As President of the United States, I have tried repeatedly to convince you, the American public, that in 20 years of attending his church services, I never heard my friend and pastor, Reverend Wright make any racist, anti-white comments that would cau…

The intarwebz is my family’s bread and butter. Barry needs to steer clear of what’s left of our livelihood.

Stay alert.

Is Obama Afraid Of A Mouse?

Not.

Shades of Adam Selene.

To answer that you need clear up a common misconception. There really is no such thing as “the internet”. There is no wire or piece of infrastructure or physical entity called “the internet”. The Internet is an abstract term that describes thousands of global networks that communicate with each other privately. When a Comcast user looks at Yahoo.com, there is a good chance the traffic went directly from Comcast to Yahoo and back without touching anyone else’s network.

Or if user goes to another site that only has a connection to one “upstream” small ISP that doesn’t have great peering connections with other networks, say a site at Rackspace.com that uses someone like Above.net as an ISP, the user traffic might go from their immediate provider to Above.net who then hands the traffic off to Rackspace. In no case did the traffic touch “the internet”.

“Critical Networks” might be the networks that serve the root name servers. Without these, nobody would be able to find anything. If you want to go to http://www.joeblow.com, you need to find out where to get IP addresses for “joeblow.com” and it is the root name servers that are the starting point for finding that. You first ask the root server “who handles dns for .com” and you get a response. Then you go to the server indicated by that response and ask “who handles DNS for joeblow.com” and you get a response. Then finally you go to the address indicated by that response and ask for the address of http://www.joeblow.com” and you get it.

Without the root name servers, the internet fails … but the root name servers don’t belong to the US. They are not under the jurisdiction of the US government. They are basically run by volunteers and they are scattered across the world.

But the point is that the government is going to have a very difficult time telling a private network that they can not exchange traffic with another private network over private infrastructure. It is an exercise in cat wrangling and is the kind of silly when you consider that “the internet” is global.

The Internet is a best effort cooperation between private networks. Do not EVER rely on the Internet working. It is subject to glitch, fail, disrupt, or work perfectly. All without ever touching anything called “the internet”.

It is legislation created by people who have no idea what they are talking about or trying to regulate.

Back to the topic though, this is really scary in that ozero wants the ability to shut down the internet. The big question is WHY??? WHY would he want that power?

Because in order to get and maintain total control, Big Brother Obama and the Dems need to make sure we hear and abide by only what they tell us.

Obama administration to the vast online right wing conspiracy:

“All your base are belong to us”
Hellrider on August 28, 2009 at 8:38 PM

More like “Nice Internet ya got there.” “Be a shame if something happened to it”.

IF the fear is In the event the Prez gets sick ‘n tired of letting the populace communicate, coordinate, cooperate in order to limit the left’s potential harm to America, and decides to flip the switch for the sake of “national security” (his own job security), I’m pretty sure that a couple of things will happen. Communication will continue. Ham radios are still everywhere, mostly in the hands of conservatives, commonly called “right wing survivalist whackos”, CB’s under the dashboards of 250,000 trucks traveling the entire US, and low and behold, regular old telephones. Somehow I believe Articles of Impeachment could still be discussed broadly, my second point.

I’m also disturbed by the apparent requirement that you will need a government certified security administrator.. WHY??

bullseye on August 29, 2009 at 8:11 AM

Every unit in the Soviet Military had a billet we never had…the Political Officer.

Certified IT Guy = Political Officer

The Federal Government should and will dictate to private companies on what equipment they can buy, who they can employ and who their shareholders can be.

Huh. Good point. You know, we could probably outfit the Air Force for 1/10th what we pay now, if we had our aircraft manufactured in China, or, if we just bought Chinese aircraft. Evil Grumman/Lockheed/Boeing.

So it seems the point we’re talking about is limited to what is encompassed by the term “Critical Infrastructure”. Applied too broadly (my arguement) allows the Executive to selectively isolate threats as he determines. The ability of Google to provide internet search capabilty is not critical infrastructure. The ability of the FAA to communicate and control commercial aircraft is critical infrastructure.

This is Hot Air, yeah? Free market, rah rah rah?

Is not the government at this very moment dictating what the salaries of senior executives of privately owned White House-owned companies? Did the Car Czar fire senior GM/Chrysler executives? Doesnt’ the Stimulus Bill contain “Buy American” provisions? I see no conflict with requiring the FAA to “Buy American”. I see huge conflict with requiring Google to “Buy American”. I also see a huge potential for political abuse of the powers proposed by Rockefellers bill.

You brought up TEMPEST. Did you think that was bunk?

bileduct on August 29, 2009 at 12:24 AM

No, it just occurred to me that DOD had programs in place for years to contain “interference” with classified information (TEMPEST). I was interested in learning if TEMPEST has graduated from RF to the digital domain, or if a TEMPEST-like program had been developed.

Any thoughts, techies?

Yes. Don’t allow Microsoft Windows to run an any home system or server. Require all platforms to be Linux/Mac OS or Sun.

Problems solved.

Cybergeezer on August 28, 2009 at 4:14 PM

Yet, that said, I’m still troubled by this Times piece from a few days ago about the Conficker virus and how America’s techie brain trust just can’t seem to stop it, even when they put their eggheads together. If it’s some sort of trojan horse, it’s not unthinkable that whoever’s directing it could suddenly take over a huge number of systems, requiring a very rapid quarantine. And even if it isn’t, a future virus might be. The Rockefeller bill isn’t (necessarily) a bogus power grab, in other words, it’s a response to a genuine threat that maybe reaches too far. How do you limit the president’s emergency powers so that he can’t abuse them while keeping his hands untied to fight a new kind of warfare if need be? Any thoughts, techies?

One simple way to greatly reduce the threat is for people to stop using Microsoft products. The Windows Operating System was not designed with networks like the Internet in mind. Apparently, after all these years, Microsoft still hasn’t figured out how to make it remotely safe. The ideas that shaped Linux came from a networked computing environment, and that why there have been few to none Linux viri (viruses) in the wild.

If firms and people stop using Windows, we’ll see other benefits. Spam, the junk mail in your email, comes almost exclusively from Windows PC machines that have been compromised.