US No Longer the World's Internet Hub 433
museumpeace brings us a New York Times story about how internet traffic is increasingly flowing around the US as web-based industries catch up in other parts of the world. Other issues, such as the Patriot Act, have made foreign companies wary about having their data on US servers. From the NYTimes:
"Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications. Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States."
Re:Article Error (Score:4, Informative)
(In other words, no, it's not funny anymore, and provably false.)
Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Informative)
The Earth has a center, because it is a sphere. But no one lives outside a small band +/- 400m from the surface, so "the world" is a shell that has no center.
No one except the Mole Men, and they've got their own Internet. Which is really more an "Infranet", but that's their problem.
There are large population centers [wikipedia.org] more than 400m above sealevel (more than twice that, actually). Plus there are people in the dead sea [wikipedia.org] which is 420 meters below sea level.
And that's before we start counting the people living on the ISS, the people living in the salt mine city [wikipedia.org], Atlantians (Deeper or Higher than 400m depending on who you talk to) or the mole men.....
SOX probably more influential than Patriot Act (Score:5, Informative)
Other issues, such as the Patriot Act, have made foreign companies wary about having their data on US servers.
No. Other forces such as wanting increase profit margins are probably having a bigger influence.
WRT legislation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act [wikipedia.org] has probably had a greater impact on influencing companies on their move. Provisions within S-OX require companies to provide access to data to allow for full data audits. That would include emails, internal reports, etc.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:4, Informative)
"Sealevel" is "the surface" only at sea. There's practically no one living 400m above or below the actual surface of the sea.
The rest of the world lives within 400m of the surface, even if that surface is a mile above "sealevel".
And the ones outside that narrow shell aren't on the Internet. Except for a tiny few in another shell inhabited briefly by airplanes, and another orbital shell inhabited by fewer people than the sampling margin of error.
Re:Free Market (Score:1, Informative)
Theres a difference between the possibility of spying and the guarantee of publicly legislated surveillance.
Re:Logical conclusion of this (Score:5, Informative)
If the servers are already accessed via strong encryption the location is not very relevant unless the jurisdiction bans such encryption. The main danger to such communities is then the seizure of their equipment by local authorities, on the basis of one or other real or imagined infraction (child pornography, terrorism, patent infringement, copyright infringement, hate crimes, etc.)
I'm not sure Europe is better than the USA in terms of freedom from such seizures. There are surely better locations.
Cloud computing... is a buzzword but is interesting nonetheless. Over time we may see secure or private clouds, which would then correspond to these islands, and which might become fully independent of vulnerable physical servers.
So we may have a future of virtualized, distributed, secure islands connected by a sea of insecurity.
But then again, it's late on a hot Saturday afternnon here in Brussels and it's beer o'clock. :-)
Re:I'm glad! (Score:5, Informative)
And in the UK the government have mandated that much of your data is stored by ISPs via the braindead RIP act, and some other act demands that you hand over decryption keys or be in breach of the law. Hey, not much better.
Re:Good Riddance (Score:5, Informative)
I guess there is a good deal of cost-cutting and laziness involved in not having more independent connections. Most German providers, for instance, route their traffic through the DE-CIX node in Frankfurt instead of maintaining a dozen peer links.
This said, at some point it must be cheaper to have direct connections than buying capacity on a detour over the US. Especially where overseas cable are involved. A Google search brought up the following maps for the IPV6 net, and it seems that the countries outside the US do indeed build their own connections:
ahref=http://ipv6.nlsde.buaa.edu.cn/rel=url2html-19746 [slashdot.org]http://ipv6.nlsde.buaa.edu.cn/>
Internet is decentralized, not distributed (Score:1, Informative)
The Internet isn't supposed to have a "hub". It's supposed to be completely distributed and decentralized.
To get technical, the Internet is decentralized, but not distributed. Here's a good illustration of the differences:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420/RM3420.chapter1.html
In a truly distributed network all nodes are (relatively) equal, with (roughly) the same number of links between all the nodes. In a decentralized network, there is no centre (duh), but there are nodes that are "larger" than others, and are 'hubish'. These more concentrated nodes (i.e., ISPs) talk to the edge nodes as well as between themselves.
The above illustration is from Paul Baran's original RAND memo:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420/index.html
Encryption only helps partially (Score:3, Informative)
Traffic analysis without cracking crypto is a huge and valuable source of intelligence. Knowing who's talking to whom is something spies really want to know, and it's something the people talking would often hate to have revealed. For a small-scale, down to earth example, look at the HP pretexting scandal.
Re:Yep (Score:3, Informative)
You're right except for "why the Internet was started". What you cited is a myth. The Internet was started as simply a way for a handful of nuke weapons labs to ship around data without literally sending around packages of punchcard decks. So they connected them by wires. The decentralized architecture came because no single center had organized a project (or its government budget) to "run the network". They got basic TCP/IP running, then email on it, then started building local network apps, which they discussed on the network in "Request for Comment" messages which spec'ed the new app/protocol. Like good scientists, they repeated each other's experiments, and apps/protocols spread. And new sites started using the TCP/IP protocol and the app protocols that ran on it as scientists and engineers found out about how easily they could share data (and email, always the killer app). The fact that the decentralized architecture could also withstand nuke hits once the network was complex enough to have multiple routing choices around any outage (like if some researcher turned off their computer while on vacation) was an unplanned benefit.
But it makes a nice, illustrative myth. However, the real reason is much more illustrative of why the architecture is superior.