John Kozubik

Peak Internet

In light of current events, I think it is time to begin discussing "Peak Internet" in the same way that we discuss "Peak Oil" or "Peak Credit".

The last two weeks have included Comcast potentially de-peering due to end user traffic, the DNS system compromised with questionable legal authority and a a popular website forced out of US infrastructure.

I believe that 2010 represents the "peak" of the homogenous, globally routed Internet as we have known it. For what it's worth, we're guilty of some fragmentation of our own ...

 

Ignoring The Kill Switch

Much has been said recently of Cyber Warfare and the existential threat it represents.

Hopefully you have been able to ignore this ridiculous meme and the clownish "experts" propagating it.

Unfortunately, providing "solutions" for these problems is far too lucrative a market opportunity to be left unexploited, so you should expect to see this meme grow, and for the proposed policies to become more and more radical.

Enter the kill switch.

Like the more general "cyber warfare" meme, the Internet Kill Switch is demonstrably absurd. Will wireless networking equipment be confiscated ? Will private peering interconnects within datacenters be disconnected ? Will IP traffic over cellular or CATV links be disabled ? The understanding of those that propose such an idea probably begins and ends at the word "switch".

Derision and disgust, however, are not ingredients of a good business continuity plan. Although it appears unlikely to be implemented soon, the (bad) policy has been proposed, and regardless of our technical "understanding", we as service providers must respond and fit our offerings to this possible reality.

And so, in Q1 of 2011, rsync.net will provide a wireless private network at each of its physical locations (San Diego California, Denver Colorado, Zurich Switzerland, and Hong Kong) which will allow customers to physically approach the datacenter and access their stored data without traversing The Internet. This will ensure that bad policy will have to enter the stone age to keep you from accessing your data.

Full technical details will be published on our web site before these wireless links are active. Capabilities will include the ability to tunnel through to other rsync.net locations. So, for instance, if you live in California and store your data in our Zurich location, we may still have routing across the ocean even if you do not - we're right next to our backbone providers, and have several of them, after all. So while we will not transform ourselves into an ISP for you, we will maintain whatever VPNs we can to allow you to reach your data, regardless of which physical location you may be at.

As we've pointed out before, we are not an ISP. We announce today that we are not even an Internet data storage provider ... we are simply a data storage provider and will work with our customers to provide them service regardless of political inefficiencies.

 

The Warrant Canary in 2010 and Beyond

We have been publishing our Warrant Canary weekly at rsync.net for almost five years now. We are happy to report that in this time, no warrants of any kind have been served to us.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that the National Security Letter as an abusive surveillance tool is becoming any less widespread. While the Doe v. Ashcroft ruling was an encouraging step, the reality is that the NSL is alive and well. To wit:

The USA PATRIOT Act is affected only if the limits on NSLs in terrorism cases also apply to non-terrorism cases such as those authorized by the Act. The government was expected to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, and until the district court ruling is reviewed, the secrecy procedures of the NSL remain in place.

Further, the limitations of the NSL, and of the USA PATRIOT act in general, are slowly being worked around by successive presidential and agency administrations:

Wrong Direction on Privacy (Huffington Post)

Breaking a Promise on Surveillance (New York Times)

And so we will continue to publish the Warrant Canary. Further, we will begin mirroring our Warrant Canary at our international locations (currently Switzerland and Hong Kong). This will address the most common complaint: that when the rubber hits the road, conventional and unconventional means of coercion could be used to compel persons at our firm to publish false statements. Restriction of our speech will now require cooperation across multiple continents, cultures, and languages.

 

Related to this, let me say that I have never thought of rsync.net as an Internet Service Provider. We have a technical philosophy that places a high value on simplicity and we have constructed our data storage platform with as few processes and services running as possible.

We believe that stability and security are greatly enhanced by keeping the list of moving parts as small as possible.

There are legal and privacy related benefits to this philosophy. We do not currently fit the legal definition of an ISP, and we will take steps to ensure that we continue to fall outside of data collection measures that specifically relate to ISPs

There is some cost associated with this. For instance, we have considered implementing an "email to file" service that allows our customers to email attached files into their rsync.net filesystems. One of our competitors, DropBox, has such a feature. We have eschewed this, however, as providing email service (even in this non-standard way) takes us a big step closer to being classified as an ISP.

 

Finally, I will address the FAQ: "what will happen if you do receive a warrant ?"

The answer is, we will publish the receipt of the warrant, and perhaps the warrant itself, provided that it is not a "secret" warrant. So the current verbage of the warrant canary:

No warrants have ever been served to rsync.net, or rsync.net principals or employees. No searches or seizures of any kind have ever been performed on rsync.net assets

would be changed to read:

rsync.net has received the following warrants during operation:
2010-09-14 Warrant served by Sevier County Court, Sevier County, UT, compelled rsync.net to provide confirmation that John Q. Public was not an rsync.net customer.

NO OTHER warrants have ever been served to rsync.net

As always, a secret warrant causes the canary to cease updating until such time as that warrant can be listed. I hope that this makes clear that the mere receipt of a warrant or order of any kind, which I am surprised we have never received, does not necessarily "kill" the warrant canary.

 

I will conclude by reiterating a key component of our Terms of Service:

No consumer or personal information about our customers of any kind will be divulged to any party for any reason.

It's amazing how simple things can be...

 

Free Speech or Stone Age

I am passionate about free speech. To that end, I watch closely the actions that state actors take to restrict freedom of speech (as well as their perceived effectiveness).

The explosion of speech on the Internet has been met with increasingly frequent and sophisticated means of monitoring and censorship. Nationwide blackouts in North Korea, government mandated spyware in China, and pinpointed disabling of infrastructure during the Iranian presidential election of 2009, all lead to the conclusion that state actors can control free speech in the Internet era.

That conclusion is wrong.

Modern commerce is so dependent upon information that removing this infrastructure condemns a society to a "stone age". Further, as commerce rapidly evolves, it is impossible to distinguish between the critical and superfluous aspects of this infrastructure, so selective control is impossible. Even if a state actor takes drastic action, the mere existence of portable computers, open wireless networking standards and encryption guarantee the populace access to free speech - even without the Internet.

The choice state actors face is Free Speech or Stone Age. (full paper - 2 pages)