Some thoughts about Network Neutrality

I was watching a conference on net neutrality a month or so ago (http://www.netneutrality2008.org/About.html) and I started thinking about the implications of the current situation.

It seems to me that we either will get an internet that gets partitioned hierarchically according to the ISPs wishes and best performance of the internet backbone. Or alternatively IPv6 and wireless routing will force the Internet to become more properly decentralised.

I know theoretically the Internet is decentralised for the perspective of the IP packet, but that does not necessarily mean that the architecture as it is rolled out will be decentralised. I believe we naturally put faith in forms of authority that allow us to go about our daily business in a rational way. Sometimes these authorities abuse their position, but in that case they tend also to lose their authority too.

So what stops us from centralising about the most convenient connection to the internet? (i.e. a reasonably priced ISP) – Not much. Until people are able to freely share their wireless connections with their neighbours and are able to correctly route packets between networks (i.e. when we drop NAT and move to IPv6), I don’t think this will happen.

Spam blogs and comment spam

I found this rather interesting paper on the rise of spam blogging and the suggested solutions to getting rid of it. It is written by Yi-Min Wang and Ming Ma from Microsoft® Research and Yuan Niu and Hao Chen from the University of California, Davis.

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~hchen/paper/www07.pdf

There is more about the monthly rise in spam blogs on

http://fightsplog.blogspot.com

I find spam comments and high google rating for spam pages pretty irritating. To find out how these tricks work and that they are now are connected to the ongoing assault of our inboxes is intriguing, although also slightly worrying. Whilst I can see that advertisers and syndicators might have a hard time trying to find and associate with good content on the web, I see that they certainly have a hand in where the WWW will end up.

Ultimately I guess it is all our responsibility not to click spam links and thus not feed the problem.

Whilst I think the rise in the use of SPF (Sender Policy Framework) or SenderID will shift some of the work of fighting spam to DNS, this may cause an increase in DNS cache poisoning as spamers resolve to take over domains with access to certain widely used mail servers. Hopefully DNSSEC and similar technologies can fill the gaps in security.

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