[bmw]

... I am always amazed, and appalled, when I fire up a packet monitor and watch the continuous flow of useless junk that arrives at my demarcation routers' interfaces.

That background traffic has increased to the point where it makes noticeable lines on my MRTG graphs. And I have little reason for optimism that this increase will cease. Quite the contrary, I find more reason to be pessimistic and believe that this background noise will become a Niagara-like roar that drowns the usability of the Internet. ...

http://www.circleid.com/article/215_0_1_0_C/

[|MiNi0n|]

A quick perusal through my log files always saddens me these days, much in aggreement with this article.

However, I'm quite sure the Net will survive just fine, despite all the random idiocy :D

[elmore]

That's a really good aritcle! It got me thinking about things for sure. The net is going to change for sure. As the article says, the net just simply can't continue in the manner that it has. Polluted address space being the biggest thing in my opinion.

The most disturbing part of the article to me the the last paragraph!


But of even more concern will be the fact that these portals, or gates, will require gatekeepers, which is merely a polite word for censors. Our experience with ICANN has shown us how easily it is for focused and well-financed interests to capture a gatekeeper. In the present political climate in which government powers are conferred, without a counterbalancing obligation of accountability, onto private bodies, the loss will be much greater.



So bmw, have you any ideas on how to either educate admins or clean up some of this mess?

[elmore]

However, I'm quite sure the Net will survive just fine, despite all the random idiocy :D

I'm not quite as optimistic as you. In particular with all of the junk going around these days and with governments always with a hand in the mix.

I have the fear I'll wake up one day and surf on a heavily regulated net. Under the cloud that it's a good thing, because now nancy can't join a chat room and talk to john, who knows franks e-mail who knows Hingis's website who doubles as a member of some South American Cartel when he's not doing kiddie porn, who's also willing to sell pot to nancy, just so little Tommy can get gunned down in an act of terrorism or some bullshit.

But I suppose only time will tell.....

[v902]

Yes, regulation does seem close :? And with already questionable laws on encryption and such it's really becoming more and more a reality, hell the NSA is constantly pushing for backdoors in software and encryption... I'll just keep using SSHv2 for now :)

[Former Member]

The internet as we know it has to die sooner or later, mainly because it just wasn't designed to be secure. MIT and other institutions have been collectively designing and redeploying an internet 2 (I think thats the name).
The increasing stance taken by corporations (etc.) in order to prevent harmful traffic poisoning their networks seems only logical, as I said above, the internet is not secure and for such a large scale public access service, It never will be 100% secure.

How do you all expect the internet to evolve? any ideas/fantasies as to how it could change?

[elmore]

any ideas/fantasies as to how it could change?

Reminds me of Conan O'Briens "in the year 2000" sketches.

I'll play.

Let's see....

The streetlights on my street never go out because 48 hours before they're about to burn out they inform the power company.

My refridgerator/other appliances, never have problems because they always inform the warranty company before a problem happens.

I can order a pizza online, wait a second.......

Instead of turning the TV to HBO I'll browse to HBO.com

Sorta reminds me of a Story that came out on /. a while ago, I can't find it now but it was the top 10 internet predictions for the next 10 years.

[v902]

SCO goes down :)

For me it's a bit different as I don't have money or appliances etc. But I hope for things such as:

Automatic encryption no matter what service I am sending to or from, the service by nature (telnet) may not be encrypted but the packets that I send are sent out encrypted...

ProPolice stack protection or something like it built into all Operating Systems

StackGuard [-like] patches are added for all major compilers and are on by default

ISNs' are _truely_ random, even for Routers/cable modems, spoofing them has advantages too...

To shut down your computer you need to enter a password (No more parents hard shutting down my box all the time :x)

ARP posining made impossible(Check back with a packet to make sure it's their MAC...)

Death penalty for kiddies (OK OK this is more of a sure way to stop scans on my box :lol:)

EDIT: And DST port is in front of SRC port, wtf is the point of SRC port being in front? Jebus....

[Former Member]

HBO....never heard of that (in England), just taken a quick look at the site and it looks cool though, thanks for that :)

I haven't really considered the appliance/public services though you make good valid points, I assume thats more to do with software than anything else though.

Now vlad...SCO is just like any other corporation, if you don't adapt...u die, they kinda went backwards did they not...

The encryption rates, protocols in use and their replacements as well as the future of cryptography interests me, will be interesting how the next generation of hackers/crackers/phreakers adapt to such a change in climate. Now we all know there's always going to be hackers/crackers/phreakers ;)

ProPolice, I've never heard of, you have any links?? I'm still the OS novice you know n love lol. I'm generally against standards, they tend not to evolve as quickly as anything else in the field.

lol.... buy a bloody lock man, that is all :)

Any comments on the core infrastructure of the internet? I'd like to know what you all think of the layout of the internet as well, will there be major backbones for networks to connect to? Will there be balkanised networks that create a backbone on the fly? I'm not entirely to sure of the current situation in this respect, and of much else...but I'm learning....slowly slowly learning.

[v902]

Lol, I'l look into the lock idea :lol:

ProPolice is a "way" to stop buffer overflows and general screwing with teh stack, it's implemented by default in OpenBSD.... It protects the stack in multiple ways, randomizing the location (Complexity), putting a "canary" (Random number) before the RET adress and poitners/etc, and putting buffers close to the canary so that it less likely to overflow other things. Then when it goes back to go to the RET adress if the canary is fux0red the proccess is killed... This stops basic buffer overflows and other situations, I can't find any good links but I did find a quote by Theo himself


Propolice is, as I like say describe it, "Stackgaurd on steriods".
Stackgaurd uses a random canary (random value constant per run)
placed by the function prologue and checked by the function epilogues
to ensure the return address has not been moved. It was i386 only
code. Propolice is machine independent, running on most of our
architectures. As well, Propolice rearranges variables inside a
stack frame so that the ones most likely to overflow (ie buffers) are
closest to the canary, thereby making it hard to overwrite pointers or
regular integers (which it moves down).


For the infrastructure, I believe that more and more lines are going to be replaced by more efficient ones from the sponge research... (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3168353.stm), truely if whatever gets me closer to getting an OC-48 for the price of cable is good :)

[Former Member]

The sponge article is quite interesting, not thrilling though lol :P

Theo knows how to put a guy in the shade man.... I feel so small compared to that guy lol, everything in OBSD seems so cool.... keep that sh?t rollin V :D :D though, no doubt I'm going to read the obsd docs indepth when my system' returns from the dead

[v902]

Yeah, I got a new prediction, not for the internet though.... 2007, a type of spong is now extinct ;) hehehe.

Yeah, Theo is way over my head... I mean, he can be a total ass but hey, keeps the OS running and I like it so... Yeah, I still gotta read all the docs, my OpenBSD partition right now only exists in imagination... :)

[bmw]

Though I posted that article, I'm not as pessimistic about the Inet's future as the writer. There's too much at stake now, especially economic, for the Internet to "die". If the Internet were to disappear overnight, people would start creating it again.

Even if all the telcos decided to get out of the business, a grass-roots Internet would spring up fuelled by IEEE 802.11 wireless bridges and ISDN/T1/whathaveyou links. It's happening in California now with little WiFi clusters.

Also, the telcos have bet the farm on TCP/IP. All of them are moving their infrastructure to TCP packets from T1 frames. All voice traffic will be carried over TCP in the near future. The amount of data traffic carried by the telcos exceeded analog voice traffic a couple of years ago. As long as the telcos have a data/packet infrastructure, the Internet or something equivalent to it is possible.

Thing is, ISPs make money from the Internet. They will keep on increasing the bandwidth of the pipes to meet the demand. As that happens, the effect of pointless packet noise will lessen. I fear it will always be there, but it will become like the universe's background radiation: always there, all around, but ignored by everyone.

As for "what can we do about it": I'd say it's up to the ISPs and the common carriers to block pointless and damaging traffic (where possible). The ISPs already do that to some degree by blocking outbound TCP port 25 (SMTP) to thwart random DSL/Cable spammers using open relays.

I bet it won't be long before they'll all simply block port 135 and 445 and probably all the other Windoze networking & RPC ports simply because nobody can safely use that stuff in the clear, and the only use it's put to is Blaster worms and popup spam.


Long ago a wise man said that the net sees censorship as damage and routes around it. I think the same goes for the gradually worsening background noise. The net's strength lies in its redundancy and diversity. It'll be around in one form or another for a very long time.