SOPA/PIPA

Today is SOPA awareness day. The day were many sites are "blacking out" to show their support of stopping the bills, commonly known as SOPA, and PIPA (or Stop Online Privacy Act, and Protect IP Act).

I'll start by saying I support the Anti-SOPA/Anti-PIPA movements; and I want to move quickly into HOW this affects us. Everyone knows about the screening of sites for privacy, what will be their criteria etc, what they can do, etc. but I see, more and more, people saying something along the lines of "I don't care, I don't live in the U.S.A."; I have news for those people: You're going to be very unhappy if this bill passes.

Here's why. The bills don't target US based websites, they target any websites. Those sites can be closed at any time for any reason... well, how? They revoke your DNS entry. What does that mean?

DNS, or Domain Name System, for those that don't know, translates something 'human-readable' into something a computer can work with. You see, the internet is not made up of google's and yahoo's, it's made up of 10.12.111.233's and 172.18.222.32's. That's how computers see the internet. These fancy names we've made up are called Domain Names; the Domain Name System (or DNS) was created to make reaching a site, easier than typing in (up to) 12 numbers that you would have to memorize for each site.

DNS basically is the internet equivilent of the yellow pages. You want to get an oil change at mr.lube, look in the yellow pages, and find the phone number for Mr. Lube. hey, there's an address too. In this analogy (which is fairly accurate), SOPA/PIPA type legislation would basically blast Mr. Lube from the Yellow pages, so you couldn't look them up if you wanted an oil change (all because they didn't pay their contribution to the RIAA's profit margin because they were caught playing Britney Spears in their customer waiting area).

Sure, if you have the phone number (or in SOPA/PIPA's case, IP Address) memorized, you can still call them, and if you know their address, you can still drop in for an oil change, but you can no longer find that information from the yellow pages.

Well, on the internet, the name you type in, EG GOOGLE.COM is the name of the place you want to go, the IP address returned, is the "phone number" to connect to that location. Without the DNS "yellowpages" on the internet, there would never be a connection. Simple as that.

So how does all this work? simple. DNS works backwards, which is to say, the last item comes first in terms of registration. so ".com", ".net", ".org", ".gov", etc. are all what are known as "Top Level Domains" or TLD's for short. so what SOPA will boil down to, is what DNS registrations they can revoke. Well that's simple, any TLD's where the company that owns that TLD is in the United States will be vulnerable.

Sorry to tell you this, but all the common ones you love so much, are owned by the states. That means all ".com" websites, and ".net" and ".org"... all vulnerable to SOPA. and since the distribution system for DNS all stems from the TLD servers, which is dictated by the central servers (all of them are America-based), nothing is safe. We're talking about the potential that an entire TLD is reposessed due to SOPA. That's right, poof, all of the .cn addresses, now property of SOPA. or .ca, or .uk, or whatever. GONE, like that.

Sure, the sites will still be there, and the pages will still be able to be accessed.... but NONE OF THAT MATTERS, because YOU WONT BE ABLE TO REACH THEM.

So pull your head out of the sands of "I don't live in America, it's not my problem", and realize, THIS IS YOUR PROBLEM TOO! Do whatever you can about it, even if that means yelling at your american friends, to yell at their elected representatives, DO IT, DO IT NOW! or you, me, this blog, google, youtube, and the internet as we know it, will simply cease to exist.

... Here's some links to get you started and help you out:
http://americancensorship.org/
http://fightforthefuture.org/
http://demandprogress.org/
http://www.fsf.org/

Joining in the protest today:
http://sopastrike.com/on-strike/

How the internet works

Understanding all the nuances of technology, from how a computer encodes a single bit onto a wire for transmission, all the way up to the protocols everyone knows about, like HTTP and HTML, it's amazing to me that we don't have more connection issues.

I was seriously deliberating this, in my head, a few days ago, and an issue I dealt with today, reminded me of all those things and how the simplest thing can make the whole system go away.

The issue I was trying to resolve for a customer was that a particular webpage refused to load... The cause, as I had determined it, was that an administrator for that webpage had disallowed access from that particular address for whatever reason.

Going through the steps though, I checked through all the different layers and made sure the connection was going okay, that the DNS resolution was working correctly, and that the IP settings were correct.

To think of it, when we type google.com into a browser address bar, the browser instructs the system to establish a connection, the system, knowing it has to resolve the name, examines it's DNS settings, if the DNS servers are not listed as a connected route in the routing tables, it then needs to connect to the default gateway on the default route, in which case, it needs to ARP the default gateway for it's MAC address.

After resolving the mac address of the default gateway, it has to assemble a UDP DNS lookup request for the server, with the default gateway's MAC address, the DNS server's IP address, and the request information containing google.com.

After it receives a response, it need to then check the resulting IP for google, and compare that to local routing tables. It then needs to determine whether it needs to send out the SYN request on the same adapter to the same default gateway, and initiate the TCP session.

All this in approximately 1/10th of a second or less.

That's a lot of things to do in so little time... but we do it so often, without thinking, that the relevance of everything gets lost in translation. This process, and appreciation of it is definitely lost on end-users.

Oh well, I appreciate my DHCP and DNS servers, as well as my local default gateway for everything they do for me, each and every nanosecond.