The Internet Is Being Slaughtered in the Back Room
by Paul Rosenberg
LewRockwell.com
People have rightly complained about SOPA, the “UN Takeover,” and other abuses of the Internet by governments, but all these publicized abuses were minor. The real nasty deeds are taking place in back rooms right now, among engineers who are trading away Internet freedom for mere paychecks.
As the article linked above says, “If civil society activists and technologists both had a better appreciation of [technical things]… they would be paying far more attention to this than they paid to the WCIT.” (WCIT was the “UN Takeover.”)
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE BACK ROOM
As I say, the real dirty deeds are currently happening in the back room. Here’s what they are:
Right now, a group called the Secure Inter-Domain Routing Working Group is working on a technology called Secure Border Gateway Protocol, or BGPSEC. (You may remember than I warned about BGPSEC a couple of years ago.)
BGP is how autonomous networks tell each other which IP addresses are available behind them, and it is utterly necessary for a dynamic Internet. No BGP would mean no Internet.
Routing info exchanged over BGP is not currently verifiable, and that can be a problem, especially because of a nasty spying scheme called hijacking. The fix for this involves the verification of unique resources (like IP addresses), but BGPSEC is only one possible solution, among several.
The Rest…HERE
