Oh, Noz!

Who would ever have thought that TV broadcasters would be allowed to show inaccurate cartoons?  Next thing you know, we'll find out that the Internet isn't truthful, either!

Lawyer Helps eBay Vendor Behave Badly...

Written like that, my headline sounds completely unsurprising, doesn't it?

Here's a case that just sounds outrageous – and also like one that should end in a crescendo of bad publicity for the vendor (and their lawyer!) involved.  The gist: the vendor sent a package to a customer with postage still due on it.  The customer left negative feedback for the vendor because of the postage due.  The vendor admits that postage was due.  The vendor is suing the customer for having left completely accurate negative feedback.

Popehat has issued a call for help, and Instapundit has linked to the story.  The vendor (Med Express) may not know it yet, but this is going to end very badly for them.  Which makes me feel pretty darned good!

Details here.  Here's the negative feedback, in all its glory:

Order arrived with postage due with no communication from seller beforehand.

As eBay feedback goes, that's pretty weak tea.  Here's the vendor's (rather lame) response, two days later:

Sorry- no idea there was postage due. This has happened alot from USPS lately.

Med Express, I have some advice for you.  Withdraw your suit.  Fire your lawyer, loudly and publicly.  Blame this behavior on him.  And make it up to your customer in some spectacular fashion...

Submarine Cables...

Today's Internet is very dependent on undersea (submarine) cables that link various parts of the world together.  We can seamlessly link between web sites in various countries only because these cables exist.  Less obvious, but economically perhaps even more importantly, these cables enable many other kinds of communications traffic: email, voice phone, fax, instant messaging, and much, much more.  They are, these days, vital conduits of economic activity – it's hard to imagine any kind of business that isn't dependent on them.

These cables (see diagram at right) are the most concentrated information conduits in the world.  When one of them breaks, the impact is large and immediate.  In some cases around the world, a single submarine cable is the only high-bandwidth link between some region and the rest of the world.  When one of those links breaks, large numbers of people are sawed off from the rest of the world – no web, no email, no phones, just ... crickets.

Here's a nice explanation of all this...

Court of Public Opinion...

I recently blogged about the spat between Elon Musk (of Tesla Motors) and the New York Times.  Musk was convinced that the Times was lying about the results of a test drive they made in a Tesla car, smearing the company's good name and reputation in the process.  Instead of suing the Times through our court system, Musk appealed to the “court of public opinion” by publishing an open letter to the public.  His letter was publicized by hundreds of news sites, newspapers, and blogs.  In the resulting kerfuffle, the New York Times reconsidered its stance and reversed its previous support for their reporter, withdrawing the story.  Elon Musk won that “case” in a manner far more convincing to the public than anything I can imagine emerging from a case pursued in the traditional courts.

I thought that case was interesting, which is why I blogged about it.  Security expert and cryptographer Bruce Schneier saw it as one example of a pattern of behaviors enabled by the Internet.  It's part of the rise of an alternative system of jurisprudence.  An excerpt from his recent article on Wired:

The court of public opinion is an alternative system of justice. It’s very different from the traditional court system: This court is based on reputation, revenge, public shaming, and the whims of the crowd. Having a good story is more important than having the law on your side. Being a sympathetic underdog is more important than being fair. Facts matter, but there are no standards of accuracy. The speed of the internet exacerbates this; a good story spreads faster than a bunch of facts.

...

The court of public opinion has significant limitations. It works better for revenge and justice than for dispute resolution. It can punish a company for unfairly firing one of its employees or lying in an automobile test drive, but it’s less effective at unraveling a complicated patent litigation or navigating a bankruptcy proceeding.

Mr. Schneier is onto something here.  I found myself thinking along these lines recently, as I'm currently in a dispute with a large environmentalist organization.  Seeking justice in a court of law is an intimidating, expensive, and very uncertain proposition.  Seeking justice in the court of public opinion just might be a better alternative – though not one that occurred to me immediately.  Apparently I'm more of a hidebound traditionalist than I thought I was :)

Strange...

U.N. Eying the Internet...

Great.  One of the few things the world's governments has managed to do well is to keep their regulatory mitts off the Internet.  Now a group of countries interested in control (for various reasons) are proposing to screw up the Internet, just as they've screwed up so much else.  From today's WSJ:

Today, however, Russia, China and their allies within the 193 member states of the ITU want to renegotiate the 1988 treaty to expand its reach into previously unregulated areas. Reading even a partial list of proposals that could be codified into international law next December at a conference in Dubai is chilling:
• Subject cyber security and data privacy to international control;
• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for "international" Internet traffic, perhaps even on a "per-click" basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;
• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as "peering."
• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;
• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work;
• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices. 

Read the whole thing...

Behold a Troll...

An Internet troll, that is:

On the Air Again...

Thanks to Eric at SDWISP, we're back on the air again.  We're not actually sure exactly what was wrong, but somehow between the work the Eric did on our radio link and associated wiring, and that I did on our network's router, our Internet connection is back.  Woo hoo!

Thanks for the great service, Eric.  While we've come to expect it (because you're so consistent!), it is still greatly appreciated...

Eagle Camera, 24 x 7...

From Decorah, Iowa in their nest 80' in the air, the Raptor Research Project is streaming live video of eagles and their just-hatched chicks.  The snap at right I took just a few minutes ago.  It's black-and-white because at night the nest is illuminated with an infrared light (which the eagles can't see).  During the day, the feed is in full color.

Live eagle nest viewing, from the comfort of our homes.  What an amazing world we live in!

This is Really, Really Stupid...

France has made it illegal for web sites to securely store passwords.  Instead, web site operaters must store passwords “in the clear” – meaning in a form that authorities can use to access customer data.

The bureaucratic mind at its finest.

   Rope
   Tree
   Bureaucrat
   Some assembly required...

How the Internet Started...

According to my lovely wife:

A revelation with an Incredibly Big Message (IBM):

Well, you might have thought that you knew how the Internet started, but here's the TRUE story ....

In ancient Israel , it came to pass that a trader by the name of Abraham Com did take unto himself a young wife by the name of Dot.

And Dot Com was a comely woman, broad of shoulder and long of leg. Indeed, she was often called Amazon Dot Com.

And she said unto Abraham, her husband: "Why dost thou travel so far from town to town with thy goods when thou canst trade without ever leaving thy tent?"

And Abraham did look at her - as though she were several saddle bags short of a camel load, but simply said: "How, dear?"

And Dot replied: "I will place drums in all the towns and drums in between to send messages saying what you have for sale, and they will reply telling you who hath the best price.

And the sale can be made on the drums and delivery made by Uriah's Pony Stable (UPS)."

Abraham thought long and decided he would let Dot have her way with the drums. And the drums rang out and were an immediate success. Abraham sold all the goods he had at the top price, without ever having to move from his tent.

To prevent neighbouring countries from overhearing what the drums were saying, Dot devised a system that only she and the drummers knew. It was called Must Send Drum Over Sound (MSDOS), and she also developed a language to transmit ideas and pictures - Hebrew To The People (HTTP)

But this success did arouse envy.. A man named Maccabia did secrete himself inside Abraham's drum and began to siphon off some of Abraham's business. But he was soon discovered, arrested and prosecuted - for insider trading.

And the young men did take to Dot Com's trading as doth the greedy horsefly take to camel dung.

They were called Nomadic Ecclesiastical Rich Dominican Sybarites, or NERDS.

And lo, the land was so feverish with joy at the new riches and the deafening sound of drums that no one noticed that the real riches were going to that enterprising drum dealer, Brother William of Gates, who bought off every drum maker in the land.

And indeed did insist on drums to be made that would work only with Brother Gates' drumheads and drumsticks.

And Dot did say: "Oh, Abraham, what we have started is being taken over by others."

And Abraham looked out over the Bay of Ezekiel , or eBay as it came to be known. He said: "We need a name that reflects what we are."

And Dot replied: "Young Ambitious Hebrew Owner Operators." "YAHOO," said Abraham. And because it was Dot's idea, they named it YAHOO Dot Com.

Abraham's cousin, Joshua, being the young Gregarious Energetic Educated Kid (GEEK) that he was, soon started using Dot's drums to locate things around the countryside. It soon became known as God's Own Official Guide to Locating Everything (GOOGLE)

And that is how it all began.

WTF: IPv6 in the Science journals?

Here's an example.

An entire generation of computer scientists has been born, educated, and gone to work since IPv6 was first invented.  There are very damned few deployments of it outside of the backbone.  The benefits are clear, but so are the implementation challenges.

The linked article refers to a government mandate for IPv6 upgrading.  I'd get excited about that except that I remember the first such mandate (around 1995), the second (around 2000), and the third (around 2005) – none of which had much impact so far as I can tell.  Outside of the squandering of vast amounts of taxpayer dollars, of course.

Sheesh.

Search Engine for Electronics Parts...

Octopart.  And they've just added Digi-Key's entire catalog.

The Internet is awesome!

The Wikipedia Song...

If you use Wikipedia, you need to listen to this.  Beautiful!

Now This is How to Quit Your Job...

This sequence of photos was emailed to her boss – and all her colleagues – by a girl announcing that she was quitting her job.  I can only aspire to such a hilarious and effective way to quit an awful job.

It's also a hoax, dang it.  But it's still funny as hell.

One Ring to Rule Them All...

Update: Bruce Schneier weighs in.

Original post:

Several readers (and a colleague) wrote to ask me about this story (and the many others like it) that hit the web in the past few days.  The stories don't have much detail beyond the fact that somehow seven people were chosen to hold the keys that it would take to “restart the Internet” in the event of a disaster.  The more geekly folks out there know that the Internet is a highly distributed system with no central point of control, so the notion of restarting the Internet doesn't, on the face of it, make much sense.  So what the hell is this story talking about?

Well, first of all, there's a bit of overdramatization in the story.  Actually, a whole lot of overdramatization.  But there's also a grain of truth to it.

To understand what's going on here, you first need to understand a tiny bit about the Domain Name System (DNS).  Even though you may not realize it, you're probably using it every day.  For example, if you typed “www.jamulblog.com” to read this blog, your web browser submits that name to DNS to look up the address (“74.125.47.121” in this case) of my blog's web server.  Then your web browser contacts that web server to get the actual blog posts.  So DNS is sort of like a phone book in which your web browser can look up names to find the address – which, like a phone number, it can use to contact a web server directly.

DNS has a trick that your phone book doesn't, however.  If you ask for a name that your local DNS server (probably run by your Internet service provider) doesn't know, that DNS server will ask a “root server” for the address of the “authoritative” DNS server that will know that name.  For example, if you typed in my blog's address and your local DNS server had never heard of it before, your local DNS server would ask a root DNS server for the address of the authoritative DNS server for “jamulblog.com”.  Then it would ask that DNS server for the address of “www.jamulblog.com”.  This is called a recursive query.  I've glossed over all sorts of details, but the basic idea of a recursive query is key to understanding this “restart the Internet” story.  With me?

Recently (July 15th) the root DNS servers implemented DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC).  These security extensions are a very complex, designed-by-gigantic-committee protocol designed to allow DNS clients (such as your web browser) to verify that the DNS responses it receives (those addresses) are, in fact, authorized (not forged) responses.  Without these extensions, it's relatively easy for a program to forge DNS responses – so that you type in “www.bony.com” but instead of getting the Bank of New York, you get some site that looks like the BONY site but is actually just trying to capture your password.  Forging DNS responses is bad, and DNSSEC is designed to prevent it.  But (and this is where the hype comes in) DNSSEC is optional on the client (like your web browser).  You can turn it off.

The way that DNS clients can verify that responses are authorized is to follow a chain of authority all the way back to the root DNS server.  Ignoring the details of how this works, it all depends on a Secret Master Key (SMK) that's held on the root DNS servers.  This SMK is just a (very) big number, with something like 1000 digits in it.  Without the SMK, the root servers could not generate verifiably authentic responses, and neither could any other DNS servers.  That means that without the SMK, no DNS clients (even your web browser) that have implemented DNSSEC could verify the responses.  You'd type in my blog address and you'd get an error message instead of my blog.  The internet would be broken!

Well, not quite.  It's simple enough to turn off the DNS security on DNS clients.  It's a bit more work for intermediate DNS servers (like the one your Internet service provider runs), but not really very much more work.  In addition, even if DNSSEC was completely broken, there are plenty of DNS servers that don't participate in DNSSEC at all (such as Google's DNS servers, for example), and these would keep right on working.  Nevertheless, if the SMK were lost, the result would be (temporary) service interruption for millions of systems.  Plus it would be a really big pain in the patoot.

How could the SMK be lost?  There are lots of scenarios, all of them involving disasters that wiped out all of the root DNS servers at the same time.  Pick your poison: earthquake, meteorite strike, giant tornadoes, terrorists, nuclear war, coordinated copper-eating ants.  None of these are very likely to wipe all the root DNS servers out, but theoretically it could happen.

So there's an SMK backup and a recovery procedure, part of the overall DNSSEC security procedures.  The security requirements make backup tricky. You don't want to have a complete copy of the SMK available to any one person, because that one person could then do something bad, like sell the SMK to al Qaeda or the Russian Mafia.  The backup needs to be really secure.  So the approach they took (see diagram at right, and associated presentation for details) was to split up the SMK into 7 pieces, any 5 of which could be used to recreate the whole thing.  These 7 pieces have been deposited into 7 safe deposit boxes.  The 7 keys to the safe deposit boxes have been entrusted to 7 individual people (hopefully trustworthy folks!).

In the event of a successful coordinated copper-eating ant attack that wiped out all the root DNS servers, these seven people would be called.  They'd first travel to their safe deposit box, use the key they've been entrusted with to open it, and grab their piece of the SMK.  Then they'd travel to a secure location.  When at least five of these folks had arrived at that secure location, technicians could piece together the SMK from the fragments each carried – and the root DNS servers would once again be able to authenticate their responses, your web browser would be happy, sunshine would break through the clouds, and there would be no more hunger.  I made up the last bit...

Chatroulette...

This is just plain weird.

And before you ask: no, I haven't tried it yet.  The very thought makes me uncomfortable...

Harriton High School Web Cam Spying...

The Stryde Hax blog has all the technical details of how Harriton High School was able to use Mac book web cams to spy on their students at home.

The technical elements of this story are a classic clever hack, nothing really earth-shattering in them. 

The truly scary part of the story is that the high school thought that this was a good idea.  The even scarier part is that some (thankfully a tiny minority) of the students and their parents also thought it was a good (or at least acceptable) idea...

Italy Attacks the Internet...

Yesterday three Google executives were convicted in Italy of privacy violations.  What did they do?  They “allowed” some Italian teenagers to upload an awful video of an autistic kid being tormented, and didn't pull it down quickly enough.  What's “quickly enough”?  The court didn't say.  How fast did Google pull it down?  It depends on whose story you want to believe, but Google says they pulled it down within three hours of the first complaint they received.

Google will, of course, appeal this conviction (see their official blog post).  It seems completely absurd to me, akin to holding UPS responsible because someone packed an awful video in a box and shipped it via UPS.  If companies like Google actually became liable in many countries for the content uploaded by Internet users, the inevitable result would be that all the wonderful, free services like Google video would go away, or would require payment ‐ for those companies would have to decide between hiring armies of censors or simply dropping the problematic line of business.