DPI and Net Neutrality's Overseas Weak Spot 76
Ian Lamont writes "An unnamed source at an American ISP says staff there briefly considered using Deep Packet Inspection to comply with an order from Argentina's Department of Justice to block access to a local gambling site. The ISP ended up not going that route, owing to the cost, but some engineers at the company worry that DPI will eventually be implemented on the ISP's overseas network, thereby positioning it for an easier US rollout should Net Neutrality lose out in Washington. Besides being used for traffic-shaping, DPI can also monitor the traffic of ISP subscribers to supply targeted advertising."
This is where customers put their foot down. (Score:4, Insightful)
And say "No".
Even if it hurts in the short run. The loss of consumer bargaining power in these instances, where the contracts possibly allow for this, is the fault of the general consumer to begin with.
Re:This is where customers put their foot down. (Score:5, Insightful)
And say "No".
I ask, "to whom?". The ISPs are not the only ones who want (to use a generalization) the traffic of subscribers to be monitored. I think you overestimate the power of the consumers in this case.
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If the consumers go away, the corporation goes out of business.
Now how is the GP "overestimating" the power of consumers if the very life of the corporation in question hangs in the balance?
In the past decade, American consumers went trillions into debt to purchase foreign consumer goods and thus kept the funny-money US economy from crashing like the Hindenberg. I would say that's a mighty display of "power".
The only people who don't think c
Re:This is where customers put their foot down. (Score:5, Insightful)
You convinced me. I'd like to get in on this boycott. Send me an e-mail when I need to cancel my internet, and then send me another email when the boycott is over and I can resume using the... internet...
I think I may see a problem here.
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The truth is, the masses are either apathetic or don't mind this. Their alternative? More laws, to which people don't know much about and generally, don't care. They know this, and it's how they want to leverage control.
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Don't be a tool. The Internet has always operated on the principle that traffic on the public network isn't private. Let them use Deep Packet Inspection. If you didn't encrypt your data, that's your fault.
And as for consumer bargaining power, we never had any. Residential broadband has always been without an SLA. Even if you network goes down or is slow for weeks, your only recourse is to cancel your service.
What we need are SLA's for consumer broadband that guarantee a minimum (not maximum) bandwidth. Then
Re:This is where customers put their foot down. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll encrypt what I need to be private. And let them block all they want within the SLA, I'll pay for the level of service I need.
What happens when ISPs start to throttle (or block all together) encrypted or binary data ?
I can already imagine the justifications: "binary data consists largely of pirated software and media!", "only terrorists, pedophiles and other criminals have something to hide and use encryption!" "yap yap yap!"
At the risk of sounding pretentious, I believe that the Internet is one of the greatest assets for human advancement and achievement since the printing press. It is far too important to us to allow certain groups with special interests to ruin it for everyone. One last resort is to force ISPs who succumb to government pressure out of business. In the meantime we have to use every single democratic and diplomatic means at our disposal to force government to make the decisions that serve the larger population's wishes, and not the small special interest groups that want to shut the rest of the world up.
ISPs in Canada already throttle encrypted traffic (Score:1, Informative)
Rogers and Bell throttle all non-HTTP traffic. If their DPI cannot recognize it, they throttle it.
Yeah this sucks for VPN users, but they are an oligopoly and don't care.
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They throttle https? How have online banks and retailers reacted?
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Let me toss this one back at you. How many times do you continually push high bandwidth traffic to or from your bank? You could easily throttle those pages down to 10% of "full speed" and very few people would notice, let alone figure out the pattern.
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Rather slugglishly, I'm afraid.
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time for a bin2html | gzip encoder.
They must allow content-transfer-encoding: gzip, which every site should use.
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So what? So the ISP simply Have their DPI decompress the gzip'ed data and inspect that.
Well, you could try sending enormous blobs of HTML'ized gzip'ed binary data.
You could scramble your TCP/IP stack so it goes through weird contorted schemes of pseudo-random packet dropping, fragmentation, reassembly etc. to flush the DPI cache, etcetera, etcetera.
This will turn into YASAR (Yet Another Silly Arms Race)
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In the meantime we have to use every single democratic and diplomatic means at our disposal to force government to make the decisions that serve the larger population's wishes, and not the small special interest groups that want to shut the rest of the world up.
We're filthy rich business lobby groups that can throw money at the politicians? When did that happen?
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Then those ISP's customers are shut out of commerce ("Whaddya mean I get a timeout when I try to send my credit card to amazon or log into my bank?") and the users decide to use some other ISP.
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Then we'll Uuencode or BinHex the binary data so it looks like ASCII.
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All the more reason to move to IPv6... (Score:2, Insightful)
IPv6 was designed to be more secure and encryption is built in (IPsec). It seems that the best solution to the whole net neutrality issue is to encourage the transition to IPv6 as quickly as possible.
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Net neutrality isn't about Internet protocols.
It's about social and political neutrality on the Internet.
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Correct. However, encryption is seen as a way around the net neutrality issue since the packet content is unknown. IPv6 adds encryption out of the box.
Re:All the more reason to move to IPv6... (Score:4, Interesting)
That actually makes me wonder if the whole reason IPv6 adoption is so miserably low is that the government and communication companies know that when they adopt it wholesale, they lose the ability to do easy DPI and other such shenanigans.
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I'd hand out a complimentary tinfoil hat if I had one.
IPv6 is on the radar and requested as a must-have, but normally only on a roadmap level ("Will your product support this some time in the future?"). In some parts of the world (there's more to it than the US), any device incapable of IPv6 won't get onto the network in the first place.
If you stop to think about the practical implications for a while, it's very unlikely that encryption will be that much more widespread than it is today (it's a processing p
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Don't think for a second that private use of encryption isn't under attack by the telecoms and the government that works for them.
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I don't need to encrypt my data. This DPI ad-injection stuff is a bunch of bullshit which can easily be cleaned up by the even more powerful Formula 409.
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And say "Whaaa"?
The average customer has no clue as to what the implications of DPI are. Or care, for that matter. You give them a few percent off at the grocery store for tracking their purchases. And that's perfectly OK by them.
Heck, even our own intelligence agencies have allowed the sale and export of data that makes commercial, industrial and even political espionage by foreign powers easy. The NSA/CIA/FBI are probably a decade or more behind the state of the art in data mining and link analysis.
Re:This is where customers put their foot down. (Score:4, Informative)
Tell you what: people are quickly learning about the means and meaning of the surveillance of our data and behavior.
Here in Chicago, tens of thousands of drivers have gotten little notes in the mail from the City of Chicago, telling them that they have to pay $100 or have their car seized, based on a picture taken at an intersection.
When a local, nationally prestigious university recently had a public symposium on the effect of electronic surveillance upon personal, public and political life, you would have been quite surprised at the number, and the variety, of the people who showed up. In fact, a lot of last-minute shuffling had to take place at the venue to accommodate the unexpected number of attendees. And a surprisingly small number of them were techies and geeks. A large number were under age 18.
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The only way for people to completely avoid DPI would be to cut themselves off from the internet. Even if their ISP doesn't use it, some other ISP will and any data that went that way will be subjected to it. Most traffic that I create goes through several networks on the way to its destination. For example, between my hotel's ISP and Google, my packets go through alter.net (a/k/a Verizon Business), Quest, and a few other routers that don't have reverse lookups. Third-party DPI, anyone?
Targeted ads for paying customers is really stupid (Score:2)
That's all it can do? (Score:2)
Besides being used for traffic-shaping, DPI can also monitor the traffic of ISP subscribers to supply targeted advertising."
I think there might be a few more issues than the innocuous sounding "traffic shaping" and targeted ads.
Packet Encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
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The problem is that even if every website also did this, which they won't, your ISP could still sell your browsing history to advertisers or give it to the feds because they know what sites you visit even if they don't see the contents of the packets.
To avoid this you need something like Tor.
Re:Packet Encryption (Score:5, Interesting)
Ive been routing my internet through trusted nodes accross the net in encrypted form for a while now and have given up the "old internet". NSA has dpi level inspection at major fiber lines via light bending, especially with underwater fiber. They also use spoilia (spillage of communication signals caught by satalites due to the earths sphere shape) to intercept our activities on wireless communications. If your data is ever transmitted in the air, assume it is being watched. Fiber optics is harder to snoop in on since it requires a physical tap. I wouldn't worry about the US spying on its citizen. It dosn't need to. Under the UK-USA agreement, the NSA shares its intelligence info with the UK, Nz, and Aus and in return those countires share their info with us. The US does not engage in spying on citizens, instead, it usually asks one of its allies to spy on a specific person. By doing this, the US bypasses many laws on privacy. The NSA's largest establishment in the UK USA agreement is at menwith hills and fort mede, maryland. The two agencies (both controlled by the NSA) coordinate sigint. Bottom line, all of our traffic is monitored and run through thousands of different communication algorithms for data mining. Do not share any identifiable information online, to any one for anyreason. Even anonymous browsing is vulnerable to time analysis.
Re:Packet Encryption (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Packet Encryption (Score:5, Informative)
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Ok, second question.. Do you always refer to yourself in the third person?
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BountyX, I'm sorry I've already used my daily allotment of moderator points before I read your post.
Re:Packet Encryption (Score:5, Funny)
Even the strongest chain has a weak link... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're on a completely dark net, well, that's great... but won't the lack of content get boring aft
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Everything Should Be Secure-ish (Score:3, Insightful)
Excuses that governments may have nearly limitles
Out of interest (Score:5, Interesting)
How much extra resources are used in delivering a page by HTTPS instead of HTTP?
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Quite a lot when negotiating the crypto handshake (there's hardware [wikipedia.org] for this and it scales pretty decently, even if it's not exactly cheap) - but you'd still be able to pick up what was being visited from the certificate if you wanted.
DIP will likely be rolled out to support QoS. (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO Deep Packet Inspection will be rolled out to identify the protocols in use on connections, to support assigning the correct QoS to different protocols.
For instance: File transfers accelerate until they consume (and equally divide) all bandwidth at the most congested link in their path, but just slow down if they're artificially limited below that level. Meanwhile Streams are band limited but must go to the front of the line to meet their jitter and delivery reliability requirements, though delayed stream packets are useless and should be dropped to avoid also delaying their successors.
Unfortunately the tagging of the packet itself can't be trusted because there is an incentive to achieve improved service by cheating, requesting better service than necessary. (And a Microsoft IP stack, widely deployed, made just this "improvement".)
My take: The right solution is to write a contract for various rates of "premium" packets, then accept the labeling but demote the QoS on packets above the running limit. Then the incentive is on the user to obtain software that doesn't cheat, and the ISP doesn't need to deep inspect.
Unfortunately, the ISPs and equipment vendors seem to be going with the DPI identification approach. And that means deploying DPI, which can then be misused by the ISPs to do the bad kind of non-neutrality.
QoS labeling by endpoints (Score:2)
I think this is what you were trying to say, but the endpoints, not the ISP should tag packets for QoS. No DPI is required - except in the consumer routers with options like "minimize VOIP latency" or "accelerate large downloads". There should be an extra cost for low latency or high bandwidth packets - so there is nothing to gain by "cheating". (High bandwidth packets can take advantage of a longer but more capacious route, or get to keep their place in a deep queue.)
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Quite a few of us have run into problems with "contracts" for "unlimited" use.
What's going to make ISPs suddenly start honoring contracts?
A different form of government is needed (Score:1, Interesting)
It no longer makes sense to have:
Before it is too late, before all governments make dpi as routine as China could ever hope for, the people need to get control of the governments.
Fortunately, the source of these issues also presents the solution: open source governance [metagovernment.org] (and its cousin, radical transparency [wikipedia.org]).
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I'm not so sure. People are pretty smart, and liberty can be a compelling incentive. People have even given their lives in order to achieve it for their communities.
All in all, I'm betting on liberty. It's going to take the collapse of our cushy consumer lifestyle before people wake up enough for it to happen, but that lifestyle has been financed by credit for a long time now and that credit
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Worse - it's like having a little guy who sits outside your front door all day, follows you into town, insists on opening and reading every newspaper, book, magazine, letter, circular and piece of junk mail that you read, then follows you back home again.
It may be coincidence but just recently I was shopping for T-shirts online, visited a website called 'over50', and the next day, I received junk mail for life insurance for the over 50's. I'm currently doing experiments where I visit my own university home
For fuck's sakes.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Net Neutrality already lost in Washington. Wake up and smell the shit.
Translation to Spanish available (Score:1)
Eu knows how to deal with that kind of shit (Score:2)
u.s. should adopt this.
In NZ (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, I still have reason to worry. A lot of NZ traffic go
There's DPI and there's DPI (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, there's DPI devices for traffic shaping (or throttling or management or whatever term you prefer), and there's DPI devices for ad insertion but those really wouldn't be the same devices, probably not even made by the same vendor. Plugging my own blog, here's a short entry [shortpacket.org] about this.
As for the article, I think - but I could well be called biased - that the unnamed sources may be overreacting a bit. Could you do the things described with a decent traffic shaping DPI enabled box? Sure. Do ISP's do this? W
Really bad idea (Score:2)