my web 0.2 website

Youtube pushed off the air

In between browsing Facebook and Youtube, the UK economy generates $1,930,000,000 of output a year. Thats $550,000 every two and a half hours. Well if today had been a work day, there’d have been one two and a half hour period where that was much higher. That’s because in a pique of routing excitement, Pakistan Telecom managed to hide Youtube from most of the internet for that length of time.

Pakistan Telecom and Youtube are likely to have no commercial relationship in place to carry Youtube traffic – particularly as around two hours ago, according to Yahoo News, the story broke that the Pakistan Government required ISPs operating in the country to block Youtube. Despite this, Pakistan Telecom were able to cause ISPs all over the world to send traffic that should be destined for Youtube to Pakistan instead.

This is because the protocol that determines how to find my network on the internet, is shaped by how “specific” the announcement of my network is. If I make an announcement of a network of 1,024 addresses, and someone else makes a second announcement of 256 addresses within a subset of my 1,024, then the network which announces the smaller subset win the traffic destined to those hosts. This is a feature – fully by design – of the BGP routing protocol. Almost every time a more specific block of addresses is announced, this is because the administrators of those networks intend for the routing to be different for a subset of a large number of addresses.

Sadly, there are accidents from time to time – another network can announce a subset of my addresses without my knowledge or permission, and they win the traffic that should have gone to me. This happened today – it seems that Pakistan Telecom decided to inject a fake route to their network containing Youtube’s webservers, and accidently then leaked that route to the networks they connect to.

Small networks and end sites can limit the chances that they will leak bad routes by explicitly listing the network addresses that they intend to send to their upstream or peered networks. Larger networks may find it harder to stop themselves propagating someone else’s mistake, because they may have a contract to carry forward any announcement that their customers make. Furthermore, the complexities of their own networks mean that an engineer working under pressure after announcements made by government ministers are more likely to make a typo error and do the wrong thing.

Richard Clayton presented a very interesting set of commentaries at the last LINX meeting. He commented that right now its very obvious indeed when someone hijacks some of my network space in this way, because all of my traffic disappears. Youtube were probably aware that something was very wrong within moments of the announcement. What if someone builds an infrastructure to steal my traffic – or at least some of my traffic – but after doing something with it, they send it back to me, it is much harder for me to spot that anything is wrong.

This is a significant risk to ecommerce infrastructures that competitors or e-pirates could seize upon opportunities to steal customer behaviour data. What if a wizard stole the network containing your web server, proxied your shop, but set up a fake checkout? How quickly would you spot?

Because this problem is inherent to the routing protocol, this is the obvious place to fix it. There are attempts to blend PKI with routing information, so that peers can verify the validity of your announcements. S/BGP (secure BGP) requires me to sign my announcements, and gives my peers a method to check in an impartial internet community database that my announcement is valid. It is the sort of technology that would have prevented Youtube from disappearing off the air today.

Life after email

The death of email has already been predicted on approximately 1,258,926 blogs, so I barely need to recount the chant that IM is already replacing regular conversation, social networking manages infrequent messaging between your peers and introduces you to new business partners, and that web forums are how the population now find out information.  Email is struggling to be the ubiquitous gold-standard for internet communication because of the amount of spam and malware that is distributed through the medium.
This doesn’t explain how email marketing will be replaced.  Email is an inexpensive and relatively simple and successful way of driving repeat business.  Once your customers have found your company useful once, you take future opportunities to remind them to spend some money with you again.  If legitimate email marketing dies, this could cause a dent in online trading.  That’s bad for folks like me and the folks who read these articles.

GMTV are finding they’re already a victim of spam filtering, or customer reluctance to read marketing email.  They’re originating messages that either get binned by the audience, or their audience’s automatic spam filters.  Customers who traditionally would have received emails informing them of new online content are now being encouraged to install a desktop client that alerts them in real time about new content.

I’m pretty worried that in order to stay in touch with suppliers in the future, I’ll be expected to use one particular desktop client.  This means in some cases, I may have to use one particular desktop environment for a start.  Secondly, this makes it more likely that I’ll receive malware – how can I trust the originators of the client?  And as it’s a network service, any desktop alerting system is also potentially at risk of abuse or spam.  So I get realtime spam as well as spam waiting for me when I check my mail.

Instead, I hope that more email clients incorporate RSS systems in the future, as Apple Mail has done in the latest release.  Using Apple Mail, I can subscribe to marketing announcements from the companies that I want to hear from, and have those arrive in a specified area of my mail client, and they’re not inflicted by spam.  As I try to make clear everywhere possible – use open standards and open protocols, if you want to keep your doors open to new business.

Internationalisation of DNS continues

Like most original internet standards, the DNS was designed to initially suit the needs of any section of the world that could communicate using 7-bit ASCII and Latin character sets. Then the internet became really popular. Everywhere. The DNS had to evolve to cope with naming schemes that came from alphabets all over the world.

All successful internet protocols are elegant and simple by design. This makes it possible to retro-fit great ideas someone has one. Internationalisation was proposed in 1992, and it eventually became possible to register Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) in the .com space in 2003. Standards move slowly on the internet!

IDN is up for discussion again at the 31st ICANN meeting on Monday. This time, the world’s registry community are meeting in New Delhi, one of the most significant IT regions of the non-Latin world, to discuss the remaining “glitch” in the IDN system. An IDN might look like this: .com. Therefore any user still needs to be able to type .com in order to reach the resource they request. There is a proposal at the ICANN meeting to add Internationalised top-level domains, actual complimentary TLDs to .com, that will mean that resources can be reached in any supported alphabet.

This is interesting stuff. One school of thought is that this could significantly assist the development of electronic enterprise in many more pockets of the world. The supremacy of Silicon Valley as the web’s main economy would then be broken. I think differently – I think that .com is now too established as the main ecommerce ‘brand’ TLD, and attempts to localise the meaning of .com will be fruitless. .com means “I trade online”. Despite .biz and similar TLDs being equal in technical terms, they are not equal in the eyes of shoppers or traders. .com now has specific global meaning, and can’t be diluted.

Vodafone’s legal challenge to fast porting.

I tried to open some dialogue with colleague members of the ITSPA about Vodafone’s legal challenge to Ofcom’s two-hour number port ruling.  Instead I got a number of offlist replies suggesting Vodafone’s challenge is still news to many in the industry.

Today, if you want to port your number from one service provider to another, it relies on two major coincidences – firstly that your old and new provider have an agreement in place to manage the technical transfer between the two networks, and secondly that your old provider remains fully willing to forward all calls destined from your old number, to your new service provider.

There are several issues with such a system – the first is that your old provider are still very much involved, so their technical or commercial failure causes a problem long after you have ported away, another is that the process is slow and manual, and a third is that not all service providers have agreements to permit number porting (called a Mutual Porting Agreement in the industry).

Vodafone are concerned about the costs of the new system, even though an industry group UKPorting has only just begun to gather information about how the system should work.  I think that it’s a flawed premise to argue that a system is too expensive before a system is selected (and associated costs are announced).  Instead Vodafone should get involved with designing a perfect system.

The UKporting system to facilitate fast, reliable, and simple porting must happen, and must succeed.  We have to protect consumers who port their number from failures caused by their former service provider.

I am concerned that the system may mean all multihomed telephone networks will need to move to any all-call-query model that’s run by one natural monopoly.  If a single entity holds the industry to ransom, we have not moved forward – there’s still a single commercial or technical position that can fail to break your port.  The single All-Call-Query model also lends itself well to governments having access to a single point where recording of most call attempts can be made.