Watching the Net's background radiation

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34227.html

[Check out the above URL for the graphs, as they don't translate too 
well in text. :)  - WK]


By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 27/11/2003

When the city sleeps, it's never completely silent. But when the
Internet sleeps, what kind of static does it make? What does it sound
like? Like the weird warbles astronomers claim to hear from outer
space?

We'd like to share what the Internet sounds like when it sleeps, and
in its current highly agitated state, we think it's worth sharing.

Our thanks to ISP Robin Bandy at Cliq for providing traffic
information for a node which died, but which was still being routed
to, over several months. A silent tristero, if you like: the computer
which we'll examine was giving out no TCP/IP responses. Cliq's traffic
monitoring continued, however, and began to trace what the rest of us
can't hear. This is the unbidden Internet traffic: the very sound of
static.

What we're hearing are the pings and portscans that leave untraceable
fingerprints around our sockets, and they're so slight that we don't
notice. Let's look at the packets.

A daily sample shows that this traffic is persistent, and fairly
variable.

But a weekly sample shows that a poor silent, unattended node gets
something of a break at the weekends. What's a gal to do? We see that
traffic drops by half at weekends, from 20 bits per second to 10.  
This, as Robin suggests, gives credence to the theory that a lot of
the Internet's static is generated by business computers, which are
running Microsoft® Windows, but which are left unattended when the
corridor warriors depart their desks, and head downtown, to hunt for
unprotected nodes.

Now that's interesting. The monthly chart isn't too interesting,
however, so we won't bother showing you it, but for the sake of
completeness, here's a chart for the duration. It represents a routed
but silent Internet node over the course of eight months silence.

As we can see, it's going up.

Some of us have noticed that the noise quotient of the Internet has
increased somewhat and, what with all the spam, the pop-up windows,
the blog noise and Google being broken, things just aren't what they
used to be. The 'be' being a thing that perhaps never was, or only
ever existed as the romantic hope of someone's imagination. Our Robin
brings us back to earth, and points to a few interesting implications
of this data.

The hard figures we can draw are that modem users lose about 20 bits
per second to Internet junk, which is just about tolerable. But owners
of Class B networks, who expect to monitor 256^16 nodes, are probably
more interested in the stats, as they pay for the data.

Techno-utopians have tried to school us that the "Internet" is
frictionless and free. But now we look at the real Internet and, once
we included background static in the picture, we can begin to discover
where the real costs lie.

And the larger networks have a real cost here, as Internet static is
multiplied exponentially. So what happens next?

 From the technical follows the political: these guys may start to get
selfish soon, and demand to be paid. For punters who've always
accepted that "things" are "free", and never thought about the
political economies of the Internet - this could be a real eye-opener.

The operators may well decide to throw the Internet's real freeloaders
- geeks who contribute little real (in terms of technical or social)  
infrastructure, off of the payroll, at a macro-economic level. The
political economies suggest that some day very soon Internet
consultants may well be expendable to the people who really pay the
bills. And if this cost is a form of pollution, which polluters must
we bill? The guys whose computers are left unattended at weekends,
leaking like an oil spill?

The Universe gives off a persistent background microwave radiation -
and this provides astronomers with the historical data of how the
cosmos was created. How much can you stand, and how much do you think
the money men can stand before they pull on their radiation suits? And
who do we send the bill to, at the end of the day?



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