (and in some industries, required)
companies are paying the bill and providing the tools for their employees to get work done, if the company wants to allow those tools to be used for non-work purposes they can do so, they can also define what is reasonable.
with phones companies limit where you can call to (blocking 900 numbers and international calls in many cases) and they have enough logging that if someone runs up silly amounts of long-distance calls they will take action. If you run up several hundred dollar a month phone bills on your cell phoen most companies will take action against you.
why should computer use be any different?
Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired) Posted Aug 28, 2008 21:04 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I don't have any problem businesses filtering their private network.
I do it at my work.
(Also I have very easy ways to work around the most vigorous filtering techniques.)
But ISPs are beginning to heavily filter and monitor traffic. There are lots of very rich and power companies that would love to have the government actively monitoring the internet for their own benefit. Lots of companies would stand to make a whole lot of money from being paid to monitor the internet.
As you have seen with TiVO and the broadcast flags many businesses are successfully able to use government as a springboard for having private companies dictate hardware and software design, backed up by fines and imprisonment. Already lots of people have been assaulted and caged up for the sake of keeping them quiet for the sake of protecting the profits of multinational corporations. Not for actually piracy, but just talking about technology that people could use to do piracy.
Businesses by themselves are harmless.
They are no less evil, stupid, or badly run as any government.. it's the same issue with any sufficiently large human-based organization.
The difference is that governments retain to themselves the ability to seize property, demand compulsory payments and back it up with real threats, fine people, imprison people, and kill people. Businesses, generally, are not allowed to that sort of thing (legally) unless they are under contract from governments. It's the same thing for any country. USSR, GB, France, China, Australia, USA, etc. The only differences is the circumstances in which the government penalties kick into effect. (for example: China can kill people on political grounds. police in Germany can kill people to prevent serious crimes (like murder), but in the USA the government can still kill people even after the murder took place as punishment.)
In my country individuals do retain some rights to kill people, when defending their life and other people's lives, and some notion of that extends to corporations (since they are nothing but a group of individuals), but generally under even more restrictions.
Now businesses, in comparison, are much less of a threat. If I piss of, say, Ford Motor Company then they can't send armed men to my house and take me away from my family. Only the government can do that. So unless I do something very fraudulent the worst possible outcome is that a bank may reposes my car and ruin my credit. In the larger scheme of things this may be quite unpleasant, but it's not very bad and the effect is only temporary.
Now, unfortunately, what we are seeing is that we have government and businesses are working together.
The People (Us) gave the government power to control aspects of commerce and business in a attempt to protect ourselves and the economy from dishonest businessmen. Unfortunately it was not really done in a very good manner because we are seeing laws meant to control businesses being turned around and used to control individuals for the _sake_ businesses. So instead of us in charge of the government we are seeing the government AND business working together to maximize profit and power.
Of course all of this is extending to attempts to control how the Internet functions, like I mentioned above.
Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired) Posted Aug 28, 2008 21:05 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Businesses by themselves are harmless.
I mean in comparison. They are capable of some serious bad things by themselves, of course, like any other group of humans.
Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired) Posted Aug 28, 2008 22:34 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
More to the point, public companies in particular are potentially immortal
`individuals' with no consistent ideals at all and with a legal requirement to be sociopathic.
Companies as originally constituted were a good idea, but things started
(Er, sorry for the nasty centre-embedded sentence, I can't think of a
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