At 10:12 AM 9/30/97 -0700, Dave Del Torto thoughtfully expounded thus:
Cypherpunks,
The CFP98 program committee is considering a panel (or possibly a pre-conference tutorial) for next year entitled something like "How to Choke the Net." (The provocative title is NOT intended to espouse the practice of net-choking NOR to provide hands-on techniques.)
[snip] Dave, I think that the fact that 50 - 75 % of all packets _in the world_ (IIRC) go through MAE-EAST in Reston, VA means that any governmental entity controlling this NAP could filter/drop packets to their heart's content. I seem to recall a year or so back that Madsen, et. al. said that they were very certain that packet monitoring took place at major NAPS like this. For my own $.02 I think that the lack of success on this front has been due to sloth on various governments' parts, not for lack of ability. Considering that many third-world countries have limited connectivity into the high-speed backbones, typically through one or two interconnect points at most, (owned by their government-run PTT's) I think that any concerted effort on a government's part would be more successful than most think given that the Internet is not as seamless and redundant a network as one might think. (Yes, I recall the xs4all business last year, and feel that Western Europe's interconnectedness is currently an anomaly and not the norm, from a global point of view.) I would like to know if the general public's use of default DNS servers as setup or defined by most of the big ISP's would help this kind of control? <wandering into areas I know little about> I imagine that it is harder to block access if one controls routing and uses direct IP addresses, but considering that a lot of people find sites to look at via the various search engines; and considering the recent US rating proposals looking to not include unrated sites in search engines; I think that the possibility of effective site blocking for most casual internet users is not that far-fetched. </wandering into areas I know little about> A chef my wife knows in Thailand 'lost' some PGP mail coming to him once or twice, and then got a knock on the door asking him please not to use encrypted mail anymore: "... You are free to do whatever you want, but this is very suspicious activity that you might want to reconsider...." FWIW, Tom Porter txporter@mindspring.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." FIGHT U.S. GOVT. CRYPTO-FASCISM, EXPORT A CRYPTO SYSTEM! RSA in PERL: print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`