North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Digex transparent proxying
Thank you Patrick. At 01:30 AM 6/28/98 -0700, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote: >At 10:28 AM 6/27/98 -0500, Karl Denninger wrote: > >>Proxies are fine WHERE CUSTOMERS HAVE AGREED TO THEIR USE. >> >>STEALING someone's packet flow to force it through a proxy is NOT fine. > >I think this is the heart of Karl's argument. (Karl, feel free to correct >me if I'm wrong.) The rest of the rant about how transparent caches, proxy >server, etc. work and other opinions about how the Internet and web content >will look in the future is ... not my concern at present. Proxies not only intercept and redirect packets, they replace packets with older ones, rather and allowing a fresh packet to come through. There are many circumstances where this is unacceptable. Most contracts imply raw packet streams, unless specified otherwise. Filtering a raw packet stream is technically a breach of contract. If done to us, it will cause us to switch upstream providers, make us renumber our hosts, and cause us much grief/anxiety/emotional harm/lost business, which we will be glad to bill back to the upstream provider, in court if need be, at inflated values if we can get away with it.<grin> If our upstream provider is not the one directly doing it then *they* can forward our bill, tagging on their own expenses, to their upstream provider, and so on. By the time this little shit-ball hits the one doing the filtering, they may decide that sipping umbrella-drinks, on the beach, or collecting welfare, may be a better business model to persue. >But the original topic is of great concern to me. Is there one person on >this list - even someone from DIGEX - who can give me one reason why >altering the destination of a packet a customer paid you to deliver, >without that customer's consent or foreknowledge, is in any way morally or >ethically permissible? Hell, for that matter, is it even legal? It can be considered simple contract breach (see above, I was not being facitious) with appropriate penalties for "willful failure to perform", aka fraud, possibly wire-fraud under the right circumstances. There's a whole range of civil and criminal law that are specifically designed to extract pounds of flesh, out of such perpetrators. >I know that when my downstreams pay me for transit and give me a packet, I >do my damnedest to get that packet TO THE DESTINATION. If I can give my >customers better service though proxy or caching or any other method, I >will definitely OFFER it to them. (We are currently looking into >transparent and other caching techniques, but have not begun such an >offering as of yet.) However, I will not shirk my responsibility to >deliver packets where the customer (rightfully) expects them to go without >the customer's permission. I find it repugnant that one of my peers has >done so. I would be interested in how other's feel about it - without all >the discussion about whether caching is any use or not. Agreed, I would offer such a value-added service, but not at the expense of a raw data-feed. >>Karl Denninger ([email protected])| MCSNet - Serving Chicagoland and Wisconsin > >TTFN, >patrick > >************************************************************** >Patrick W. Gilmore voice: +1-650-482-2840 >Director of Operations, CCIE #2983 fax: +1-650-482-2844 >PRIORI NETWORKS, INC. http://www.priori.net > "Tomorrow's Performance.... Today" >************************************************************** > ___________________________________________________ Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) e-mail: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/ ___________________________________________ SecureMail from MHSC.NET is coming soon!
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