From: Thomas Porter <txporter@mindspring.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 1997 05:32:18 +0800
To: Dave Del Torto <ddt@pgp.com>
Subject: Re: [CFP98] "How to Choke the Net"
In-Reply-To: <v04001401b055e4866f2e@[205.180.136.85]>
Message-ID: <3.0.1.16.19970930171158.0cc7f358@pop.mindspring.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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`