[ NNSquad ] Re: New P2P Privacy System from Univ. of Washington

[Barry Gold <bgold@matrix-consultants.com>]

Richard Bennett wrote:
> I think there's a big difference between technologies that can be 
> "abused by evil people" and those that are *meant to be used by 
> criminals in the commission of crime*. There's no legitimate reason to 
> mask the identities of the members of a P2P swarm in any free and 
> democratic country,

Ah.  So there was no legitimate reason for the existence of 
anon.penet.fi or any of the subsequent remailers that have been created 
all over the world?  Or for the various sites -- both free and pay -- 
that will mask your IP address when websurfing?

To me, this smacks just a little too much of the "honest people have 
nothing to hide, so why are you objecting if we want to search your home 
for contraband?"

> Jacobson raises one of the interesting challenges for neutralists, to 
> wit: if you insist that protocols remain blissfully unaware of payload, 
> how, pray tell, do you deal with the challenge of popular and repetitive 
> content? In the not-too-distant future, TV delivery will shift almost 
> entirely to the Internet. Are we doomed to transmitting a unique copy of 
> the entire packet stream of each episode of "American Idol" to each of 
> its 50 million viewers, or can we relax the layering dogma enough to 
> cache copies of the stream close to the end user?
>
> Solving this problem will require some awareness of the content by the 
> delivery system, and that's not a bad thing, is it? According to 
> neutralist dogma, it's the Original Sin. So the choice appears to be 
> this: efficient networks or neutral networks, pick only one.

I guess it depends on how you define Network Neutrality -- the central 
question that this list is about.

But Bennett does have a point.  If it is illegal (or even immoral or 
fattening) for ISPs to look any further than the IP header when handling 
packets, then a lot of strategies like caching cannot be implemented.(*)

This is why I have abandoned total opposition to DPI.  Obviously, DPI 
can be beneficial.  It is only when it is used to the detriment of the 
user that I object to it.

I suppose, really, we should add a bit to the header saying whether 
intermediaries are allowed to look inside the packet.  But given how 
long it is taking merely to make the jump from IPv4 to IPv6, I don't see 
that happening any time soon.

(*) I should note that caching has the interesting property that 
_nobody_ is harmed.  The person trying to fetch the cached page gets 
better response because it is delivered from a (topologically) nearby 
host instead of the originating host many hops further away.  And other 
users of the same node or ISP also benefit because valuable tier 1 lines 
are used for non-repetitive traffic instead of being tied up with 
multiple copies of the same image or video.

This assumes, of course, that the ISP caches _only_ things that are 
truly repetitive, correctly respecting markers for when the data need to 
be re-fetched from the remote host.