[SGVLUG] SOPA/Protect IP bill moving forward to gut DNS security

[John Kreznar]

In a posting purporting to be from Braydon <ronin at braydon.com> but
lacking a digital signature, it is written:

> On 11/16/2011 11:50 PM, John Kreznar wrote:
>>> fyi - perhaps now is a good time to contact your congressperson...
>> ... or apply technology to defend against them:

>> http://freedomboxfoundation.org/learn

> I'm curious how they are going to handle this portion:

> "If our internet plug is pulled, the box will use mesh routing to talk 
> to other boxes like it."

Here is a selection from their mailing list that gives something of the
flavor of current discussion there of this portion.  It also provides
subscription information for the mailing list if you're interested.

Incidentally, that the author of the posting is John Gilmore gives an
idea of the caliber of people involved on the project.

This particular posting is also interesting because of the recent
discussion here of OpenWRT.

  Message-Id: <201108210952.p7L9qM86004401 at new.toad.com>
  To: freedombox-discuss at lists.alioth.debian.org
  Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2011 02:52:22 -0700
  From: John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com>
  Subject: [Freedombox-discuss] CeroWRT (OpenWRT with DNSSEC, mesh routing,
          etc) RC5 is out
  List-Subscribe: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss>,
          <mailto:freedombox-discuss-request at lists.alioth.debian.org?subject=subscribe>

  I just noticed:

    http://www.bufferbloat.net/news/18

    CeroWrt is a project to resolve endemic problems in home networking
    today, and to push the state of the art of edge networks and routers
    forward. Projects include tighter integration with DNSSEC, wireless
    mesh networking (Wisp6), measurements of networking and censorship
    issues (BISMark), among others, notably reducing bufferbloat in both
    the wired and wireless components of the stack.

  These folks are targeting much smaller hardware than FreedomBox
  (Netgear wifi routers with >8MB of flash memory), but they are
  actively making a plug-and-play-rather-than-administer router that
  includes the basics of what FBX wants, like mesh routing, ipv6,
  dnssec.  We can learn from them.

  Their main research goal is to reduce "bufferbloat", which is the
  tendency of network hardware and software (in the modern days of cheap
  RAM) to queue packets rather than dropping them.  This confuses
  classic TCP, which depends on packet loss to signal congestion.  When
  TCP never hears back about congestion, it starts filling up the
  buffers somewhere deep in the net, which seriously sideswipes the
  latency experienced by all competing traffic.  Even one massive TCP
  connection, in the presence of bufferbloat, can make dozens of other
  nearby TCP connections take SECONDS to get through.  Unfortunately,
  bufferbloat is everywhere in modern network hardware and software, so
  removing it is a long-term project.  The CeroWRT folks are part of
  the vanguard of fixing it.

          John



-- 
OpenPGP key: http://ininx.com
 John E. Kreznar jek at ininx.com 9F1148454619A5F08550 705961A47CC541AFEF13

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