Posted on 06/02/2008 1:43:36 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
As the FCC auctions off an unused spectrum of airwaves, the winner may be forced to provide free wireless internet for most of the country. No date or terms for the auction have been set, but the government's deal requires that free service on the 25 MHz spectrum reaches at least half the in five years and 95 percent within ten years. The agreement, proposed by FCC chairman Kevin Martin, also stipulates that the bidder must filter out obscene content for allowing the winner to use the remaining portion of the spectrum for commercial purposes.
"We're hoping there will be increased interest in the proposal; and because this will provide wireless broadband services to more Americans, it is certainly something we want to see," said FCC spokesman Rob Kenny.
CTIA, the principal trade group for wireless companies, is unenthusiastic about the proposal, taking issue with the provision that the service must be free. Prior to this proposal, there has been little interest in this portion of the spectrum, as wireless carriers preferred the 700MHz airwaves auctioned a few months ago.
A startup company called M2Z previously asked to use the airwaves for free, providing free wireless with a content filter and garnering revenue from advertising that would be shared with the government. The FCC turned M2Z down, saying the company needed to bid against other carriers, but Martin's proposal is very similar. The next step is a June 12th meeting where more details are expected to be hammered out. [Source: AP Business and Yahoo! News]
You're saying that a whitelist-based port-blocking ISP could somehow let users do file-sharing and such? Nothing would get past the first hop.
Sure it would.
Someone just sets up a HTTP server that does proxy port forwarding. Done all the time.
Point your browser at the HTTP server that does the port forwarding, config your Internet Connection settings to use the proxy/port and you’re off to the races with most other applications. Many of the fire sharing apps now have their own settings for where you enter proxy server addresses/ports.
Or you could use socks2http on your machine.
There’s tons of ways around this. This is what is called “tunneling” in the generic sense. A long time ago, we used to tunnel AppleTalk inside IP packets to create huge AppleTalk networks for multi-national corporations, when there way no viable WAN routing for AppleTalk (ie, there’s nothing like BGP for AppleTalk).
There’s been IP tunneled inside ISO packets, (and vice-versa, as we were winding down support for DECnet v4 and v5), IPv6 inside IPv4, you name it. In these examples, there is no AppleTalk or IPv6 network beyond the first hop, just as you’re hoping to stop some port or protocol at the first hop.
You just take the payload, wrap it in an IP packet, shove it down the IPv4 network to the other end, and the only way you’d know that someone is using AppleTalk or IPv6 inside your company would be to... examine the packet contents.
Same deal with file sharing, porn, music, you name it.
Why would a whitelist include an HTTP server that does proxying or port-forwarding?
Sure.
At some point, there will be a proxy put up on some machine because there will be a demand for it. A little crypto on the payload and no one has a freakin’ clue what is going down the wire.
Let’s put it this way: You’re trying to out-thug the ChiCom’s, who have erected some of the most stringent net filtering.
They can’t make it work, and they have a lot more experience being totalitarians than the US Congress.
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