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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (10973)	8/11/2005 11:50:26 PM
From: axial	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 46821

Frank, we agree. "I don't believe Skype's success could in any way be confused with a failure of Internet design. The Internet is performing as it should when Skype gets through, and it does get through most firewalls and NATs. Rather, I view the success of Skype as a reflection of how the Internet was originally regarded and how it was intended to work by its crafters at a time when the types of scourges we deal with today were virtually non-existent. Or, as I am often reminded, when the government, universities and research centers were the sole tenants of the Internet, the permissiveness that lends itself to today's breaches was in actuality regarded as a beneficial "feature" (witness the Skype example you cited earlier), rather than as a vulnerability or weakness." This is an echo of fred g's response, which in turn echos the comments of the Internet's creators. The question is: can you make the Internet secure? I don't think you can. I don't think any widely-used, public global network can be secure. Can one make it progressively more difficult to crack either content, transmission/reception, or both? Yes. There are "stories" (perhaps apocryphal) of American subs that tap into fiberoptic cables, undersea. Given the volume of traffic, and the speed of transmission, this seems difficult to believe. How one would extract meaningful data without alerting users with an unexplained break in transmission/reception (the cut and splice) and huge data storage capacity (else real-time transmission to analysis, with real-time analysis) strains the imagination. The point is that any network is susceptible at various levels. The more widely-known and understood its workings, the more likely that it will be penetrated. I don't disagree that Skype works in a manner consistent with the design of the Internet. But I don't think that the Skype payload was contemplated when the switches that carry it were designed. And those carriers who've attempted to block Skype (or Vonage) traffic are certainly not willing participants. Taking a step back, the argument seems to be that an exploit is justifiable if it's consistent with the original design of the Internet. Then are carriers obliged to handle all traffic that makes use of their resources, at their cost?