Re: DOJ proposes US data-rentention law.
Steve, Not arguing, but the hardware cost curve for storage has a shorter halving time than the cost curve for CPU (Moore's Law) and the corresponding halving time for bandwidth is shorter still. If that relationship holds up over a period of years, today's tradeoffs between cache, re-computation, and anticipatory transmission would presumably change in the direction the economics dictates. And of course, if I really care that a particular piece of data is non-discoverable I either have to encrypt it, never transmit it, or go on one whopping search mission. Or so I think. Does the world look different from your vantage? --dan
Re: DOJ proposes US data-rentention law.
I appreciate what an honorable ISP admin will do to abide customer rights over intrusive snoopers and perhaps cooperative administrators above the pay grade of a sysadmin. Know that a decent sysadmin is on for about 1/3 of a weekday for 24x7 systems is a small comfort but leaves unanswered what can happen: 1. During that time when a hero is elsewhere. 2. Upstream of the ISP, the router of the ISP and the nodes serving routers, as well as at a variety of cache systems serving there various levels. 3. At major providers serving a slew of smaller ISPs. In this case I reported a while back of a sysadmin telling what my ISP, NTT/Verio, is doing at its major node in Dallas: allowing the FBI to freely scan everything that passes through the Verio system under an agreement reached with NTT when it bought Verio. No matter what a local sysadmin does with data, it remains very possible that data is scanned, stored and fucked with in nasty ways coming and going such that no single sysadmin can catch it. End to end crypt certainly could help but there is still a fair abount of TA that can be done unless packets are truly disintegrated and/or camouflaged at the source before data leaves the originating box. Pumping through anonymizers, inserting within onions, subdermal pigging back on innocuous wireless packets of the financial advisor door, multiple partial sends, stego-ing, data static and traffic salting, bouncing off the moon or windowpane, what else can you do when an eager beaver industry is racing to do whatever it takes to build markets among the data controllers breathing hot about threats to national security and handing out life-saving contracts to hard-up peddlers shocked out of their skivvies with digital downturn. No patriotic act is too sleazy these days that cannot be justified by terror of red ink and looming layoffs.
Re: DOJ proposes US data-rentention law.
At 17:37 22/06/2002 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Not arguing, but the hardware cost curve for storage has a shorter halving time than the cost curve for CPU (Moore's Law) and the corresponding halving time for bandwidth is shorter still. You've got a point. Storage is becoming less and less expensive per gigabyte, especially for IDE drives. If you're using a RAID set up, IDE doesn't cut it, SCSI is the way to go (for now). SCSI is a lot cheaper than it used to be, but it's still over $1000 for a single 70gig drive in Canada. For maximum redundancy in one rack-mount server, RAID 10 is the way to go. That means for every 1 drive, there must be an an exact duplicate. Costs can increase exponentially. That said, storage isn't the only expense when creating a large, fast and redundant file server (especially for caching). The fastest way to get data from a computer to the file server is via fibre channel. And fibre channel hardware isn't cheap. Last time I looked, a DIY RAID 10 system with 15 drives (1 hot-standby), case and fibre channel capability was ~ $30-35k. For each workstation that connects to it, there is a ~1k charge for the fibre channel client card. Don't even go near a fibre channel switch, they run $10-15k apiece, and don't handle more than 10-15 connections. Plus cabling. See, it adds up -- and that's just for one unit. To do the kind of data retention proposed in th EU, that is the kind of hardware that would be necessary. Plus a rack of tape backup drives running 24x7. Perhaps this sounds extreme, and it very well could be. My concern isn't so much based on what the law says must be retained, the penalties if the data isn't retained are what worry me. Could a system or network administrator be charged if the data is unavailable? What if their is a plausible reason (ie. hardware failed a year ago, fire)? What if the company cannot afford it? What charges are brought against the company? These questions are the reality for sysadmins in the EU. If Canada implemented a data retention law, I would be extremely concerned about my personal liability as well as corporate -- Canada already can charge a network administrator who the police believe is negligent in blocking (and removing) copyrighted software from computers he/she is responsible. It has happened. My understanding it has to do with an RCMP settlement over the PROMIS software scandal, but that's another topic. -- Steve
Re: DOJ proposes US data-rentention law.
At 18:57 21/06/2002 -0700, John Young wrote: Data retention is being done now by programs and services which cache data to ease loading on servers and networks. [...] John, As a systems administrator an ISP, I can tell flat out that the software you describe has nothing to do with ISP services. The software provides caching services for telecom companies (ie. billing, WAP, voice mail alerts etc). I see nothing that mentions typical ISP services, like e-mail or web-browsing. It is software designed to impress the executive level with pie charts and promises of reduced hardware costs. No one likes spending $50k on a NAS or Fibre Channel / RAID 10 box. Next time John, I suggest you turn your sites on caching software like Squid. Know what? I'm not even afraid to provide the URL! http://www.squid-cache.org .. you may even discover it has US Intelligence Community(tm) links, dating back many years! Incredible, huh? ISP's like the one I work for use Squid to save on bandwidth costs by caching oft-visited websites. Unfortunately, we (like most if not all ISP's) cannot afford the massive disk arrays (or the space they would take up, even the electricity) that would be necessary to retain data *for one day*. Geez, I don't think the government gonna like that. That's doesn't even bring us to the technical abilities of all the different pieces of software that must be re-written (en masse) to satisfy government desires. For instance, let's try e-mail software.. There are numerous companies and individuals who offer their own versions of e-mail server software. Microsoft's Exchange and Ipswitch's IMail for the Windows crowd who like spending lots of money, or Qmail, Postfix, Exim and even Sendmail for the Unix crowd. There are dozen's more, but you get the point. All that software will need to be rewritten. Then all the e-mail servers will need to be upgraded and tested. THEN more disk space added just to handle all the extraneous information like from who and to, from where (say originating IP and from what server host and IP) etc etc etc ad nauseam. Whoops! Let's not forget tape backups! I'm buying 3M stock come Monday! But what happens if we have a disk failure and the logs are lost? Hmm... Anyway, that is just for e-mail.. Imagine what HTTP, or FTP, or whatever can't-live-without service someone invents in the future? Data retention is unworkable even to the biggest of companies. Even the NSA cannot store that kind of data without a significant (and secret) budget. The only ones deriving any benefit from this are law enforcement and computer hardware commercial software manufacturers. Maybe its an economic stimulus package in disguise? -- Steve.
Ross's TCPA paper
I recently had a chance to read Ross Anderson's paper on the activities of the TCPA at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/.temp/toulouse.pdf I must confess that after reading the paper I am quite relieved to finally have solid confirmation that at least one other person has realized (outside the authors and proponents of the bill) that the Hollings bill, while failing to mention TCPA anywhere in the text of the bill, was written with the specific technology provided by the TCPA in mind for the purpose of mandating the inclusion of this technology in all future general-purpose computing platforms, now that the technology has been tested, is ready to ship, and the BIOS vendors are on side. Perhaps the Hollings Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act bill would be more accurately termed the TCPA Enablement Act. BTW, the module that Ross calls a Fritz in his paper after the author of the bill, long had a name: it is called a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Granted, in the context of the TCPA and the Hollings bill, the term trusted is used somewhat differently than the customers of future motherboards, which are all slated to include a TPM, might expect: trusted here means that the members of the TCPA trust that the TPM will make it near impossible for the owner of that motherboard to access supervisor mode on the CPU without their knowledge, they trust that the TPM will enable them to determine remotely if the customer has a kernel-level debugger loaded, and they trust that the TPM will prevent a user from bypassing OS protections by installing custom PCI cards to read out memory directly via DMA without going through the CPU. The public and the media now need to somehow, preferably soon, arrive at the next stage of realization: the involvement in the TCPA by many companies who's CEO's wrote the widely distributed open letter to the movie studios, telling the studios, or more precisely -- given that it was an open letter -- telling the public, that mandating DRM's in general-purpose computing platforms may not be a good idea, is indicative of one of two possible scenarios: 1) the CEO's of said computer companies are utterly unaware of a major strategic initiative their staff has been diligently executing for about 3 years, in the case of the principals in the TCPA, such as Intel, Compaq, HP, and Microsoft, several years longer. 2) the CEO's wrote this open letter as part of a deliberate good cop, bad cop ploy, feigning opposition to DRM in general computing platforms to pull the wool over the public's eye for hopefully long enough to achieve widespread deployment of the mother of all DRM solution in the market place. I do not know which of the two potential scenarios holds true. However, I believe public debate regarding the massive change in the way users will interact with their future computers due to the efforts of the TCPA and the Hollings bill would be greatly aided by attempts to establish which of the two scenarios is the fact the case. --Lucky Green
Re: Ross's TCPA paper
Ross has shifted his TCPA paper to: http://www.ftp.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/toulouse.pdf At 07:03 PM 6/22/2002 -0700, Lucky wrote: I recently had a chance to read Ross Anderson's paper on the activities of the TCPA at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/.temp/toulouse.pdf
