The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 17, 2008

Official News page 11


WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

The quote of the week had be one from Josephine Briggs, the newly appointed director of the US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). The center does proper scientific testing of alternative medicines to see if they meet their claims. When asked by Science magazine if anything that actually works has come out of CAM, she thought for a moment and replied, "the tai chi for shingles was very nice." [Source: Bob Parks-What's New newsletter]

This week saw an important anniversary - the 50th anniversary of the founding of the research organisation ARPA by the US government. ARPA research was responsible for the founding of the ARPANET, which went through various incarnations, eventually becoming the Internet that we all know (and love) today. ARPA is long since gone, and with it the sort of free wheeling research that drove computer science and computer networking forward when there appeared to be no payoff in the foreseeable future. Happy birthday and RIP ARPA.

But enough of my rambling - on to the biggest issue of Winding Down to date...


Analysis: The start of the third age

As I've indicated before, the Internet is currently passing through one of its periodic crises. This one is caused by the fact that it is being used to distribute much bigger files than previously - mainly video - and that a lot of the sharing is between users rather than downloading from central server. To give you some idea of how advanced this trend is, I've seen estimates that something like 37% of AT&T's traffic is peer to peer (P2P) file sharing traffic!

These problems are entirely independent of whether the files are 'legal' or not. They are caused by lack of investment in new capacity and by the changing patterns of usage which are shifting the burden onto different parts of the network - parts that were not really designed to handle the volume of traffic now developing.

In its original incarnation as ARPANET, the Internet was basically a P2P network. That is to say all the computers on the network were equally important and passed information back and forth directly to one another - a two way information flow.

As the Internet got bigger and became more commercialised, some computers became more equal than others, and information flow on the Internet became more client-server oriented. With this model the information flow becomes one way - the server sends information out to multiple clients, whose job is merely to request information and display it in a suitable form. There was also an order of magnitude increase in the amount of traffic on the network.

ISPs came into existence at this, the second stage of the Internet, and their infrastructure is currently designed to handle client-server architecture. That is, a (relatively) few massively connected nodes (big company servers) surrounded by a large number of lightly connected nodes (the consumer clients). One of the consequences of this is that most home consumer connections are asymmetrical - the download speed of the line is anything up to ten times that of the upload speed.

Unfortunately for the ISPs, the Internet is now moving into a new, third phase - which undoubtedly won't be the last phase! This phase is characterised by a return to P2P networking and another massive increase in the amount of traffic.

To give some indication of the traffic increases, it's worth looking at the physical analogs of the Internet's traffic flow. The last generation of floppy disks held just under one and a half megabytes of data. CDs, which came into general use at around the same time as the Internet was entering its second phase, hold 700 megabytes (just under 3/4 of a gigabyte) of data. We are now commonly using DVDs, which hold 4.2 gigabytes of data. For those who want to indulge in future gazing, basic Blu-Ray disks hold 50 gigabytes of data...

All this extra data travelling around the net wouldn't be too bad, from the ISPs point of view, if it was coming from the well endowed (in connectivity terms, I hasten to add!) server nodes. But it's not - it's coming from the least well connected, peripheral, bits of the Internet via P2P networks. Apart from the sheer volume, there are two other problems, one technical and one business.

The technical problem is that virtually all P2P networks use a protocol called UDP to carry their data, as opposed to TCP which is more common in client-server networks. There are myriad differences between the two, but what matters from the point of view of this article is that TCP is designed to share bandwidth gracefully, while UDP is designed to grab all the bandwidth it can lay its hands on.

The business problem is that the pricing adopted by ISPs works on specific assumptions about how long customers are going to be connected to the Internet, and how much bandwidth they are going to consume. This in term determines the investment in equipment and the capacity of the links shared between consumers. What is sufficient capacity for a bunch of people browsing a web made up mainly of text and static pictures is pitifully inadequate for the same group sharing videos via P2P.

Incidentally, in the case of cable providers, these problems are compounded by the topology (shape) of the consumer end of cable distribution networks. Cable networks are laid out as a ring, while the equivalent for traditional ISPs is a star topology. In the first case all the subscribers are sharing a single cable, while in the latter they each have their own cable to the central hub.

Until recently the differences in topology were hidden by the greater capacity of cable network cables, but as the usage grows this is already starting to create unforeseen problems for cable providers.

The Chinese have a curse, 'May you live in interesting times.' I think this may just apply to the internet at this time, but at least I don't have to make up news for you all!


Shorts:

I think we are in need of the digital equivalent of a vampire stake! It looks like the vile SCO is about to rise from the (nearly) dead. Carlyle Partners co-founder Stephen Norris is bringing a cool US$100 million to the table to take SCO out of Chapter 11 and make it into a private equity firm.

Whether the bankruptcy court will wear this one is a moot point, but the real question is why anyone would want to do this. SCO has no product income stream worth talking about, the bulk of its legal claims were shot down in court last year, and Novell has a priority claim on a large chunk of any money that it does get. There are loads of suggestions about the motivation of Norris, but no hard facts.

This saga has already run for five years - at this rate it could continue for another five...

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/02/14/sco_reorganisation_plan/
http://lwn.net/Articles/269557/ [Note: this article is currently subscriber only, but it will go public later this week, and it is the best discussion on the subject I've found.]

Here in the UK there is a major fight between the ISPs and the government led by our unelected 'Great Helmsman' Gordon Brown. Our glorious leader wants ISPs to snoop on all (yes, ALL) traffic passing through their equipment, on behalf of the media companies, and presumably, in the not too distant future, the government.

The ISPs are resisting, despite threats of new laws to compel them to do so. The ISPs point out that they are forbidden by law to inspect the contents of data packets unless a warrant has been issued instructing them to do so. At the moment there seems to be a stand off, but how long that will last is anybody's guess.

In the meantime, the ISPs have come up with a neat answer to media biz demands that they provide information and cut off customers who are alleged to be 'pirates'. The solution - that the media companies put their money where their mouth is and agree to underwrite any court cases brought by wrongly accused customers. Strangely enough, there is no sign of the media biz rushing to agree!

Nice one :)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7246403.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/12/anti_filesharing_paper_leak/

And guess what? Two of the music majors, Universal and Sony BMG, have been served with a notice by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) that they are facing a fresh anti-trust investigation. This is fascinating, and, for the companies worrying, since last time something like this happened - in 2000 - the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) came to the conclusion that the labels price fixing had ripped off consumers to the tune of US$480, and fined them accordingly. This investigation could well have interesting consequences - I for one will be watching out for more info.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/07/universal_sonybmg_antitrust_report/

It's not just suggestions of ripping off music consumers that Universal are facing. They are also being sued for US$6.1 million plus interest plus unspecified punitive damages by a slew of musicians and musicians' estates. Names involved include Sarah Vaughn, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Patti Page.

For years now musicians have been claiming that the record labels are swindling them, but the cost of the legal case, and the possibility of being unable to get new material distributed has discouraged action. It looks like this is about to change. More as the case develops.

http://www.boston.com/ae/celebrity/articles/2008/02/16/more_celebrity_news/
http://www.nypost.com/seven/02162008/business/business_briefs_97902.htm

There was a nasty shock in the works, this week, for those who rely on Internet advertising for their income. Advertisers have long been agitating for a decent metric by which they can judge the efficiency, and therefore the value of their advertising. At the moment the most common metric is click through. That is, the advertiser pays for the number of times a punter clicks on the link to the advertiser's site.

This is open to abuse, of course, from automated click throughs by competitors and the like. While companies like Google have mechanisms for dealing with this, they aren't very good, and the issue is sub-text in all discussions on click through.

Now, however, something even more worrying has emerged from a study published by media agency Starcom. It seems that even in the case of legit click through, not all click throughs are equal. Their study showed that just six percent of the online population are responsible for 50% of all display ad clicks! But that wasn't the end of the bad news. When they looked at the demography of the six percent, Starcom discovered that heavy clickers are mostly between the ages of 25 and 44 and, more importantly, have a household income of under US$40,000 pa.

This is not the demographic advertisers are looking for, since although heavy clickers spend four times as long on the net as average users, their spending does not reflect this, and they are more likely than the average to visit auctions, gambling and career services sites. That's a completely different surfing pattern to your average non-clicker. Could it be that the heavy clickers are unemployed with time on their hands, but no money?

Let's face it, most web users don't even notice the adverts, even assuming that they aren't using something like Firefox's Ad Block Plus, which stops unwanted ads from being displayed. I think that in the near future the advertisers are going to be taking a very hard look at what they are actually getting for their money.

http://www.smvgroup.com/news_popup_flash.asp?pr=1643

OK - time we had a snipe at Microsoft, or else y'all think I'm getting soft :) Sooooo, how about this? Microsoft Australia have a hilarious on-line Vista quiz with a prize of a $15,000 (I'm not sure whether that's US$ or A$) media package including a 52" LCD TV, home theatre gear and an XboX 360 Elite. The whole exercise is to test your skills at churning out Microsoft sales propaganda and 'advising' your mates on which version of Vista to buy. Microsoft must be getting really desperate.

It sounds just the thing for a group of lads looking for fun on a Saturday night after being turfed out of the bar. Make sure everyone can see the inane questions and ludicrous answers, and please don't throw empty Budweiser cans at the monitor!

http://apcmag.com/8017/microsoft_battles_vista_perception_issues_15_000_prize

Looks like the EU is stepping in where the US fears to tread. It's about to make new rules about how goods bought online within the EU are to be taxed. From 2015 Value Added Tax (VAT) will be charged at the rate in the country of the consumer, not of the supplier as is currently the case.

Currently, companies like Amazon, Skype and PayPal have taken to relocating their operations to Luxembourg, which at 15% has the lowest VAT rate in the EU ( Sweden has the highest at 25%).

The law also creates a new computerised system for automatically transferring VAT between countries, and will allow companies to claim back tax from countries where they are not even registered for the tax. I may be naive, but it sounds to me like a grade A opportunity for massive fraud!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/14/eu_downloads_tax_reform_finalised/

The arms race over P2P copying continues as BitTorrent developers move to add further encryption and facilities to evade throttling devices, such as Sandvine, used by Comcast. You really don't want to know the technical details, but basically once they're in BitTorrent, Comcast will have to play some costly catchup if they want to continue to harass BitTorrent users. And then, of course, BitTorrent developers will add something new :)

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-devs-introduce-comcast-busting-encryption-080215/

Finally, a cautionary tale from the Dutch. The new travel cards for Dutch transit users have already been hacked, and they haven't been issued yet! Unfortunately for the Dutch, all the basic tenets of cryptography and security were ignored when designing the cards.

There are two types of card, a disposable paper one ('Ultralight'), and a reusable plastic ('Classic'). The ultralight doesn't even use any cryptography, and it was shown eight months ago that it is possible 'rewind' the card to a previous state.

The Classic made a classic error - the decision to use a secret algorithm and a short (48-bit) key. It didn't take that long to reverse engineer the algorithm by breaking open the card and making a high resolution image of the circuitry.

Kerckhoff's Principle, one of the best known maxims of cryptography, states that security systems should never rely on keeping the algorithm secret. This is repeated ad infinitum in every security/cryptography textbook I've ever seen.

Once the algorithm is out the Dutch are completely screwed. The key is only 48 bits. That means there are only about 280 trillion keys to search against - something which can be done in a few weeks, if not days on modern computers.

To say the Dutch are unhappy would be an understatement. They've already spent around US$2 billion on this project. It hasn't gone live yet, and it's already compromised.

Caveat Emptor!

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1250


Homework:

There is an interesting piece by the maverick Kevin Kelly, about the Internet defined as a copy machine. It's in Edge magazine, and it is an interesting discussion on how you can (possibly) make money out of a situation where everything is available for free. Thought provoking and worth a read.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html

Did you know that XML is ten years old this week? If you did know (or even if you didn't) there is an interesting description of the early years of XML, and the people involved, at the URL. This is the story of XML before the big companies got involved. It's about the period when XML was designed by a group of highly talented individuals, and the piece contains snappy pen portraits of those individuals. I found it fascinating.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/02/10/XML-People

And if you'd like a look at something a little unusual, take a look at this gallery of striking nanoscale images put together by Wired magazine.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/multimedia/2008/02/nano_gallery_jmm?
slide=1&slideView=10


Scanner: Other Stories

Microsoft standing firm on OOXML ISO vote
http://www.fanaticattack.com/2008/a-deluge-of-facts-kos-ooxml-office-open-xml.html

Vista SP1 update locks out users
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/showpost.aspx?postid=2848906&siteid=17

Top Microsoft web executive to depart
http://www.physorg.com/news122282251.html

DNS inventor warns of Next Big Threat
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=145663

RIAA wants songwriter royalty lowered
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/music/news
/e3i29ce7ca58f3334d03346ad2dcaa23e21

RIAA chief calls for copyright filters on PCs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/08/riaa_wants_filters_for_end_users/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, and Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue There was also some material from a reader, which I saved somewhere safe, so I wouldn't lose it, and now I can't find it...

Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
17 February 2008

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html


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