This is the case because radio networks share common frequencies or channels. A TV broadcaster transmits a signal from a single antenna, and millions of TV sets receive it (most ignore it, but that’s another issue.) There is only one transmitter in this system, so there is no problem with interference caused by the multiple elements of the system. Transmitters generate interference with each other on a shared spectrum system, but when there’s only one transmitter, there aren’t any collisions. TV broadcast is one transmitter, multiple receivers, so it works best when the one transmitter can blanket a large area with a common signal.

Data networks operate in a very different way because they features two way communication and multiple transmitters. Multiple transmitters thrive on frequencies that travel limited distances, for two reasons:

1. Interference from collisions – multiple stations transmitting at the same time – decreases as the number of potential transmitters visible to a given receiver declines. More transmitters means more collisions, in other words, and each collision is a waste of capacity. This problem is mitigated in several different ways, and each of them is most effective when the pool of potential transmitters is small. Limiting the travel of each transmission limits collisions.
2. The overhead of detecting and correcting collisions is a function of the distance a packet travels before a collision can be detected. In the old Ethernet system devised at Xerox PARC, collisions were detected in the first 64 bytes of each packet. Transmitters were capable of seeing that their packets had collided, so they truncated packets that weren’t going to make it. This was a very low overhead system in which collisions didn’t impose a significant toll on the pool of available bandwidth. Wi-Fi is very different because transmitters aren’t aware of collisions as they happen, only after an entire packet has transmitted and an interval has elapsed for the receiver to acknowledge the packet. No acknowledgement means a collision probably happened. The waiting interval for the acknowledgement is sized to the latency of the network over its largest extent, so it’s a function of the speed (a thousand feet per microsecond) of light over the distance that the network is expected to cover. Wi-Fi networks can’t be larger than 5000 feet without bending the rules and reducing capacity. They require an acknowledgement within 10 microseconds from end of packet, during which time both their own (transmit) packet and the acknowledgement have to cover the whole distance, and the packet has to be checked for correctness. The greater the separation of the most distant stations, the more likely they are to collide as well, because they have to wait longer to see each others transmissions, an additional form of system overhead.

So the two reasons are the probability of a collision happening and the overhead of the collision avoidance and detection systems. Cellular systems don’t have big collision problems because they rely on scheduling systems to allocate air time in a way that prevents collisions, so they can break Wi-Fi’s 5000 foot limit without losing efficiency. This makes them better able to use the propagation benefits that come from the 700 MHz band as opposed to the more limited 2.4 GHz band that most Wi-Fi systems use.

But these things are not completely black and white, and we’ll explain why in the next installment.

The mobile network providers and the House Energy and Commerce Committee are on one side of the current spectrum auctions issue, arguing that the FCC needs guidance from Congress about incentive auction parameters, while the Senate and the FCC say that the Commission should have a free hand in designing the auction. An additional issue concerns the extent of the FCC’s power to force broadcasters to different frequencies that will make more spectrum available for auction (the “repacking” issue.) A third issue concerns the forced sharing of channels by broadcasters, most of whom don’t require the full allocation they were given in the DTV transition. A number of broadcasters transmit 4 or 5 separate programs at a time, and all but the first tend to be low quality programs with limited appeal.

There’s plenty of spectrum available for current needs in rural areas, so the crunch is an urban phenomenon. Broadcasters have two reasons for holding out from the incentive auctions:

1. They recognize that spectrum is becoming more valuable, so the longer they can hold onto their (free) assignment, the more money they can get; and
2. Some broadcasters are interested in developing new services that target mobile devices such as mobile TV and even broadband.

In addition to the broadcasters, the incentive auctions are opposed by tech companies who want to reserve some spectrum for unlicensed use; this system is often called “Super Wi-Fi” or “Wi-Fi on Steroids” but  it doesn’t actually have much similarity with Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi and its close cousin, Bluetooth, rely on sensing the air for traffic before transmitting. This is known as “Carrier Sensing” and it’s a very old and well established system that packet radio networks have employed since Aloha NET in the 1960s. Wi-Fi supplements CS with a two additional tweaks: A collision detection system and a collision avoidance system. (“Collisions” are what happens when two or more computers transmit packets at the same time in the same area on the same channel.) So the full name of the Wi-Fi technology is CSMA-CA, for “Carrier Sensing Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance.

CSMA-CA only works over short spans of time; when transmitters are separated from each other by more than 100 microseconds or so, it ceases to provide effective control and collisions become very frequent, which reduces the ability of the network to provide good, predictable service. This is the reason that cellular networks don’t use CSMA-CA. In its place, they use scheduling systems on exclusively licensed spectrum and systems of clever bit coding like the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) invented by Qualcomm and pervasively borrowed by 3G mobile broadband standards world-wide.

Unlicensed use of spectrum over large areas is a different problem than the one that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth solve, and it’s not a problem that we currently have a good solution for. This may be moot in many cases, provided that unlicensed spectrum deployment continues to follow the Wi-Fi model of small networks with limited power. There is spectrum available above 3 GHz that can be used for this purpose, and some Wi-Fi aficionados (Brough Turner for one) propose to add it to the unlicensed inventory.

White Spaces advocates maintain that the 700 MHz spectrum used for TV has unique benefits that the 3GHz+ freqencies don’t provide. We’ll examine those arguments in the next post.

I think there are two issues in play here. On the one hand, if Internet access is a “human right” then it naturally falls on government to protect this right, which means greater political scrutiny of the Internet. All the elements of the Internet infrastructure and ecology would come under tighter government control, the better to ensure that no one’s rights are abridged. If you’re in the Internet business in any way – broadband, search, advertising, content, services – your business would be subject to ongoing scrutiny in a human rights regime. So this is troublesome for many companies, as we see every time Congress or the FCC proposes to apply rules to some element of the Internet that had been unregulated.

Obviously, Cerf’s employer is one of the companies in the regulatory cross-hairs at the moment, and with its acquisition of Motorola Mobility and continued dominance of search and advertising, we shouldn’t expect this to change. It’s in the corporate interest for the broadband and mobile Internet to muddle along as best it can without too much help from the taxpayers unless that help comes with no strings attached, or so many people believe (especially in Silicon Valley where free markets are the de facto religion.)

There’s another interesting element to Cerf’s plea as well, in the form of an exhortation to engineers to put aside their technical roles and engage in Internet policy issues as advocates of human rights:

Yet all these philosophical arguments overlook a more fundamental issue: the responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights. The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights…

It is engineers — and our professional associations and standards-setting bodies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — that create and maintain these new capabilities. As we seek to advance the state of the art in technology and its use in society, we must be conscious of our civil responsibilities in addition to our engineering expertise.

Although it reads like a platitude, this statement is actually quite troubling. There is a long-running debate over the role of scientists in public policy that’s been generally resolved along expert witness lines. Policy makers (that means Congress and other legislators) have the responsibility for shaping science and technology policy, as they do in other areas. But tech policy is unique to the extent that policy makers require technologists to explain technical systems, dynamics, and outcomes to them, the better to inform the final result.

In order for this system to work, engineers need to play it straight and answer the questions put to them without editorializing. If a policy maker wants an interpretation of the data on climate change, the state of the fisheries, the limits of Moore’s Law, or the nature of cerebro-silicon interfaces, he or she deserves an objective answer, regardless of the consequences. Their function is to inform policy makers of the consequences, not to tip the debate according to their political points of view. This includes advising policy makers of the questions they should be asking when they’re not asking the ones that will best illuminate the entire problem space.

Cerf argues that technologists should no longer play this role, and should instead approach policy makers as advocates for a particular policy position: “protecting human and civil rights.” This argument is incredibly dangerous because it cuts off the only source of objective technical learning that policy makers have and puts in its place one more interest group with an axe to grind.

Technologists should reject Cerf’s post-modern policy prescription. Science and technology have a unique role to play in public policy, but not the dominant role. When technologists are invited to advise policy makers because of their expertise, they shouldn’t abuse the privilege (or dodge the responsibility) by offering political viewpoints. The scientist’s job is to provide straight answers.

There is no universal consensus about human rights and civil rights for engineers to advocate; everyone determines their position on these questions according to personal values and individual analysis, so the goal is not really achievable. And even it there were a universal consensus, there would still be discord about which policies are most efficient towards meeting the common aim.

Cerf’s point of view echoes the “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” fantasy we just discussed. If engineers can successfully bend public policy around the Internet, networks generally, and computing even more generally into the mold of our personal politics we come a large step closer to the ideal of a world managed by supposedly “neutral” machines that are programmed by people who are anything but neutral. When the external controls on a social system are removed, the bullies take over, and techno politics is simply a way for people operating the levers of power to hide their tracks and escape any form of accountability.

Having grown up in the ’60s when utopian ideals were in fashion and revolution was a parlor game, I’m familiar with techno-politics, so I’m quite comfortable rejecting this charge (once again.)  Technologists are part of the policy process, and we do best to stick to our role and play it well, even it that means we sometimes have to say things that aren’t fashionable.

At the risk of being unkind, I also have to point out that Cerf hasn’t done any real engineering for 30 years, so it’s a lot easier for him to abandon the technical role than it is for working technologists.

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

(All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (c) 1967 Richard Brautigan, by permission.)

This is a sixties version the highest stage of communism, of course.

The documentary explores the roles of such seemingly diverse philosophical elements as Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, hippie communes, cybernetics, and theories about self-organizing systems and radical democracy to explain how we got into such crises as the Southeast Asian property bubble of the late 90s, the global financial collapse of the late 2000s and our current sovereign debt crisis.

The premise boils down the belief that smart machines interlinked with the right kind of network could create a permanent condition of financial prosperity and political stability that mirrors the supposed stability of nature. With the machines in charge, people would be free to act as selfishly as Rand wants us to act without doing any real damage to each other, the economy, or the planet.

In the first episode, Curtis examines the influence of Ayn Rand from Silicon Valley to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and tells tales about Rand’s personal life. As superficial as Rand’s ideas are, they still have a following among some Washington, DC think tanks who engage in the Internet policy debates, and are to be found within the Internet engineering community, where politics tend to cluster at the extremes. How you get from radical selfishness to machine control of the economy isn’t immediately obvious, but the connection would seem to come from the promise that machines can eliminate political hierarchy and allow ideal social networks to develop organically and democratically. The fist episode also deals with China’s reaction to the financial crises of the ’90s and ’00s in the US and abroad, concluding that China is currently managing the global economy for its own benefit.

One large thread in episode two deals with naive views of nature as a system that tends to stability if left to its own devices. Of course, there is no body of evidence in natural history to support the idea of a permanent natural order, it’s been an appealing notion since at least the time of the Egyptian pharaohs who sought perpetual life through quirky embalming and burial practices. In the engineering community, this notion was developed by people like Norbert Wiener, Jay Forrester, and Buckminster Fuller who developed systems concepts in mathematics and then applied them to both natural and human interactions. This sort of thinking isn’t inherently insane, but it’s easily distorted. It’s appealing to think about both physical systems and social interactions in terms of power sources, information, and feedback loops, and models of this kind can be very useful as long as we recognize their limitations. Circuit boards are ultimately much simpler than human societies which makes for massive reductionism if we take the analogies too far.

Perhaps the most insightful portion of this episode deals with the liberation movements of 2003 such as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Serbia-Montenegro Union,  and the Rose Revolution in Georgia. As was the case in the Arab Spring, these movements toppled heavy-handed authoritarian regimes and brought in idealistic and progressive replacements. None of this lasted, however, and today Serbia and Montenegro are separate and Ukraine and Georgia are just as repressive as ever. Veterans of hippie communes are familiar with their dynamic: When you remove institutions of governance from a social group, you create a situation where the strong bully the weak and the weak have no recourse. This happened at The Farm, the hippie commune that gave rise to the on-line community known as The Well, it happened among the Wellberts, and it happens today on Wikipedia, an offshoot of the Well created by Wellberts such as head guru Jimbo Wales.

There is every reason to believe that the Arab Spring will go the same way: The first act of the interim government in Libya was the repeal on Qaddafi’s ban on polygamy, and extreme religious sects won the lions share of  the seats in Egypt’s post-revolution parliamentary election and are now tussling to write a new constitution.

Despite the failure of cyber-utopianism to produce lasting and positive effects in the real world (or in the virtual world for that matter,) it’s not yet an abandoned philosophy. We can easily see that it’s alive and well in debates over Internet governance and in such national issues as the measures in the U. S. House and Senate that seek to deal with copyright infringement and the sale of dangerous goods on-line.

If you’re struggling to understand why the opponents of the Protect IP and Stop Online Piracy Act are so all-fired passionate about their cause as to boycott, bully, and slander the other side (as well as people they believe to be on the other side who aren’t,) let me suggest that the issue doesn’t have much to do with what it is at the surface.

The underlying issue is whether human institutions such as the U. S. Congress can dictate terms of operation to the cyber-utopian liberation machine. Cyber-lib doctrine says that the Internet and all the interactions it enables are above national law and can only be affected by a consensus of the Internet community itself, and this is a community in which national lawmaking bodies have no special standing. It’s fine with cyber lib for the cops to arrest people who use the Internet for kiddie porn, but only if they can find the perps and catch them without altering the Internet.

Leaving aside the naivete of the beliefs in permanent order and optimal self-organization, I think it’s necessary to question the utility of the belief that the Internet can govern itself at all. It is after all a mechanical system that lacks any particular built-in system for stopping bad behavior and promoting goodness. To the extent that anything like this happens, it’s a result of social systems that oversee the Internet, as was the case when an Acceptable Use Policy guided the Internet’s use of the NSF backbone in the 80s and early 90s.

Don’t we need to engineer a set of replacements for the Acceptable Use Policy? I think so, and a good place to start is with the recognition that nations don’t lose their sovereignty simply by connecting national networks to international ones.

Bonus: Here’s an interview with Adam Curtis by Andrew Orlowski of The Register, a co-producer of the documentary and my former editor.

Weigh in with your comments if you please.

The House Judiciary Hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) held on Thursday, December 15 was certainly one of the longest hearings in recent memory, as well as one of the most detailed. A group of nine members of the committee offered some 60+ amendments to the latest version of the bill, the Manager’s Amendment published Monday night.

Thanks to the glory that is the Internet, you can view the hearing on-line and see the text of the amendments. Of particular interest is Rep. Goodlatte’s discussion of DNS filtering at  5:52:30 in the video. He reads from the blog post described below, quotes from an ITIF report on SOPA by Daniel Castro, PIPA/SOPA: Responding to Critics and Finding a Path Forward, and then reads from a blog post I put up on the Innovation Policy Blog Wednesday, DNS Filtering is an American Innovation.

My blog post simply shares the fact that the Internet’s most common DNS server implementation, BIND, already includes a filtering system (called Response Policy Zones or RPZ,) so compliance with the SOPA mandate to blacklist rogue sites is a simple matter for most ISPs today. It’s also the case that other leading DNS services such as Nominum (run by Paul Mockapetris, the man who invented DNS) and OpenDNS support domain-level blacklisting. It’s somewhat ironic that the RPZ feature was designed by Paul Vixie, one of the five DNS experts who signed a letter in opposition to SOPA (Mockapetris did not sign this letter, which is significant.) So Vixie is in the curious position of urging Congress not to mandate the use of a feature that he designed.

The argument over DNS filtering is becoming increasingly silly, with opponents of the bill maintaining that it criminalizes various measures that might be thought of as anti-circumvention measures despite the fact that the bill is very clear about what constitutes circumvention. The opponents’ argument is that any measure that has the effect of bypassing the DNS blacklist, even unintentionally, would come under fire.

Yet the text of the bill says the target is: “any entity that knowingly and willfully provides …a product or service designed or marketed …for the circumvention or bypassing of measures described in paragraph (2) [blocking DNS responses] and taken in response to a court order…(page 21.)

These need to be willful measures designed or marketed for copyright circumvention, not technical oddities that have the magical and purely accidental effect of circumventing the blacklist, so there shouldn’t be much fear of a broad net catching the wrong fish here.

Wendy Seltzer, the Princeton activist law professor, has written a very intriguing blog post advancing the black-is-white argument; she says the section cited is “unclear.” I gave up the quest to understand law professors’ reasoning long ago because so much of it is based on particular court cases that define terms that mean one thing in common usage in a completely different way in the law. One thing I do know about this piece of legal code is that “knowingly and willfully” means the party in question can’t be just fooling around and causing unintended consequences: They need to know what they are doing and they need to be taking deliberate steps to bypass the filter, like the author of the MAFIAAFire redirector has done.

The DNS experts who oppose copyright enforcement have devised a peculiar scenario in which tools meant to carry DNSSEC through public firewalls in coffee shops and hotels will run afoul of the anti-circumvention provision. Their reasoning is quite distorted. These networks may need to use proxies to bypass their NAT firewalls, but these proxies don’t need to request DNS resolution from pirate DNS servers that bypass the blacklist. Not all bypassing is created equal, in other words. Bypassing a firewall to reach the Internet in a secure way is fine, but bypassing the blacklist is not fine. I think most judges can make that distinction, even if some law professors and software engineers can’t.

Seltzer raises a curious point about the blacklist circumvention tools being developed by the U. S. State Department to aid pro-democracy activists in other countries. As these tools are used to evade such things as China’s speech restrictions, I see no reason to believe they would come under attack by the U. S. Attorney General on copyright grounds. They aren’t designed and marketed to evade the U. S. copyright blacklist, and  would in most cases comply with it as far as I can tell.  This may be a problem for overseas activists who want to pirate Hollywood movies, but I don’t think that’s the relevant use case.

Seltzer points out that the activist tools may rely on darknets such as Tor and Psiphon. Once on the darknet, a U. S. user might use a pirate DNS to resolve the address of The Pirate Bay, so she fears a wholesale ban on darknets. I think this contrived use case misses the point of the SOPA blacklist, which is help consumers tell which sites are legitimate and which aren’t. Dedicated pirates determined to get to The Pirate Bay don’t need to use darknets to find TPB’s IP address; they’ve probably got it bookmarked.

The DNS programmers raise a similar specter with respect to applications responding to DNS resolution failures as a result of filtering. Once again, there’s no problem with trying multiple servers when an address resolution fails; that’s what happens today. SOPA only has a problem with DNS implementations that are hard-wired to use databases that are designed and marketed to bypass the AG’s blacklist. The DNS code may not be able to tell the difference between a DNS failure in China and one in the U. S., but  the DNS user can certainly can tell the difference between an activist DNS and a pirate DNS.

You don’t get to use either one unless you set up your operating system to do so, and whether you do or whether you don’t, SOPA doesn’t have a problem. You can’t be prosecuted under SOPA for selling circumvention to yourself.

UPDATE: Stewart Baker echoes Seltzer’s fanciful interpretation of anti-circumvention on The Volokh Conspiracy, a libertarian law blog. His argument, like Seltzer’s, depends on the reader accepting one particularly peculiar notion:

So the browsers get no information about www.piracy.com from the ISP’s DNS server. Faced with silence from that server, the browser will go into fraud-prevention mode, casting about to find another DNS server that can give it the address.

Sorry, but browsers aren’t going to go “casting about” to random DNS servers for certified responses, they’re only going to ask trusted ones.

In the comments, a reader explains how to do secure blocking with DNSSEC:

This seems to me an easy problem to solve technically. The Attorney General’s office would simply get a credential as a Certification Authority, and would order all US DNS servers to publish its own signed DNSSEC record which says that piracy.com is a server the Justice Dept. controls. As a side benefit (from their point of view), anyone who attempts to visit piracy.com and reaches the Justice Department’s server will leave log records of his visit that can be traced to the originating computer.

Of course, much like common efforts to entrap dope dealers, this effort will entrap only the most naive Internet users. Serious users will access piracy.com proxy servers located outside the US, or will simply go to its IP address rather than the domain name. But there are a lot more technically naive people than programmers out there.

Yup. What we have in the engineers’ letter on SOPA and DNSSEC is a bunch of people who don’t like what the bill does – censor the Internet – making up far-fetched reasons why it shouldn’t be passed. It’s politics, in other words, not technology.

Background

DNS Filtering is a technological solution being proposed by the Senate Protect IP Act and the House SOPA bill that would require broadband providers to filter out (block) DNS records for websites ordered taken down by a US Court.  The reason they were ordered taken down by a Court is because they were found to be infringing copyrights or selling counterfeit goods.

DNS or Domain Name System in lay terms is basically the Internet’s phone book.  It takes domain names like Microsoft.com and translates it to a machine routable Internet Protocol (IP) address.  Human users of the Internet use the domain name and the IP addresses and DNS mechanism is all handled under the hood.  When the DNS is blocked for a certain website (its domain name), it makes access to that website difficult without the end user making an active effort to bypass the block.

Why the assertions against DNS filtering are wrong

The key arguments opposing DNS Filtering are:

• DNS Filtering is easily bypassed
• DNS Filtering would break Internet Cybersecurity
• DNS Filtering would fracture the Internet

Bypassing DNS Filtering is moot

The claim that DNS Filtering can easily be bypassed by content pirates is misguided because it fails to recognize the purpose of DNS Filtering.  The purpose of DNS Filtering is not to stop end users from pirating content, the purpose is to stop counterfeit goods and copyright infringing websites from posing as legal sites and charging paying customers for advertising time or direct compensation.  The people who pirate content are going to use the no-fee no-ad peer-to-peer (P2P) alternatives.  The people who pay to access these blocked websites were paying customers who may have had no idea they were buying pirated or counterfeit goods.  DNS Filtering informs those users (essentially victims) that the website was taken down by the courts for illegal activity.  Anyone who would bypass the DNS Filter probably wouldn’t be going there in the first place because they can get the content free.

DNS Filtering doesn’t break Internet Cybersecurity

The engineers who are claiming that DNS Filtering would break the security extension standard for DNS called DNSSEC, and thereby break Internet Cybersecurity.  This is because a website whose DNS was blocked by court order cannot operate in secure DNSSEC mode.  I refuted this argument in my paper, pointing out that the purpose of the court order is to completely break access to those websites whether they were running in non-secure DNS mode or secure DNSSEC mode.  When I debated the engineers opposed to DNS Filtering at the Internet Governance Forum, those engineers insisted that DNS Filtering breaks DNSSEC.

This makes it seem like there are opposing engineers making these conflicting assertions

• Stephen Crocker and other engineers opposed to DNS Filtering continued to insist that DNS Filtering breaks DNSSEC
• I claim that DNS Filtering only breaks DNS and DNSSEC for websites that were ordered to be blocked and broken by a US Court

But if we examine these two statements, they are not conflicting at all – both statements are true.  The difference is that the latter statement by me is more specific, and was not refuted.  Where we differed is our interpretation of these statements.  Crocker et al interpreted this to mean that this constitutes a break of Internet cybersecurity and the adoption of the DNSSEC standard.  I interpreted this to mean that DNS Filtering has nothing to do with DNSSEC operation on the rest of the Internet or affect the DNSSEC standards process or adoption.

Since Crocker et al never explained how DNS Filtering would break DNSSEC for the rest of the Internet, it is clear that they are overreaching in their conclusions.

Since that debate on DNS Filtering at the Internet Governance Forum, Paul Vixie (one of the engineers who opposes DNS Filtering) has come out with another argument explaining how DNS Filtering supposedly breaks DNSSEC.  Vixie claims that web browsers implementing DNS and DNSSEC backup mechanisms are necessary for the success of the DNSSEC standard, and that the proposed DNS Filtering laws would make it illegal to implement web browser DNS backup.  DNS backup means that a failed (or blocked) DNS request could be bypassed, and this could be interpreted as an affront to DNS Filtering court orders, and somehow that would mean DNS backup would have to be made illegal.

But this is yet another overreaching technical argument that falls apart under even the most basic examination.  First, the Protect IP Act and SOPA bill never mention DNSSEC or DNS backup.  Even if those bills did something so crazy, there is no way those bills could practically outlaw DNS backup because every Internet connected device on the planet already has the built-in capability of DNS backup.  Second, DNS backup isn’t even mentioned in the DNSSEC standards (here and here) so there is no threat to the DNSSEC standardization process or adoption of the standard.

There have never been anything more than overreaching conclusions and uninformed opinion to support the claim that DNS Filtering threatens Cybersecurity, yet the claims of these engineers opposing DNS Filtering is so pervasive that these views are presented as fact.

The House of Representatives addressed the security issue

Members of the House recently addressed the claims that their bill would allegedly threaten Internet Cybersecurity by offering some amendments.  They made explicit assurances that their proposed bill should not be construed in any way to compromise or impose onerous obstacles to the security of the Internet.  The amendment read:

(5) NO IMPACT ON SECURITY OR INTEGRITY.— Nothing in title I shall be construed to authorize a court to require compliance with an obligation under section 102(c) in a manner that would impair the security or integrity of the domain name system or of the system or network operated by or on behalf of the party subject to the obligation.

Neither the House nor Senate bills in their original forms made any threatening moves to DNSSEC but this new amendment makes it explicit that there is no intent to impair security operations of DNS.

No Evidence of DNS Fracturing on the Internet

The engineers opposed to DNS Filtering claim is that if courts are allowed to block infringing websites, alternative DNS systems will pop up and replace the Internet’s official DNS service controlled by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and fracture the Internet.  But this speculation of DNS fracturing has been proven wrong by real-world examples.

The Internet’s official IANA controlled DNS already coexists with hundreds of thousands of private DNS services operated by organizations, businesses, governments, and militaries.  Those private DNS services have to coexist because wholesale replacement of the Internet’s DNS service is impractical and there is no reason for infringing website operators to do any different.  When the US courts began seizing rogue websites a few years ago, a web browser plug-in called MAFIAAFire was created to bypass those court blocks by patching in the blocked domain names.  The plugin used the practical and easy method of listing addresses for the blocked domain names but did not attempt to replace the entire IANA DNS service which would have been horrifically challenging.

Conclusions

Based on the fact that those engineers opposed to DNS Filtering have voiced their opposition to Protect IP act and SOPA bill for non-engineering reasons, it seems they are attempting to pass off non-engineering arguments as black and white scientific engineering arguments.  Those engineers certainly deserve to have their personal opinions heard on any policy debate, but those personal opinions should not be presented as engineering facts.

Regardless of an engineer’s position of the proposed Senate and House bills, whether it is opposed or in favor of one or both bills, engineering should remain purely fact- driven.  Once the facts are considered, there is no engineering argument against DNS Filtering.

The Wired argument is pretty compelling, and I include their graph in my talks about mobile broadband (most recently at the Caribbean Telecommunications Union Ministerial Seminar in Barbados.)

The compelling feature of apps vs. the Web is the user interface. The Web assumes you have a large screen, a keyboard, and a mouse, and its code ensures that your interaction depends on them. Web sites need for you to enter text, they pop up messages as your mouse pointer hovers over links, and they work best when your screen is at least a thousand pixels wide and nearly that many high.

As mobile devices take over from stationary ones and high-capacity broadband is everywhere, not only do these user interface assumptions fade away, but the nature of our computing interactions changes as well. Instead of reading a page of canned text or watching a pre-prepared video clip, mobile users interact with each other and with their immediate environment. To do that we need different kinds of user interface elements and different kinds of information access services. When you ask your search service for information while you’re on the move, you don’t want the classic Google link dump, you want a straight answer.

All of this leads to the class of applications known as “Augmented Reality” that are about as much like the Web as the Web was like Gopher.

It was raised again by George Colony of Forrester Research at the LeWeb conference in Paris the same day I was speaking in Barbados (sides here and presentation here; worth the time, check it out.)

Some people don’t see it this way. Notorious curmudgeon Dave Winer poo-poos the app:

I’ll keep playing here while the rest of you flirt with apps. I’ll be here when you come back. I know it’s going to happen. Here’s why.

Linking.

He almost has a point. I’m reluctant to install apps for some web sites that I can get on my iPad because I know that following a link into an app is a one-way journey. But that has more to do with how the iPad works that with any intrinsic feature of apps. They can be object-oriented processors of links, which is to say that clicking on a link in a browser that has an app behind it can take you to the app and allow you to get back. You can do some of this with the multi-touch gestures on the iPad, and it could be much cleaner. The whole process could be voice-driven too.

It’s a fairly obvious observation that the future will consist of both pure apps and Web apps;  Brent Simmons makes that case as well as anyone. The Web apps of the future won’t look much like the Web apps of today, however. Ultimately they’ll incorporate the advanced user interface elements that are being pioneered by the pure mobile apps.

I think the dynamic that’s behind this controversy is the confusion about what the Internet is. For an entire generation, the Internet is indistinguishable from the Web. These are the people who discovered the Internet after the Web was born and who’ve never given any thought to the fact that they use the Web in many cases to access services such as Skype that can and do exist outside the Web.

With all the arguing back and forth, some obvious facts are being ignored.  Whether or not AT&T made the right bet by pursuing T-Mobile is irrelevant because it ignores the fact that the $4 billion penalty paid by AT&T that will not be going to rural LTE deployment.  Deutsche Telekom, on the other hand, isn’t going to be laughing their way to the bank either because they stand to lose at least $12 billion on the failed merger bid.  With T-Mobile profits dwindling and over half a million T-Mobile customers fleeing in 2011, it’s wishful thinking that Deutsche Telekom will invest more money in T-Mobile USA.  Deutsche Telekom’s “exit strategy” can’t be made any clearer by the fact that T-Mobile is the only major carrier without the new iPhone 4S and the only major carrier without any intention of deploying LTE wireless.

The FCC staff report argued that competition from Verizon Wireless will compel AT&T to deploy rural LTE, but that’s speculation.  Even a few years ago, when Verizon marketing blasted AT&T with their 3G coverage maps, AT&T did not respond by matching 3G coverage.  Instead, AT&T focused on getting higher performance benchmarks in the urban and suburban markets. AT&T advertising focuses on a superior download speed theme.  That strategy might be paying off, as independent tests from Metrico demonstrate that AT&T’s iPhone 4S is 3 to 5.5 times faster than Verizon or Sprint, making AT&T the most attractive carrier to iPhone buyers.  And there is evidence to suggest that AT&T’s LTE network might be faster than Verizon LTE.  With the loss of the T-Mobile merger, AT&T will almost certainly continue with a “speed over coverage” strategy, which could have negative consequences for rural broadband that the FCC is ignoring.

The holidays are upon us and people are probably looking for their first or second smartphone, so I’ve been inundated with questions from friends and family about which smartphone to get.  Even people who already have their eyes set on an Apple iPhone now have questions because there are three major carriers offering Apple’s latest iPhone 4S.  Others are asking me about what kind of non-Apple smartphone they should get.  I’m going to try to summarize my advice below.

iPhone 4S

For iPhone 4S shoppers, the only decision they need to worry about is the color, flash memory storage capacity, and which carrier.  While I’ve been happy with CDMA carriers like Verizon and have used Sprint in the past, I am very biased towards GSM carriers, which means AT&T.  T-Mobile is also GSM but they don’t have the iPhone 4S so it’s irrelevant to this group of shoppers.  LTE makes the issue of GSM versus CDMA moot because LTE uses SIM cards like GSM, but the iPhone 4S doesn’t have LTE so shoppers much pick a GSM or CDMA carrier.

The reason I prefer GSM is simple:

• When I travel abroad, most of the world uses GSM. I like swapping out SIM cards and having a local phone with local service rates.
• GSM allows concurrent voice and data services.  If I’m on a phone call using speakers or a headset (bluetooth or wired), I like to be able to access the mobile Internet concurrently.  This is possible in newer revisions of CDMA, but not for the iPhone 4S.

These two basic reasons tilt the decision towards AT&T for an iPhone 4S, but what sinks the deal in favor of an AT&T iPhone 4S is a recent report from Metrico showing that AT&T iPhone 4S runs averaged nearly 3 times faster than Verizon and 5.5 times faster than Sprint.  Metrico performed 8000 speed tests so the results are fairly compelling.  While Sprint might offer “unlimited” data for their iPhone 4S and call it “4G” data, it certainly doesn’t look like 4G based and it’s questionable as to whether they can avoid implementing some kind of data cap like every other major carrier.

What about cheap iPhones like the 3GS?  Unless the buyer is absolutely adamant about having an Apple device and they can’t afford anything more than the iPhone 3GS, they can consider devices running Windows Phone 7 or 7.5.  The iPhone 3GS runs at a relatively primitive “HVGA” 480×320 pixel resolution and it’s two generations behind.  Windows Phone 7 devices are all 800×480 resolution and are often “free” with contract.

Android Smartphones

While Google Android and the devices running Android trailed far behind Apple iPhone a few years ago, they have caught up and even exceeded Apple in many ways.  The most advanced and widest selection of smartphone hardware run Google Android today and even fans of the Apple iPhone like my colleague Richard Bennett are “Giving Android a Chance“.  More specifically, he had some irreconcilable issues with the iPhone 4S and he decided to give the Samsung Galaxy S II a chance.

The Galaxy S II (specifications) is probably the most popular Android smartphone on the market, and for good reason.  The Galaxy is lighter and thinner than the iPhone 4S, yet it has a big and beautiful 4.3″ AMOLED display that is much larger than the iPhone 4S’ 3.5″ display.  Even though the resolution on the iPhone 4S (960×640 pixels) is better than the Galaxy S II (800×600 pixels), most people prefer larger displays, even if they have perfect vision.  And for playback standardized widescreen video content like TV shows, movies, and the gorgeous 1080P videos you can record on either the Galaxy S II or the iPhone 4S, the Galaxy S II widescreen display can play movies back with 1.8 times the viewing size.  Another factor to consider is the durability of the device against accidental drops.  The Galaxy S II absolutely trounces the iPhone 4S with its superior durability.

For the really advanced customers who are willing to pay a premium price, they could try something like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (specifications) which has even higher resolution (1280×720 pixels) than the iPhone 4S (960×640 pixels), and its massive 4.65″ display can render widescreen video 2.1 times bigger than the iPhone 4S.  Despite the massive display size, Samsung managed to build the Galaxy Nexus thinner and lighter than the iPhone 4S.  The Galaxy Nexus is so impressive that even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak got one.  Apple shocked the world with its revolutionary iPhone in 2007, but the iPhone seems a a little less revolutionary these days compared with its Android based competitors.

What about budget smartphone buyers?  I would give the same advice to budget iPhone buyers, which is to be aware that the lower end devices are very slow and only support lower 480×320 resolution which is difficult and unpleasant to read web pages on.  Look to the low cost or even “free” (with contract) Windows Mobile 7 or 7.5 smartphones which all run 800×480 resolution and have much nicer cameras.

Microsoft Smartphones

For really affordable and simple to use smartphones, Microsoft Windows Phone 7.5 devices like the HTC Radar (my review here) fits the bill with its solid aluminum body.  The HTC Radar is mainstream smartphone with modest features but holiday discounts might drive the price closer to free with contract from T-Mobile.  While the HTC Radar is about as boring as a sedan compared to the Android based hot-rods like the Galaxy S II, not everyone is looking or willing to pay for a hot-rod.

For people looking for a better Windows Phone 7 experience, the HTC Titan (specifications) with its massive 4.7 inch display offers a reasonably priced solution.  The HTC Titan is no where close to a Samsung Galaxy Nexus because its slightly thicker, only supports 720P video capture, and has a modest 800×480 pixel display, the Titan isn’t outrageously priced like the Galaxy Nexus.

Conclusion

The market for smartphones is extremely mature and more competitive than other with three robust platforms and “app” markets.  For developed nations, the cost of smartphones have come down so far that they aren’t much more expensive than “feature phones” yet they do so much more.  Just the camera and GPS with traffic mapping functionality of smartphones make them compelling enough that even low-tech consumers are attracted to the devices.