May 13, 2008
WISPA and Friends Team Up on CALEA
Complying with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) isn't easy, and like so many government mandates (digital TV transition, for example) it falls hardest on the smallest companies in the industry.
Luckily, there's WISPA. The Wireless ISP Association formed a group to define a standard. As we explained around this time last year, at ISPCON Spring 2007 (see ISPCON Policy Update: Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994), the FBI does not ratify any particular standard as compliant or not.
Instead, the FBI issues guidelines and is asking the industry to create standards. Any standard becomes a safe harbor, meaning that if an ISP complies with it, the FBI cannot sue the ISP, it must fight the standard in court.
The best known standard (ANSI)/TIA J-STD-025- B-2006 -- Lawfully Authorized Electronic Surveillance) is from the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Standards (ATIS). As you'd expect from a telco-dominated group, the standard is big and clunky. And you have to pay money just to see it.
WISPA's CALEA Standards (versions 1 and 2) are freely available at the WCS website.
WISPA is working on an implementation guide that will be free to members and not free to non-members.
I've got much work to do to cover this story completely, but I started during a talk with J.C. Utter, president of Imagestream, the router vendor.
He said that the ATIS standard has two flaws from the point of view of law enforcement:
1) It allows up to 1 percent packet loss.
2) It provides only streaming data.
Utter is pleased to point out that the WISPA standard solves both problems by storing the data at the ISP in Packet Capture (PCap) format. Thus, no packet loss, and no streaming. Instead, a simple data format that law enforcement can actually handle.
The hairpin problem
But there's a problem, and the problem explains why there are two versions of the standard. The problem, as explained in last year's article, linked above, is called "hairpinning."
If you're an ISP and you're recording the communications of a suspected terrorist, you'd like to do it at the core of your network. That's where you've got the rest of your monitoring tools. And capturing the data there works in most cases but not all cases.
It can be possible to communicate with another person without going through the center of the network if both the target and the other person are connected to the same edge device and that device is not CALEA compliant. In such a case, the device might route traffic directly between the two people without going through the core.
Version 1 of the WISPA standard accepts that you, the ISP, cannot do anything about this issue.
Version 2 of the WISPA standard says that you've had enough time to deal with the issue.
Dealing with the problem is not simple. CALEA also says that the target must not be able to detect the monitoring. Shipping in a probe to attach to the wireless access point, and doing maintenance on that access point, might be disqualified if the target knew the maintenance was being performed.
CALEA's complicated, and I've just started learning about the WISPA standard, so this is just my initial report. I will keep learning about it and will tell you more as I learn.
Uodate: This morning, at the conclusion of his ISPCON session, CLEC lawyer Kris Twomey said, "this is one of the coolest things any ISP association has ever done for its members."
Posted by agoldman at 1:40 PM | Add Comment
May 8, 2008
Sign of the Future? iProvo Goes Private
DSL Reports notes today that muni fiber project iProvo (as in Provo, Utah) has been bought by FTTP specialist Broadweave Networks for $40 million, which is almost exactly the amount of money the city of Provo owes on the bond it took out to build the network.
(Have you heard of Broadweave? I have not.)
Although the DSL Reports piece initially paints this as a picture of failure, the author changes his mind after a conversation with telecom lawyer and broadband infrastructure evangelist Jim Baller.
Baller points out that at a net cost of close to zero dollars, the city of Provo build a fiber network that's still there and that the fiber network forced the monopolies, phone and cable, to deploy broadband as well.
These may not be the goals of the original project, but municipal projects do make sense in this context: as an enterprise to be built and then sold in order to force the recalcitrant monopolies to deploy.
Independent ISPs face this problem regularly: find a gap in the market and start advertising service there and all of a sudden one of the national monopolies jumps in with cut rate pricing.
Posted by agoldman at 4:04 PM | Add Comment
May 7, 2008
Are Web 2.0 Companies Clueless About the Internet?
That's what GigaOM's Allan Leinwand suggests today in his article, Web 2.0, Please Meet Your Host, the Internet. It has two case studies, one about DoS attacks, the other about poor router configuration. Worth reading!
Posted by agoldman at 4:56 PM | Add Comment
May 6, 2008
Anatomy of an Off-the-Grid ISP
My colleague Pedro Hernandez did a fascinating e-mail interview with an ISP in Idaho that generates its own power.
Posted by agoldman at 12:08 PM | Add Comment
Every Patent Dispute Since 2000 Must Be Revisited?
Interesting, brief article in the NY Times (h/t BoingBoing) suggests a major shakeup in patent law could occur because a law passed in 1999 was unconstitutional.
The law "changed the way administrative patent judges are appointed, substituting the director of the Patent and Trademark Office for the secretary of commerce."
The law is important because the constitution ensures that elected officials, not appointed ones, have the power to appoint others. That keeps the bureaucracy accountable.
The bottom line is that patent law is out of control and needs significant revision.
Update: Today's patent news: VeriSign owns site redirection.
Posted by agoldman at 10:23 AM | Add Comment
May 5, 2008
ISPs Debate Bandwidth Costs, Unlimited Pricing
On the ISP-Bandwidth list in April, I posted some comments from Om Malik on bandwidth pricing (under the headline "Om Malik supports throttling, gets flamed"):
http://gigaom.com/2008/04/22/shocking-new-facts-about-p2p-and-broadband-usage/
On fixed and mobile broadband networks where consumer services are provided
(i.e., NOT interprovider or typical dedicated Internet access for commercial
enterprises):
10 percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth.
0.5 percent of subscribers consume about 40 percent of total bandwidth
80 percent of subscribers use less than 10 percent of bandwidth
This supports the arguments made by some of the larger ISPs, including
Comcast. In a recent interview, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told me his
company would try and deal with the tiny number of subscribers who use most
of the bandwidth by slowing down their connections during peak times.
(Personally, I find that to be a distasteful solution, and I believe that
folks should learn from newer ISPs like Free.fr and better architect their
networks so they can provide more bandwidth for all - without imposing any
penalties.)
A week later, the replies keep coming in. ISP owners would like to advertise a flat fee with a monthly limit, but fear that consumers don't know that the cablecos and telcos are lying to them when they advertise unlimited bandwidth. Even if the cablecos and telcos were fined by the FTC or FCC for false advertising, the dollar amount of the fine would not change their behavior.
The legal system is structured to punish family businesses and to insulate large corporations from the consequences of their own actions.
Posted by agoldman at 11:25 AM | Add Comment
April 29, 2008
Independent ISP Wins One Over Murdoch
Medium-sized UK ISP TWS has won a domain name appeal against News Corp.-owned MySpace. The politics of the ruling were complex, and the story may not be over, The Register reports.
TWS had owned the myspace.co.uk domain name since 1997, so should have the rights to it, but may have been profiting from ads run on the site since News Corp acquired MySpace in 2005.
Meanwhile the .uk administrator Nominet is in the middle of contentious elections.
It's a story to keep your eye on.
Posted by agoldman at 4:08 PM | Add Comment
AOL Claims Success, So Are Portals Back?
Kenneth Corbin of internetnews.com titles the story, AOL Touts Turnaround Success After Record Traffic.
It's certainly reasonable for an ISP to try to make money from its home page, but AOL's strategy is radical. The company has been offering a free portal, hoping to make money from advertising. Meanwhile, the AOL brand has been losing close to 1 million subscribers per quarter.
It's true that the old strategy wasn't working (see AOL, Feeble Giant). But is the new strategy really successful?
Corbin writes that we'll know when AOL releases its results. We'll need to take a look at the trending schedules to know for certain, but the odds are that AOL has not fully replaced its lost subscription revenue.
Posted by agoldman at 9:54 AM | Add Comment
April 28, 2008
Has Rockstar Finally Gone Too Far With Graphic Video Game?
With the release of Grand Theft Auto IV nearing, I expected the controversy over sex and violence in video games to heat up again, but Ars Technica is reporting that the usual trolls received an unusual assist from gaming site IGN. (IGN is owned by Murch. Coincidence?)
The Ars Technica article describes the IGN video: "The video strips the game of all context and merely shows scenes of sexual content and violence, one after the other. In fact, it can be hard to watch for that reason, and it's a rather numbing experience."
You won't find a link to it on this page.
The ISP issue here: ISPs do not want to be asked or forced to police the usage of video games on their networks. If rogue lawyers want to indict everyone at a video game company for a game they call "worse than polio" then that's fine. They're allowed to present their case, no matter how ridiculous.
I fear, however, that since the Department of Justice ranks pornogoraphy as a higher prioirity threat to America than anything else, including organized crime and terrorism, the response will be fanatical and heavy handed, and may harm ISPs.
Update: Well, after this game appears to have broken records, achieving what may be the best composite review score of all time, I'll buy it when it comes out on the PC, if I can play it on my XP / DirectX 9 computer. The reviews exceeded high expectations and drove up the game maker's share price.
Posted by agoldman at 3:30 PM | Add Comment
April 25, 2008
Saving Data Center Energy
There are some complex things you can do to save data center energy, but there are also some relatively obvious steps you can take as oil approaches $120 per barrel.
ServerWatch has 8 Simple Ways to Slash Your Data Center Electricity Bill.
Don't believe it? Check out what Sonic.net did. Of course, it may only be in California that your local utility would pay you $100,000 to upgrade your cooling.
Also, allow me an OT aside: pretty unusual use of a bucket truck at Sonic.net!
Posted by agoldman at 1:31 PM | Add Comment