Jared Mauch's Comments

Not shocking for those of us in the industry, but cybercrime (aside from trying to arrange underage sex and child pornography cases) get very little attention.  There’s a report that was done by a few places, the report article is here with the Full PDF available for your perusal. Interesting to think about laws put on the books, but the lack of resources made available to prosecute new laws. Perhaps something like PayGo when it comes to these types of investigations. The assymetrical battle rages on. The internet brought you more than low-cost communications with family and friends, the cost is lower for the bad guys as well.

So, the long wait is coming to a close.  It is expected that next Friday there will be a ruling from the FCC that comcasts actions with regard to blocking file sharing software is outside of the scope of regular network managment tasks.  This will be interesting as we may see an increase in the peer to peer traffic on networks as the DPI p2p mitigation devices get removed from a variety of networks.  It may also mean the death of a few vendors or at least consolidation in the industry.  Article link can be found here.

I have come across two articles that have been well worth reading in the past 12 hours.  The first is a general article on the possible security implications of international travel and your personal electronic devices. The second is related to two blackouts that may be related to network intrusion activity. Both are well worth the read.

The Washington Post is reporting today (on page A3 sadly) on HSPD-23. This is apparently classified (so leaked by someone) and reflects the role that the intelligence community will play in watching the overall federal threat. While it’s good to have smart people working on these things (the Intelligence community has some of the brightest people working on analysis), there’s a lot of industry or trade secrets that are held in the private sector that are as important or more important to protect. We’ll see if there is room for partnership with the private sector or if all the work done will be classified.

The FCC has started a comment period and investigation into the interference with network traffic that Comcast is doing on their network.  The Associated Press did an excellent piece of reporting last fall (2007) on the impacts this would have, and others reported of the impact it has on their corporate Lotus-Notes systems.  If you’ve been impacted by this it would be wise to file a complaint or comments. At the same time, there have been leaked memos from Time Warner Cable indicating they will be testing bandwidth caps on users later this year.  They claim that 5% of their subscriber base contributes to 50% of their overall network traffic.  If you follow commodity bandwidth pricing, the 25/25 FIOS service offerings for around $100/mo are certainly a lossy item unless their internal costs are under $4/Mb.