Re: Journal of Internet Disasters

["Howard C. Berkowitz" <hcb () clark net>]

At 11:04 AM -0800 11/17/98, J.D. Falk wrote:
> On 11/16/98, Dave Crocker <dcrocker () brandenburg com> wrote:
>
> > That does not mean no oversight.  It merely means finding non-governmental
> > methods of achieving the oversight.  I suggest, for example, that a
> > competent and careful effort of the type Sean is suggesting would go a
> > long, long way towards helping things, by providing public and clear
> > explanations of problems.  Yes, it is possible that some ISPs would choose
> > to ignore the public disclosure, but let's worry about that problem after
> > give simple, public discourse a try.  Such an approach has a good track on
> > the Internet.
>
>       Furthermore...I'd be willing to bet that if the FCC or whoever
>       got a lot of complaints, they'd form an oversight committee.
>
>       Why not just form one ourselves, making sure that it's answerable
>       to the needs of the Internet community?
>
> --

Let me begin this by saying emphatically that I am _NOT_ proposing to put
any Internet operational procedures under the Official Standards
Infrastructure. (When I did OSI at COS, I always asked my boss that I
understood what the OSI infrastructure is, but I was unclear about the
superstructure.  Ian said that he would be as good an example as any.)

In non-IP networking, there are certainly things that go beyond national
boundaries and are operationally critical.  RF spectrum allocations, for
example, are a different matter than ISO or ITU protocol development. True,
the UN has no internal means of sending a missile at a transmitter on an
illegal frequency.

To me, there's a reasonably close analogy between the Internet routing
space and the global RF spectrum.  There are collisions if people use the
same frequency/prefix (I am _not_ going to get into line-of-sight issues).
Is someone familiar enough with the procedures for dealing with
inappropriate spectrum use to see if there might be any parallels for
Internet operations?


Howard,

who remembers a presentation at AFCEA where an Israeli Air Force general
was asked about the best electronic countermeasures they had found to use
against Soviet-bloc radar.  He suggested that very few jammers, range gate
stealers, etc., really compared to a laser-guided bomb down the feed horn
of the antenna.