GOVERNMENT’S ‘INTERNET2’ SEEN AS NEXT ‘NET BATTLEFIELD

FreeMarketNews.com ^ | Dec 10, 2004 | Chris Mack

[nuffsenuff]

Sweet!

Maybe the bandwidth hogs will jump of this internet and free up some speed for the rest of us.

[martin_fierro]

Internet 1, Internet 2, Internet X.

AOL will STILL suck.

[Noumenon]

Insto tracking of everybody? Rediculous. Has the author had any experience with network security appliances? Does NAT ring a bell? The author makes some silly assumptions about the way IPv6 will be used.

[mysterio]

If they turn it into a big government boondoggle like tv and radio, I will pass. This one has been fun, but I don't believe that "the wild west must be tamed by government." Leave it the hell alone, I say.

[Luddite Patent Counsel]

Cool! I'll be able to get flamed 10X faster than I do now, and the HSA will know about it!

[EdReform]

BTTT for later

[EternalVigilance]

A very interesting read.

[t-1000]

The author sounds paranoid.

The problem with bugging the whole world is that it very quickly will bring on "information overload."

Before the fall of the USSR, the East Germany Stazye had ever single phone line in east Berlin "bugged". They had thousands of miles worth of paper documentation and tapes of conversations that were record and never reviewed.
Pretty soon they entire agency became paralyzed with information. They had no idea where to start or what to review.
So they merely went about recording and archiving, never analyzing anything just documenting.
No indexes, no catalogs, no search techniques.

So you say "well they did not have computers."
Well computers just multiple the problem exponentially.
The reason why is instead of using the computers to refine the data, they merely employ them to capture a greater volume of data.
So instead of just recording your phone conversation. They would also record your shopping habits, your bills, your emails, your faxes, your TV viewing habits.

The problem with it that all this data is useless unless a human can analyze it.
If Microsoft want to tap into our phone conversations and everything else, let them.

Let them CHOKE ON the COW.

[the invisib1e hand]

Three privacy posts for me in one day (and probably four total in the past 3 months). I sense critical mass being reached.

Separately, Microsoft is the bogeyman again, eh? I think it's the dark side of having a useful and effective industry standard.

[Rakkasan1]

they made that a movie. it was called the Matrix.

[Paul C. Jesup]

If they turn it into a big government boondoggle like tv and radio, I will pass. This one has been fun, but I don't believe that "the wild west must be tamed by government." Leave it the hell alone, I say.

I agree with you. "The wild west must be tamed by government" translates to "the control freaks should have the rights to control you (and me)."

[Myrddin]

What a pile of uninformed, fear mongering hype. Microsoft isn't going to "own" the IP protocols as their "intellectual property". IP was developed under government funded DARPA contracts. It is public domain.

The early internet had so few machines that everyone had static addresses. It was only with the massive proliferation of IP users that a means of dynamically assigning addresses was needed to handle the demand. There is also the matter of routing IP packets. IP addresses are allocated in classes A, B, C and D. A class A network has room for 24 bits of user IP addresses. Class B has room for 16 bits of addresses. Class C is 8 bits of address. The problem boils down to these "blocks" of addresses being assigned to some organization. A company with 16 bits of address block that only uses 5 bits of it actively is sitting on an enormous block of addresses that nobody else can use. Trying to "share" those unusable addresses would royally screw up the IP router network.

IPv6 moves from 32-bit IP addresses to 128-bit IP addresses. That is enough address space for every grain of sand on the beach to be unique. Practically, the 128-bit space will subsume all of the IPv4 address space as a tiny subset. If you want a static IP address, it won't be necessary to pay some ISP an outrageous monthly fee to "own" a static address in their block of addresses. You will be able to plant a static IP address on anything you want. People who are concerned about "privacy" can still operate from blocks of dynamically assigned addresses. That capability will be retained to support devices that attach to the network on a "casual" basis. The dynamically assigned IP will be appropriate for the routers attached to the "casual" attachment point.

Having a "static" IP address and roaming all over the place isn't as easy as it sounds. When your "roaming" device with a static IP address comes in contact with the network, there must be some mechanism available to inform the IP routers of the path necessary to send packets to your current location. That mechanism needs to be dynamic.

I've been "preparing" for interaction with IPv6 for almost 10 years. Windows, QNX and Linux are "almost" ready. There is still massive amounts of network equipment that isn't even close. Those commodity routers down at Walmart from Dlink, SMC, Linksys and Netgear are IPv4 devices. Unless we are exceptionally blessed by benevolent equipment suppliers, those devices will become paperweights. A functional device will need to discern IPv4 and IPv6 and act appropriately based on what shows up.

[t-1000]

But the Matrix did the exact opposite. The computers were not interested in our information, they were interested in tapping our body energy.
Actually they had no use for our intelligence, so much so they had to design a Matrix just to occpuy it so the body would not die.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

I didn't know the old Internet was broken.

As long as they don't shut it off when the "new and improved" version is up and running, I don't care whether it's static or DHCP addressing.

[Egg]

It's never the general masses that the government desires to monitor. It's only the "bad apples." Unfortunately, the definition of "bad apple" changes from dictator to dictator. You may be a law abiding citizen today, a rebel tomorrow.

[Malleus Dei]

Forget the paranoia argument against it: they can track you NOW.

Internet 2 is faster than the ordinary Internet. This is good.

[t-1000]

You are missing the greater point. The more the government or any organization becomes aware of the potential advantages of tapping information, the quicker they become overwelhmed with it.
It started out the same way in east Germany. Tap Joe's phone (because he is a "bad" guy). Then tap Joe's sister's phone. Then tap Joe's sisters friend's phone. The next thing you they are tapping Joe's 1st grade teachers phone.
Who in the world would be able to even process all the information?
Nobody. It all becomes totally useless.

[mvpel]

The current Internet was not built with the idea of every machine in the world using static IP addresses. Most computers aren’t individually identifiable unless the user makes a special effort. In fact, businesses charge extra fees for consumers to use static IP addresses. All that will change with the next-generation Internet, which is being built so that each user can, and probably will, receive his or her own static IP address.

That's a paragraph of nonsense right there, starting with a patently false sentence right off the bat.

The internet was, in fact, originally designed envisioning every device having a globally-unique IP address, way back in 1981 and before.

The only reason that businesses charge extra for static addresses is because the IPv4 address space has become a precious, limited commodity with the explosion of the Internet over the past several years.

The technology of network-address translation (which allows me to connect ten different computer systems here at home using a single IP address from my ISP on the rest of the Internet) was only introduced about 10 years ago when it started to become clear that due to routing limitations and growth that the address space would become more and more crowded and impractical to manage due to the design of the protocol.

Here's a link on the history of NAT. It's a kluge that was designed to stretch the life of an unscalable protocol, and it was intended as such.

Likewise, the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, which enables the assignment of non-static IP addresses to ISP customers, was only formalized in March of 1997, after having been introduced in 1993.

[mvpel]

The US government has started requiring suppliers to support IPv6 - many of the equipment manufacturers have been updating their products and code to add it as a result. I wouldn't be surprised to see the smaller stuff follow suit before long.