On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Ken Chase <ken@sizone.org> wrote:

...

All our topics of discussion are merging... (soon: "does Wikileaks run on 208V?" :)

If they keep going that way, soon they will be running on nuclear power from the hidden centrifuges in some cave.

And just announced via Twitter ... no, just kidding. However, the events here are troublesome. On one hand, it's kind of predictable. You have some things in the real world, like the arrest alert and being placed on Interpol's "most wanted" for what appears to be not even a case of rape [*1], getting booted from EC2 for "intellectual property" reasons (when the materials in question are not and cannot be copyrighted), having their DNS service disrupted, etc. Assange has irritated a large beast: the US Government. On the other hand, this is the same government that has repeatedly fought to reduce and minimize privacy laws, seen recently in cases such as the GPS tracking fun out in the western states [*2]. None of that might seem relevant to netops, of course, but at some point, we're going to see, and maybe already are seeing, deliberate interference with the network in an effort to make the Internet work the way that the US Government would prefer. We've already seen some examples of this in seizures of domain names [*3], an activity that would doubtlessly explode under COICA, etc., which at the moment is probably the most vulnerable aspect of the Internet, but will this move on to more insidious things, such as redirection of or null routing of Wikileaks IP space "in response to a congressman's request", while simultaneously waving a patriotic flag? And at what point does that stop? Just for "big bad" things like Wikileaks? We seem to be sailing into an interesting new set of challenges. I'm not sure that it'll be healthy for the net for the government to be providing lists of IP addresses that have to be blocked; our routing tables are already quite challenged. [*1] http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/sex-by-surprise-at-heart-of-julian-assa... [*2] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/fbi-tracking-device/ [*3] http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/us-government-seizes-82-websites-dracon... ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE