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Kill switches go both ways…

From reddit

Update on the OpenBSD IPSEC backdoor allegation

OpenBSD IPSEC source code has been reviewed by and so far no evidence of any unpatched vulnerability or back door has come up, however the IPSEC source code is large and complex so it may be premature to close the door on this one.  From Theo de Raadt @ openBSD:

(e) After Jason left, Angelos (who had been working on the ipsec stack already for 4 years or so, for he was the ARCHITECT and primary developer of the IPSEC stack) accepted a contract at NETSEC and
(while travelling around the world) wrote the crypto layer that permits our ipsec stack to hand-off requests to the drivers that Jason worked on. That crypto layer contained the half-assed insecure idea of half-IV that the US govt was pushing at that time. Soon after his contract was over this was ripped out. Soon after this the CBC oracle problem became known as well in published papers, and ipsec/crypto moved towards random IV generation (probably not viable before this, since we had lacked a high-quality speedy PRNG… arc4random). I do not believe that either of these two problems, or other problems not yet spotted, are a result of clear malice. So far the issues we are digging up are a function of the time in history.

I’ve always been a firm believer that intelligence agencies deliberately introduce vulnerabilities in application source code by paying off and/or having agents infiltrate software companies, which they can remotely exploit for eavesdropping purposes.

Just let this be a lesson to you, when the US government pushes the use of an encryption algorithm, it’d be wise to use a different one.

Torrent-based alternative DNS system coming

dot-p2p.org

Hello all #isp of the world. We’re going to add a new competing root-server since we’re
tired of #ICANN. Please contact me to help.

- Peter Sunde via Twitter @brokep on November 27th, 23:08 PST.

• TorrentFreak: BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures Written by Ernesto on November 30, 2010
• ArsTechnica: Fed up with ICANN, Pirate Bay cofounder floats P2P DNS system
• Techcrunch: Peter Sunde Seconds The Idea Of An Alternative Root DNS
• activepolitic: Distributed DNS system
• techdirt:With Domain Name Seizures Increasing, It’s Time For A Decentralized DNS System
• PCWorld P2P-based Alternative to DNS Hopes to Challenge ICANN
• The Pirate Bay Co-Founder Starting P2P-DNS

Alex Jones removed from Google News since November, YouTube channel may be deleted

After “they” flushed the video of Donald Rumsfeld saying “missile hit the pentagon” down a memory hole (I swear I’ve seen it with my own eyes… once), I started saving videos- usually FLV or Mp4 files from my browser cache.  If YouTube wants to censor videos selectively for political gain, I have a few TB/month bandwidth I can spare to xfer some important documentary videos as I’m sure quite a few other hosts do.   I think YouTube and the government should go ahead and delete his account cause they’ll really be pouring gasoline on the fire.  People will use other services to distribute the videos and we won’t continue supporting this intelligence agency founded/funded service.   Google News basically pushes all the latest internet propaganda from the corporate media to the top, constantly finding new ways to stifle public opinion. YouTube takes important videos down all the time under the pretext of copyright violation or the ambiguous “terms of use violation” they applied uniquely to Alex Jones’ YouTube channel.  We can do better.

If you want to help distribute underground documentary videos, all you have to do is seed them on BitTorrent. Vuze is a good BitTorrent client. Use the advanced view + transport encryption.  That’s something you can do easily from the comfort of your own home. Here’s how:

After downloading Vuze from the link above, or other torrent client, use a torrent search engine like Torrentz.com to search for “Alex Jones” (or whatever you want).  Download the .torrent files for the movies you want to watch, open them with Vuze, and transfer the files down.  Leave the files “seeding” which means they are shared with others in the torrent network.  Click to enlarge…

There are other social web video sites like Liveleak.com, vimeo.com, Metacafe.com, Break.com etc to upload vids.  We should definitely diversify our uploading efforts.   I’m getting pretty sick of copyright violation takedowns from YouTube in my old posts and having to find other copies.

What the feds and spooks don’t seem to realize is that for every video they take down, 10 more are going to pop up.   This whack-a-mole approach just makes their problem (us) worse as censorship makes people more curious and validates everything we’re doing.

TheAlexJonesChannel on YouTube.  – People should get in the habit of saving videos so they can quickly be re-uploaded, hopefully in a more distributed fashion next time.

Comcast charging Level 3 internet backbone provider fees to transfer “competing content” to customers

BROOMFIELD, Colo., November 29, 2010

Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: LVLT) today issued the following statement, which can be attributed to Thomas Stortz, Chief Legal Officer of Level 3:

“On November 19, 2010, Comcast informed Level 3 that, for the first time, it will demand a recurring fee from Level 3 to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’s customers who request such content. By taking this action, Comcast is effectively putting up a toll booth at the borders of its broadband Internet access network, enabling it to unilaterally decide how much to charge for content which competes with its own cable TV and Xfinity delivered content. This action by Comcast threatens the open Internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access markets as the nation’s largest cable provider.

“On November 22, after being informed by Comcast that its demand for payment was ‘take it or leave it,’ Level 3 agreed to the terms, under protest, in order to ensure customers did not experience any disruptions.

“Level 3 operates one of several broadband backbone networks, which are part of the Internet and which independent providers of online content use to transmit movies, sports, games and other entertainment to consumers. When a Comcast customer requests such content, for example an online movie or game, Level 3 transmits the content to Comcast for delivery to consumers.

“Level 3 believes Comcast’s current position violates the spirit and letter of the FCC’s proposed Internet Policy principles and other regulations and statutes, as well as Comcast’s previous public statements about favoring an open Internet.

“While the network neutrality debate in Washington has focused on what actions a broadband access provider might take to filter, prioritize or manage content requested by its subscribers, Comcast’s decision goes well beyond this. With this action, Comcast is preventing competing content from ever being delivered to Comcast’s subscribers at all, unless Comcast’s unilaterally-determined toll is paid – even though Comcast’s subscribers requested the content. With this action, Comcast demonstrates the risk of a ‘closed’ Internet, where a retail broadband Internet access provider decides whether and how their subscribers interact with content.

“It is our hope that Comcast’s senior management, for whom we have great respect, will closely consider their position on this issue and adopt an approach that will better serve Comcast and Comcast’s customers.

“While Comcast’s position is regrettable, Level 3 remains open and willing to work through these issues with Comcast. However, Level 3 does not seek any ‘special deals’ or arrangements not generally available to other Internet backbone companies.

“Given Comcast’s currently stated position, we are approaching regulators and policy makers and asking them to take quick action to ensure that a fair, open and innovative Internet does not become a closed network controlled by a few institutions with dominant market power that have the means, motive and opportunity to economically discriminate between favored and disfavored content.“

About Level 3 Communications
Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: LVLT) is a leading international provider of fiber-based communications services. Enterprise, content, wholesale and government customers rely on Level 3 to deliver services with an industry-leading combination of scalability and value over an end-to-end fiber network. Level 3 offers a portfolio of metro and long-haul services, including transport, data, Internet, content delivery and voice. For more information, visit www.level3.com

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Forces of good repurpose google trends

DNS TXT records represent vulnerability for caching DNS servers

… And now there’s an easy way to exploit it to leach bandwidth. Since TXT records are now deprecated in the DNS (Domain Naming System) specification, administrators of public caching dns servers would be advised to place limits on number of TXT records and hostnames for a domain, or just disable the use of txt records entirely as they mostly were used as a temporary method of authenticating other DNS servers while they rolled out the official Sender ID (Microsoft) and Sender Policy Framework (same as Sender ID), essentially an attempt gain some control over who connects to DNS servers (and ostensibly block out spammers and other undesirables from connecting) using the public key certificate signing chain of trust.

How ironic that this the very thing Microsoft pushed for in the DNS specification enables distributed, free content distribution that will be VERY difficult to contain, because shutting down the official domain host (the host that is authoritative for that DNS record) will have only a delayed effect on the downstream cached files! HAHA.. that really blew up in your faces, didn’t it?   You actually increased the opportunity for spammers to deliver content anonymously!

There will be obvious indicators that caching dns servers are being used as a CDN but it will require some usage analysis and behavior profiling for hosts.  But really I think we should just disable DNS TXT records entirely.

Spam is a nuisance but this type of command and control overreaction goes way beyond what can be considered a reasonable rseponse to spam.  Anti-spam technologies should not hinder free access to data, centralize power, or introduce more vulnerabilities or additional points of failure into any network service.

It will be interesting to see if the replacement for the TXT records (SPF records) will allow arbitrary text blocks. My guess is they will, since they must contain large blocks of encrypted text for keys. (SPF Specification)

My DNS server does no caching, so this is not really a concern for me. But read on . I think you will find this very interesting…

Free Content Delivery Network using DNS cache (ByteWorm)

Why spend money on expensive CDN hosting when there’s a perfectly good, free, global one available? Thats right, DNS cache. Most open recursive DNS servers will cache requests (A, CNAME, PTR, TXT, etc.) for the length of the specified TTL value, and there’s millions of them worldwide. Once a public DNS server has the records in cache (usually after a single request), it requires no further bandwidth from the originating server.

Unfortunately there’s a limit to the size of a record a DNS server will cache, and a limit to the length of the DNS packet itself. To store files using DNS cache we must encode the file and split it into multiple records. We’re going to use TXT records for this example, which is limited by 255 characters.

file1.part1.cdn 14400 IN TXT
"ICAgICAgQ2FuYWRhIEludmFzaW9uIFBsYW4KICAgIFRPUCBTRUNSRVQg
IENPTkZJREVOVElBTAotLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tLS0tL
QoKU3RlcCAxKSBBcm0gYmVhdmVycyB3aXRoIHJpZmxlcwpTdGVw"

file1.part2.cdn 14400 IN TXT
"IDIpIFRyYWluIG1vbmtleXMgdG8gam91c3QKU3RlcCAzKSBQcm9maXQ
KCldlIGhhdmUgYSBncm91cCB0aGF0IG1lZXRzIEZyaWRheXMgYXQgbWl
kbmlnaHQgdW5kZXIgdGhlCmJyb29rbHluIGJyaWRnZSBhbmQgdGhlIHBh"

file1.part3.cdn 14400 IN TXT
"c3N3b3JkIGlzIHNpYyBzZW1wZXIgdHlyYW5uaXMuCg=="

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