From: Mike McNally <m5@vail.tivoli.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 02:37:27 +0800
To: "Declan B. McCullagh" <declan+@CMU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Enforcing the CDA improperly may pervert Internet architecture
In-Reply-To: <8lOUXbq00YUvBYs3cV@andrew.cmu.edu>
Message-ID: <316A6175.74DA@vail.tivoli.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Declan B. McCullagh wrote:
> The attached paper by Dr. Reed is worth reading -- I haven't seen this
> argument raised before. One portion that I found fascinating was:
> 
>   "It is quite silly to imagine that the Ascend router at the ISP can
>   figure out if it is me or my child generating each packet."
>
> But that's exactly what the defenders of the CDA are claiming! Here's
> some background that might be interesting:

I sent a letter to the Economist last year pointing this out after reading
an article containing the offhand statement, "... and of course it is
entirely feasible to control Internet content" (or something like that).
I don't have those magic two letters at the front of my name though.  It
seems so utterly obvious.  When you connect to an ISP via PPP or SLIP,
all the ISP is doing is routing packets. 

> Chris Hansen from the ACLU told me last Friday: "Olsen is going to push
> this tagging idea that the government has, that you can imbed in your
> tag -- in your address -- an adult or minor tag. They're going to
> suggest that the market will come into existence that will make that
> tagging relevant."

Uhh...  what about the rather obvious problem that some of these new
fangled computers can support an enormous spread of information?  My
web site at io.com has no offensive materials (though I recently rated
it as basically "Satan's Headquarters" via SurfWatch), but other stuff
at io.com may well be offensive.  Packets routed out through io's
interface will of course all come from the same address.

Maybe they're suggesting that every disk block in the universe should have
its own IP address.  Hmm, maybe there's a use after all for those 24 byte 
OSI addresses...

_____c_____________________________________________________________________
Mike M Nally * Tiv^H^H^H IBM * Austin TX    * pain is inevitable  
       m5@tivoli.com * m101@io.com          *
      <URL:http://www.io.com/~m101>         * suffering is optional