I was pointed to an article at the Wall Street Journal where the head of the ODNI wants to intercept all the internet traffic that traverses the United States. This would likely be done with a similar system as ECHELON or whatever the real system is should this be something fictional. It could represent a treasure of information or the biggest privacy challenge for the industry.
More cybersecurity woes ahead?
January 17th, 2008Administration starts transition planning with cybersecurity
October 30th, 2007Now there are transition plans starting with a Cybersecurity commission that is going to make recommendations on how to better secure our systems and what should be done. I’d like to see systems like einstein be mandatory across the entire public (federal) networks. It would be an immense value for those in government to determine what is being missed.
Senate likely to hold hearings on Comcast network interference
October 27th, 2007After the AP released a report last weekend about the way comcast interferes with p2p networks now some senators want a probe. Perhaps a number of these companies that make p2p blocking hardware/software will go out of business.
DHS and the Internet
October 24th, 2007There’s a lot going on in the DC area as it relates to DHS. The GAO released a report about planning for internet infrastructure recovery. DHS is partnering with NSA in what appears to be related to a more advanced version of their Einstein project which has now drawn congressional ire. This may be the beginning of DHS/NCSD getting a bit more attention than they wish to their activities and to the industry as a whole. Could this be the beginning of the end of the unregulated internet? It may not be long before the comcast p2p interference activities come up as well.
More USA PATRIOT Act issues
September 27th, 2007Another USA PATRIOT Act lawsuit has resulted in additional sections being ruled to violate the 4th ammendment. This is interesting as it also has some implications on the FISA act and may represent the start of an increased level of judicial action on cases where the “National Security” flag is run up the pole.
15 nanometer water filter
September 12th, 2007Talk about a small filter, there is a company in the UK that has shown off a water filter that costs 190GBP and will provide drinkable water as the output even if it has fecal matter in it. Seems like something quite valuable, and should be added to most folks home emergency kits. Time to hunt one down.
10GE packet inspection
September 7th, 2007Most folks face some challenges when processing line-rate packets, currently the state of the art inspection is done at 10 Gigabits or so. Processing of these packets could be done with ethernet cards that include the Xilinx XAUI FPGA. These include such things as built-in 4 lane PCIe capabilities, and one could presumably push a basic TCP/IP stack to the card and perform iperf or other actions.
Some Japanese folks have already built some network testing equipment similar to this, called the GtrcNET-10p3. They have a 2 month lead time for the hardware. It would seem that you could do some interesting modifications to the platform to forward matching packets from some criteria elsewhere. As long as I’m reading the specs right, we’re talking about the ability to have 3GB of memory available externally. The use of this for network debugging, tracing, or even data interception when properly fed make it interesting.
There are some network cards that include this Xilinx FPGA on the market, this would mean you can do interesting types of activities in a standard PC platform when the FPGA is properly programmed.
Interesting Network Developments
September 6th, 2007So in the Internet keeping itself interesting on a daily basis, there are three important things that have come out in the past day. First is the FCC’s actions as noted in the Federal Register which include responses from only 45 service providers for how they will provide information to “…conduct a vulnerability assessment of the Nation’s critical communications and information systems infrastructure and shall evaluate the technical feasibility of creating a back-up emergency communications system that complements existing communications resources and takes into account next generation and advanced communications technologies.”
Additionally there is interesting news regarding so called “Net Neutrality” today. The DOJ has just one objection to folks doing this, but as the article headline says, “Feds OK fee for priority Web traffic”. Luckily, I use ssh and other non-http transports for the majority of my activities so this will not impact me, right?
There’s also ISP news in a Patriot Act lawsuit from the ACLU. It seems that NSL’s may no longer apply to service providers, and will need judicial oversight, either from the FISA court or other courts.