Tag: wireless broadband services

Diane Feinstein defines free speech, the 1st Amendment, a “privilege.” (Video)

The great unwashed have been given a voice in the Internet which is troublesome in her view. We must license journalism. If it is licensed, the state can control it.
Feinstein misses the days when her chief of staff could call up a reporter and threaten his or her job if the reporter said the wrong thing about the Senator. Now, people can say whatever they want, and that is a bad thing in the Senator’s view.
Total free speech on the Internet does not produce a poorer product as many in the the power establishment both in Congress and in the #oldmedia assert. Yes there’s lots of crap on the Internet. There are plenty of BS stories about nonsense. But people quickly ferret out poor reporting or analysis. Bad stories are vetted within minutes of posting. Reputations are on the line, all the time. It’s the market of ideas.
Watch this video. She has no qualms trashing the most fundamental right there is, to speak freely.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bywtn9RIDRw]
 

The U.S.'s crap infrastructure threatens the cloud

The U.S.’s crap infrastructure threatens the cloud
Thanks to state-sponsored cable/phone duopolies, U.S. broadband stays slow and expensive — and will probably impede cloud adoption
By Andrew C. Oliver
Sep 19 2013
<http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/the-uss-crap-infrastructure-threatens-the-cloud-226917>
According to the broadband testing firm NetIndex, U.S. consumer broadband speeds rank 33rd in the world, right behind the Ukraine. Personally, I pay more than $1,500 per month for 30/30MB fiber for our office. This is ridiculously expensive and slower than the average household Internet in many other countries. It’s a serious impediment to the United States maintaining its economic competitiveness — and to enabling all of us to take full advantage of the cloud, which is clearly the next phase of computing.
As a patriotic American, I find the current political atmosphere where telecom lobbyists set the agenda to be a nightmare. All over the world, high-end fiber is being deployed while powerful monopolies in the United States work to prevent it from coming here. Some of those monopolies are even drafting “model legislation” to protect themselves from both community broadband and commercial competition.
Poor laws and regulations have protected a duopoly in most areas of the country. You can buy Internet from the local cable monopoly or the local phone monopoly, period. Neither have much motivation to make it much faster nor any cheaper.
Lobbying for lock-in
In my state, North Carolina, Time Warner Cable’s lobbying group managed to get our rather technology-unfriendly legislature to pass a horrible law to “protect private enterprise” by making it nearly impossible for local communities to build out their own municipal fiber without the burden of onerous regulations. Apparently, what’s good for Time Warner isn’t good for the rest of us. (Forgive me, but I don’t consider state-sponsored monopolies to be “private enterprise.”)
On its face, such mischief appears to be a local problem in the United States, with at least 20 states having passed legislation to protect Ma Bell and Pa Cable. But clearly, it’s a coordinated national effort. Multiple national lobbying organizations pretend to protect private business from unwarranted government competition, but are actually shielding large, state-sponsored, franchise monopolies.
For many small businesses, $1,500 per month is out of reach. In the case of my business, we expect to have to upgrade this connection pretty rapidly as we expand — and, sadly, pay even more. This kind of a cost, plus the speed disadvantage, puts us on an uneven playing field with similar companies in other countries. Plus, in some rural areas of my state and the rest of the country, there is no broadband at all.
[snip]

Security and Pervasive Monitoring

Security and Pervasive Monitoring
The Internet community and the IETF care deeply about how much we can trust commonly used Internet services and the protocols that these services use.  So the reports about large-scale monitoring of Internet traffic and users disturbs us greatly.  We knew of interception of targeted individuals and other monitoring activities, but the scale of recently reported monitoring is surprising. Such scale was not envisaged during the design of many Internet protocols, but we are considering the consequence of these kinds of attacks.
Of course, it is hard to know for sure from current reports what attack techniques may be in use.  As such, it is not so easy to comment on the specifics from an IETF perspective.  Still, the IETF has some long standing general principles that we can talk about, and we can also talk about some of the actions we are taking.
In 1996, RFC 1984 articulated the view that encryption is an important tool to protect privacy of communications, and that as such it should be encouraged and available to all.  In 2002, we decided that IETF standard protocols must include appropriate strong security mechanisms, and established this doctrine as a best current practice, documented in RFC 3365. Earlier, in 2000 the IETF decided not to consider requirements for wiretapping when creating and maintaining IETF standards, for reasons stated in RFC 2804. Note that IETF participants exist with positions at all points of the privacy/surveillance continuum, as seen in the discussions that lead to RFC 2804.
As privacy has become increasingly important, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) developed guidance for handling privacy considerations in protocol specifications, and documented that in RFC 6973. And there are ongoing developments in security and privacy happening within the IETF all the time, for example work has just started on version 1.3 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS, RFC 5246) protocol which aims to provide better confidentiality during the early phases of the cryptographic handshake that underlies much secure Internet traffic.
Recent days have also seen an extended and welcome discussion triggered by calls for the IETF to build better protections against wide-spread monitoring.
As that discussion makes clear, IETF participants want to build secure and deployable systems for all Internet users.  Indeed, addressing security and new vulnerabilities has been a topic in the IETF for as long as the organisation has existed.  Technology alone is, however, not the only factor. Operational practices, laws, and other similar factors also matter. First of all, existing IETF security technologies, if used more widely, can definitely help.  But technical issues outside the IETF’s control, for example endpoint security, or the properties of specific products or implementations also affect the end result in major ways. So at the end of the day, no amount of communication security helps you if you do not trust the party you are communicating with or the devices you are using. Nonetheless, we’re confident the IETF can and will do more to make our protocols work more securely and offer better privacy features that can be used by implementations of all kinds.
So with the understanding of limitations of technology-only solutions, the IETF is continuing its mission to improve security in the Internet.  The recent revelations provide additional motivation for doing this, as well as highlighting the need to consider new threat models.
We should seize this opportunity to take a hard look at what we can do better.  Again, it is important to understand the limitations of technology alone. But here are some examples of things that are already ongoing:

  • We’re having a discussion as part of the development of HTTP/2.0 as to how to make more and better use of TLS, for example to perhaps enable clients to require the use of security and not just have to react to the HTTP or HTTPS URLs chosen by servers.
  • We’re having discussions as to how to handle the potentially new threat model demonstrated by the recent revelations so that future protocol designs can take into account potential pervasive monitoring as a known threat model.
  • We’re considering ways in which better use can be made of existing protocol features, for example, better guidance as to how to deploy TLS with Perfect Forward Secrecy, which makes applications running over TLS more robust if server private keys later leak out.
  • We’re constantly updating specifications to deprecate older, weaker cryptographic algorithms and allocate code points for currently strong algorithm choices so those can be used with Internet protocols.

And we are confident that discussions on this topic will motivate IETF participants to do more work on these and further related topics.
But don’t think about all this just in terms of the recent revelations.  The security and privacy of the Internet in general is still a challenge even ignoring pervasive monitoring, and if there are improvements from the above, those will be generally useful for many reasons and for many years to come.  Perhaps this year’s discussions is a way to motivate the world to move from “by default insecure” communications to “by default secure”.  Publicity and motivation are important, too. There is plenty to do for all of us, from users enabling additional security tools to implementors ensuring that their products are secure.
In the Vancouver IETF meeting, there will be time dedicated to discuss this, and we ask that those interested in working on this topic contribute to the analysis and develop proposals in this area.  Those contributions are very welcome and can start now and continue in Vancouver and beyond.
Relevant mailing lists (from most specific to most general) include:

Jari Arkko, Chair of the IETF and Stephen Farrell, IETF Security Area
Director

Obama Administration Asks Supreme Court To Reverse First Circuit To Allow Warrantless Searches Of Cellphones By Jonathan Turley

Obama Administration Asks Supreme Court To Reverse First Circuit To Allow Warrantless Searches Of Cellphones
By Jonathan Turley
Aug 20 2013
<http://jonathanturley.org/2013/08/20/obama-administration-asks-supreme-court-to-reverse-first-circuit-to-allow-warrantless-searches-of-cellphones/>
Civil libertarians have long ago lost faith in Barack Obama’s and his continuing expression of support for privacy and individual rights. Just in case anyone is still not convinced, consider the petition this month to the Supreme Court by the Obama Administration. Just last week, Obama waxed poetic about his commitment to privacy. Yesterday however, his Administration took another major swipe at privacy and asked the Supreme Court to reverse the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which held that the police could not conduct warrantless searches of your cellphone when you are arrested. The decision in United States v. Wurie is below.
Since there is a split in the circuits, there is a good chance for a granting of review by the Court. Civil libertarians are shuddering at the prospect of this Court getting their hands on this issue. The Obama Administration is again pitching its case to the most conservative members of the Court like Thomas, Scalia, Alito, and Roberts. It is an irony missed by many. While Democrats often discuss the need for a Democratic president to make appointments on the Court, the Obama Administration routinely relies on the right wing of the Court for its efforts to strip privacy rights and civil liberties.
The case from the First Circuit involves the arrest of Brima Wurie on suspicion of buying crack. The police seized his phone and used it to determine his address. They raided the home and found drugs, cash and guns. It is precisely the type of case that the Obama Administration knows will appeal to Alito, Roberts, and Thomas and probably pull in Kennedy.
The First Circuit simply held that the police could have easily gotten a warrant in this circumstance and should have. That is not enough for the Obama Administration. They want to strip cellphones of any and all protection after an arrest. What was truly striking about the case was the clearly frivolous argument presented by the Administration:
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