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I'm really concerned that DDOS attacks are going to lead to the death of the open Internet and its balkanization and isolation behind walled gardens. If you loo
by api 5y ago
I'm really concerned that DDOS attacks are going to lead to the death of the open Internet and its balkanization and isolation behind walled gardens. If you look at where Cloudflare and some of the big clouds are going with their private networks, private backplanes, and "secure your traffic by putting it all over our network" zero trust plans it seems to be going that way.
If open peering and the open Internet are to survive I think serious work needs to be done to fight DDOS attacks. It needs to be an effort analogous to the "war on spam" in the late 1990s / early 2000s. Unfortunately that war was sort of lost; e-mail is in practice barely an open protocol anymore and almost all e-mail is handled by a few giant companies that can leverage big data to filter spam. If you try to DIY a mail server you'll be simultaneously hit by spam and have to constantly fight mistaken filtration by larger e-mail providers who tend to distrust small mail servers by default.
If the open Internet succumbs to DDOS "spam," we will lose something really huge and important. It would be the ultimate casualty of what so far has been almost a law (with very few exceptions): all open systems are destroyed by abuse if they become sufficiently popular.
We also can't just leave it to the free market because the only solution the market will likely come up with is walled gardens. It's the easiest to engineer solution and the easiest to monetize.
- smasher164 5y agoIt's interesting that you say that, because we've already sort of balkanized around ISPs. However, CDNs and DDOS protection popped up around services that ISPs couldn't provide. Maybe the dream is for ISPs to provide these services as well, making it more tenable for regular users to self-host.
- throw0101a 5y ago> If you look at where Cloudflare and some of the big clouds are going with their private networks, private backplanes, and "secure your traffic by putting it all over our network" zero trust plans it seems to be going that way. All the networks of the Internet are already private, just like the networks of AOL and CompuServe were private back in the day: your ISP's network is private, YouTube's network is private, AWS' network is private. It's just that those private networks agree to talk to each other. Otherwise your ISP would have to re-create YouTube and Reddit/forums and eBay/marketplace and…, and YouTube would have to buildout (inter)national network to connect their video services to people's homes. Just like AOL and CompuServe had to build out information services and a connectivity infrastructure back in the day. Now each of the previously walled gardens (messaging, forums, marketplaces, connectivity, etc) is done by its own entity, each taking a slice of the monetary pie for the service(s) they provide. The Internet is a 'network of networks', but it is also an agreement: an agreement for everyone to talk to everyone else.
- api 5y agoI think that's kind of semantic. The agreement is what I'm talking about. It makes the Internet open. I can just send you a packet. That's what's in danger here.
- adrian_b 5y ago> If you try to DIY a mail server you'll be simultaneously hit by spam and have to constantly fight mistaken filtration by larger e-mail providers who tend to distrust small mail servers by default. I have managed my own e-mail server for around 20 years. Filtering spam has never been a problem. On the other hand your second problem has indeed existed, i.e. with various large e-mail providers which either blocked completely my e-mail messages without signalling any error, or they delayed for 1 day or 2 my messages, or they required many resendings of a message until really passing it to the destination. Fortunately such cases seem to have become much more seldom during the last couple of years.
- wiredfool 5y agoI've seen hideously inconvenient email pauses between Office365 and a massive NGO, so it's not just little mail servers.