John Kozubik

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...

 

Google DNS

There are many very good reasons to be alarmed by the notion that Google would like the world to migrate to their servers for DNS resolution.  A good discussion on the Nanog mailing list:

http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2009-December/015787.html

highlighted several of these, mainly from the perspective of a network operator or ISP admin, but the usual questions of privacy/tracking/anonymity were raised.

Certainly a monoculture is a dangerous thing, and this makes the sorry state of the global Internet worse in a fairly profound way.

As you may imagine, I have things to say about this. But today, I'd like to submit what I believe to be the impetus behind this new offering:

I believe that Google will begin delivering search results based not only on PageRank but an amalgam of PageRank and other, increasingly "out of band" information.

While a significant portion of my Internet behavior is funneled, in one way or another, through Google search (I don't use mail/voice/groups/etc.) there is a lot of behavior that isn't. This "out of band" behavior is every web site, and especially every chain of web sites that I visit without searching, or after searching for a single site, but then following subsequent links forward.

If search results, and especially ad placement, is generated not just with PageRank, but with a union of PageRank and other information like "site you are most likely to visit within X minutes of these sites" there is the potential of providing even more "relevant" search results, which lead to more "relevant" ad placements, leading to more ad clicks.

This isn't exactly what I would characterize as a "good" in the world, and all of the fears I have heard voiced are well founded. So even though my proposed motivation for this new service is rather benign, the technical underpinning is not any less foreboding.

If this is indeed the motivation for "Google Public DNS", what would this imply ?

First, Google would have an incentive to reduce DNS caching. If you receive name lookups from inside of your own network, or inside of your own system, this decreases the intelligence that is flowing back to Google. It will be very interesting to see what the default cache settings for name resolution are in Google Chrome OS and Android.

Second, the shady world of "search engine optimization" and Adwords fraud is going to get more interesting. These activities could conceivably shift from a passive collection of fake websites and cross-connected "blog entries" to the active generation of network traffic to influence search results.

Which sounds like a real party.

 

Flat Rate Storage Services vs. rsync.net

One of the most common pre-sales questions we get at rsync.net is:

"Why should I pay a per gigabyte rate for storage when these other providers are offering unlimited storage for a low flat rate?"

The short answer is: paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions.

 

Now for the long answer...

 

In 1998 I did some consulting for an early, and very successful provider of web hosting. They offered unlimited disk space and traffic for a relatively low monthly price. Of course, the immediate question was how this was feasible - why wouldn't I just pay my $14.99 per month and upload gigabytes upon gigabytes of data, etc.

They chuckled and said (I paraphrase) "the more you upload, the more we throttle you. The little users don't bother us and the big users eventually just go away".

It's hard to say how common this kind of (deplorable) policy is ... but the economics demand that something like this be in place. Bandwidth and disk space are not free, and even the most unsophisticated hosting or storage consumer has the ability to deluge a provider with both.

What this means is that the providers and consumers of "unlimited" services will necessarily have conflicting interests. If your interest is to store as much data per dollar as possible, it will be the interest of your provider for you to store as little data per dollar as possible. The more you utilize, the more antagonistic this relationship will become, as you move from "someone we don't make any money on" to "someone who is killing our business model".

These non-intersecting goals will manifest themselves in any number of ways from bad service and support to "unexplained" poor performance to outright disconnection. As described above, I know firsthand of hosting companies that practice these very measures, and our interaction with prospective customers at rsync.net has exposed us to many more examples.

 

Here are some specific examples:

 

The Backup Provider with Unlimited Storage - This is the most common provider we are asked about, obviously. Examples include Mozy and Carbonite. This is the textbook case of what we are talking about here. Traffic throttling, connection resets, and discriminatory support are all examples of things I have personally seen providers like this do to users that don't perfectly fit their business model.

The Web Host with Unlimited Storage - Once in a while a more technically savvy individual will point out that they could get a $4.99/mo web hosting account from 1 & 1 or GoDaddy or someone like that and use duplicity over FTP or something like that to upload unlimited data there. In cases like this, unlimited web hosts have very specific contract language that stipulates that ALL content you upload to the web host MUST be publicly available web content. So the good news is they aren't playing any tricks with the storage they provide (the bandwidth is a different story) but it is unlikely you want to publish all of your data on the web.

Gmail Drives, etc. - Technically very clever, and an example of "things that make me happy", but not worth discussing in terms of critical data backup. Even for personal use, you're moving beyond simply working at cross purposes to your provider, and into the realm of "this tool isn't even designed for this, and can change at any time".

rsync.net, and other per-gigabyte storage providers - We want you to store as much data as you possibly can with us. We will do whatever we can to help you with whatever solution you require to get your data on our systems. The more data you put here, and the faster you do it, the happier we are. It should be noted that we do offer unlimited transfer, or bandwidth, but this is not evidence of a possible conflict of interest. We offer the unlimited transfer as a complement to the data that we want you to transfer here as fast as possible. Since we do not allow anonymous access (or "web" access, or inline linking, etc.) to an rsync.net account, there is no downside for us in doing this.

 

All of this leads to a general rule that should be applied to all consumption of services: it is imperative that you be aware of the interests of your provider, fully understand your own interests, and make sure that those two things align as well as possible. It is naive to think that any workable solution can be built upon an underlying relationship that is at cross purposes.

 

The Question of Commerce

I am now writing about the various commercial endeavors that I undertake.  This will consist mainly of technical and procedural questions related to rsync.net, JohnCompanies and Trent (coming soon).

However, it will also consist of writing that explores deeper questions about commerce itself, and the various questions and conflicts that arise from creating and running these organizations.

What is the specific purpose of a business firm ? To what end should it be optimized for ? What are the activities properly suited to this end ? What lifecycle should such a firm describe ?

I am disturbed by the culture of consumption that pervades the developed world and the warped interactions that occur between producer and consumer. I would like to explore how currently accepted practices in production, sales and marketing, and customer support are often manipulative and degrading. I will discuss my efforts at avoiding this in the context of my own business firms.

I am also disturbed by the notion of a business firm as a social actor with anthropomorphic qualities like "conscience" and "duty", and I find it troubling that business firms participate in activities that are typically undertaken by human beings. It has long been my suspicion that these humanist, extra-commercial activities merely serve to balance the many dehumanizing effects of business firms. I would like to explore how a stricter conception of such firms would obviate the need for these extra-commercial activities by removing the dehumanizing effects they are balancing.

I will explore the position of commerce in the Platonic castes of society. Does commerce belong to the lowest conception, or class, of human activity ? Or are there only certain aspects of commerce that are degrading ? Further, the attitudes of various aristocracies toward work, commerce and money deserve some attention as one explores the forms that commerce should and should not take. What are the archetypes of commerce and to what degree should their purity be pursued in the 21st century ?

These writings on commerce in general will be filed under the "Commerce" category, whereas writings specific to a particular firm will be categorized under that firms name.

I look forward to interacting, via comments, on all of these topics with both my customers and the public at large.