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‘Net Neutrality Reader
There is a lot of talk about the “end of ‘net neutrality” because of the recent announcements made by the United State Federal Communications Commission (FCC). With so much out there, it is often important to sit down and read a few pieces together to gain a better sense of different sides of the issue, rather than reading one or two articles and considering yourself “well informed.” This post provides a starting point for those interested in pursuing the issue a little more deeply.
The latest episodes in this unfortunate techno-religious proclivity are now emerging. One involves an especially egregious hyperbolic excess of the Internet Wars known as Net Neutrality. The winning internet protocol religious faction, having infused the Washington political system with their Templar Knights in 2009, baked their commandments into the embarrassing December 2010 Report & Order of the FCC as “preserving the free and open internet.” “Today the Commission takes an important step to preserve the Internet as an open platform for innovation, investment, job creation, economic growth, competition, and free expression.” Nevermind that they never actually defined “the Internet.” They simply believed that whatever it was, the FCC as a federal government Continue reading
Holiday Weekend Reads (22nov17)
The coming holiday is cutting my publishing schedule short, but I didn’t want to leave too many interesting stories on the cutting room floor. Hence the weekend read comes early this week, and contains a lot more stuff to keep you busy for those couple of extra days. For the long weekend, I have five on security and one on culture. Enjoy!
This first read is about the US government’s collection and maintenance of security vulnerabilities. This is always a tricky topic; if a government knows about security vulnerabilities, there is at least some chance some “bad actor” will, as well. While the government might want to hoard such knowledge, in order to be more effective at breaking into systems, there is at least some possibility that refusing to release information about the vulnerabilities could lead to them not being fixed, and therefore to various systems being comrpomised, resulting in damage to real lives. The US government appears to be rethinking their use and disclosure of vulnerabilities
There can be no doubt that America faces significant risk to our national security and public safety from cyber threats. During the past 25 years, we have moved much of what we value Continue reading
On the ‘net: Three for the week
Because this is a short week, I’m going to combine three places I showed up on other sites recently.
I was also featured on the IT Origins series over at Gestalt IT.
Thoughts on Open/R
Since Facebook has released their Open/R routing platform, there has been a lot of chatter around whether or not it will be a commercial success, whether or not every hyperscaler should use the protocol, whether or not this obsoletes everything in routing before this day in history, etc., etc. I will begin with a single point.
If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough.
Design is about tradeoffs. Protocol design is no different than any other design. Hence, we should expect that Open/R makes some tradeoffs. I know this might be surprising to some folks, particularly in the crowd that thinks every new routing system is going to be a silver bullet that solved every problem from the past, that the routing singularity has now occurred, etc. I’ve been in the world of routing since the early 1990’s, perhaps a bit before, and there is one thing I know for certain: if you understand the basics, you would understand there is no routing singularity, and there never will be—at least not until someone produces a quantum wave routing protocol.
Ther reality is you always face one of two choices in routing: build a protocol specifically tuned Continue reading
