Larry J. Blunk wrote:
>
> I'm not trying to justify allowing the use of NAT where it is
> prohibited by a terms of service agreement and thus grounds for
> termination of service. However, going beyond termination of
> service and making this an illegal act under law (possibly
> punishable by a felony conviction and 4 years in prison) is an
> entirely different case. If you stop paying your ISP bill
> (thus getting several months for free until the ISP cuts you
> off) wouldn't that also be theft of service? Should one
> also be subject to a felony conviction and 4 years of prison for
> such an act?
If it takes a few months for the ISP to cut you off for not paying your
bill, that is their own fault. Concerning someone going to jail for
running NAT in breach of TOS, I find it supportable. There is precedence
set with the Cable companies (using equipment to allow service to be
used on more than tv's than allowed by the cable company would be
equivelent here).
-Jack
Sigh. My point is this is a question of extremes and punishment
commensurate with the "crime". I can understand how one could
consider NAT to be "theft" under a terms of service agreement. I
can even understand how one might think this should be a criminal
offense (although I would disagree - consider how many ISP's
consider NAT to be perfectly acceptable). However, going beyond a
misdemeanor offense and a fine - advocating prison time and felony
convictions - is something I simply can't understand or find
supportable.
[I think this is starting to step slightly outside the bounds of nanog,
but it's still linked.]
Look it's very simple.
If you steal something, you go to jail. That's really nto hard to
understand, and the reason it doesn't happen more often, is because
prison systems are already too full of people convicted of more serious
crimes.
You've already agreed to the statement that the act can be considered
theft. If you steal, you go to jail. Simple. If you steal, you're a
criminala because, you've commited a crime.. Simple.
Aquiring a service outside the bounds of any existing contract with the
intention of not paying for it, is also fraud.
I can't see why you have a problem sending someone to jail for commiting
a crime.
The same works the OTHER way. If you violate federal or state laws on
computer crimes, you're a criminal, you go to jail.
I don't know the statistics on how many people are convicted annually
under various pieces of computer-misuse related legislation, but I'm
sure someone does.
1. Many (all!) providers underprovision (aka oversell) their bandwidth,
expecting peak utilisations to be approximately the provisioned amount
because experience has shown that actual usage is only a percentage of
theoretical purchased bandwidth
2. If "power users" use even half the bandwidth they were *sold*, then that
has to be made up from low-bandwidth users to maintain an average in line
with actual provisioning; the price charged is actually based on the
provisioning, not actual usage or sold bandwidth, and is therefore
profitable only if the actual usage matches statistically
3. most power users eat bandwidth from a single machine downloading at the
maximum achievable rate and/or running servers; however, some could well do
so using multiple machines using NAT, and some otherwise low-bandwidth users
could possibly use more bandwidth if running multiple machines behind NAT
(based on the idea that low bandwidth users can't possibly use a multi-user
OS like linux and dumb terminals)
4. Trying to bandwidth limit users to a fraction of the bandwidth they were
theoretically sold (and/or similar schemes like total data transferred caps
and excess data usage charges) are politically and techically awkward;
customers don't like trying to understand that you sold them a product that
you knew in advance you couldn't provide, and tend to look around for
lawyers when that happens
5. therefore making the sale or advertisting of NAT devices illegal (and by
extension, commercial firewalls such as checkpoint's fw-1 and nat-capable
cisco routers) is only reasonable and perfectly defendable.
it is the hop from 4 to 5 I am having trouble with....
Using the law to defend deceptive business practices. Makes perfect sense.
It's either that or start charging the customer's what it really costs. They've been so happy to get away from that. Large networks have cut their rates based on oversell so that mid-sized networks could cut their rates, so that small networks could cut their rates, so that @home can have service for $50/mo. If @home uses full bandwidth, and each of the networks steps up to meet the bandwidth, either a) @home gets billed no less than 4 times as much or b) any network that doesn't step up pricing goes into Chapter 11. In addition, it's questionable if the overall network infrastructure can handle that amount of throughput. 1.5Mb/s to the house sounds so wonderful, but at $50/mo, it's not really feasible without a lot of oversell. People traditionally base oversell per computer connection (taken from dialup overselling).
I disagree with the method, but who am I to say someone else's business plan is faulty and they shouldn't be allowed to enforce it?
Using the law to defend deceptive business practices. Makes perfect sense.
It's either that or start charging the customer's what it really costs. They've been so happy to get away from that. Large networks have cut their rates based on oversell so that mid-sized networks could cut their rates, so that small networks could cut their rates, so that @home can have service for $50/mo. If @home uses full bandwidth, and each of the networks steps up to meet the bandwidth, either a) @home gets billed no less than 4 times as much or b) any network that doesn't step up pricing goes into Chapter 11. In addition, it's questionable if the overall network infrastructure can handle that amount of throughput. 1.5Mb/s to the house sounds so wonderful, but at $50/mo, it's not really feasible without a lot of oversell. People traditionally base oversell per computer connection (taken from dialup overselling).
I disagree with the method, but who am I to say someone else's business plan is faulty and they shouldn't be allowed to enforce it?
Then charge what it really costs.
Look, I'm buying transit from an ISP. You know, moving bits. This kind of legislation is as absurd as telling me what devices I'm allowed to view my DVD's on, listen to my CD's on, or how I should watch a movie because it happens to come on a little silver disk vs a dark stream of tape.
If ISPs have to resort to these kind of tactics to preserve "value" of their services, perhaps they need to find a way to offer more "value" than they do today.
As for the security aspects, I have privacy of communication when I put a letter into an envelope. Just because I'm communicating electronically doesn't mean I've abdicated that right.
Look it's very simple.
If you steal something, you go to jail. That's really nto hard to
understand, and the reason it doesn't happen more often, is because
prison systems are already too full of people convicted of more serious
crimes.
I believe that the phrase you were searching for there was actually
"less serious crimes." But I digress.
This seems like an apropos point to remind people of the existance of nanog-offtopic@lists.blank.org. All of the friendly bickering with
the people you know and love and/or loathe; 100% less of the
annoying-of-Susan and people-looking-for-operational-content.
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