The Pirate Bay, bane to Hollywood, is in the process of being acquired by a Swedish gaming company called “Global Gaming Factory X AB” (GGF) for 60M Swedish Kroner ($7.8M dollars) – 30M in cash, and 30M in stock.  To put that in perspective, the fine levied against the four defendants in the Pirate Bay trial was equal to 30M Kroner.  (Hmm…)

Not that the money from the sale will be used to pay the fine – the 60M is, according to the Pirate Bay Blog, the money will be going to fight The Pirate Bay’s political battles in Sweden and the EU: 

The old crew is still around in different ways. We will also not stop being active in the politics of the internets - quite the opposite. Now we're fueling up for going into the next gear. TPB will have economical muscles to let people evolve it. It will team up with great technicians to evolve the protocols. And we, the people interested in more than just technology, will have the time to focus on that. It's win-win-win.

The profits from the sale will go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess [sic] of the nets.

Global Gaming Factory, on the other hand, is going to try to take the PirateBay towards the “Napster” route – promising that they will go legal, and compensate copyright owners, disappointing Pirate Cat.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site,” said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” said Pandeya.

Good luck with that.  The value for any company is in the Pirate Bay’s userbase, but the value for the users is illegal torrents.  Going legit – well, just look at Napster.  When was the last time you bought something from Napster?  Hell, when was the first time you bought something from Napster? 

Shutting down the Pirate Bay, of course, will harm copyright infringement just as much as shutting down Napster harmed music piracy; already, Peter Sunde is talking about decentralizing the servers. 

No one is completely sure what’s going to happen to The Pirate Bay after this; and, proving that you can’t spell “conspiracy” without “piracy,” there’s a theory on the Internet that Big Hollywood set up GGF as a front company in order to buy out the Pirate Bay.  ($7.8M is small change to an industry claiming billions or trillions of dollars in losses due to piracy.)  Plausible? Yes. Probable? No. 

But in any case, either The Pirate Bay will become decentralized or the users will move to other decentralized network to get their fix – which means that enterprises currently tracking non-business critical traffic from BitTorrent downloads by focusing only on The Pirate Bay’s one tracker server will have to readjust their configurations on the fly – and respond quickly to changing traffic patterns. 

Just a quick open-thread post for all of you in San Francisco attending Cisco Live! (a.k.a. Cisco Networkers.) If you’re attending, let us know what you think in our comments section.

And if you'd like to talk to us in person, NetQoS can be found at booth #807.

Here’s one of the big problems with experimenting to find a faster, more robust Internet architecture: Since there isn’t another computer network out there as big as the Internet, when you want to make grand changes to the way the Internet works, what do you test it out on before deploying?

This is a real problem, because a single accident taking out a trunk line can cause significant disruption – like, for example, those undersea cables cut by ship anchors.

Bennett Daviss at New Scientist wrote about these problems in an article entitled “Building a crash-proof Internet.” The main problem: While the Internet was designed to route around damaged lines and offline servers, the routers we have today are relatively slow at finding new paths. Improving all of the Internet’s routers individually with newer software to find paths quicker would cost billions, if not trillions. While the million dollar losses incurred by Internet outages are not small change, compared to the costs of upgrading, living with the temporary losses seems a viable option.

Additionally, even if the money could be put up front, any “improvements” may actually break stuff, creating the problem that the solution is supposed to prevent. You’d test before deployment if we were talking about a smaller scale enterprise network, but this is the Internet we’re talking about. There just isn’t any other network out there big enough to properly test for scale.

At least, not yet. The National Science Foundation is building an “at-scale” computer network for testing Internet technologies. Part of that network is an open-source program called OpenFlow, hosted at Stanford University, which can be added to standard routers, creating a remote interface to the router's flow table - the rules for handling traffic.

Having the ability to handle flow tables remotely may be a bit of a security risk, but it means that you can let human beings – or supercomputers designed to do nothing but crunch the numbers on routing tables – make routing decisions and send them back to the router. (I wonder if, theoretically, you could use data that one router gathers to help other routers make routing decisions faster.)

Additionally, OpenFlow can be used to spread communication between two specific computers over multiple paths, which may increase reliability and spread congestion more evenly. It can also be used to sort different types of traffic to use different paths – giving VoIP traffic to the lowest-latency path, and, say, non-streaming movie downloads to the largest-throughput path… or giving e-mails more priority than MP3 files.

This just seems like an interesting piece of technology which may impact the way that we observe Internet traffic in the mid-to-long term – so it might be worthwhile to keep an eye on it.

As reported in Network World and on the official Google Blog, Google’s been talking about ways to make the Web, as a whole, faster. Quoth the Google:

Many protocols that power the Internet and the web were developed when broadband and rich interactive web apps were in their infancy. Networks have become much faster in the past 20 years, and by collaborating to update protocols such as HTML and TCP/IP we can create a better web experience for everyone.

Typically, as far as computing is concerned, we’ve seen a trend that protocols and languages that were invented in the past were lightweight, compact fast models which ran on the past’s older hardware, replaced by more robust, but slower programs. WordPerfect 5.1 blazed on 286s, while the minimum requirements for Microsoft Office 2007 are 500MHz at the minimum. Yet, I think most people would choose Microsoft Office 2007 over WordPerfect 5.1.

But on the Internet, which requires more so than any other computer endeavor, standards, we have not seen a whole lot of this. TCP has developed a few variations, but mostly remains the same protocol invented in 1974, 1995’s HTML 2.0 code still works 15 years later on today’s javascript-enabled browsers.

By speeding up the Web, Google is pushing for faster adoption of new standards, such as HTML 5, designed to bring multimedia applications away from plug-ins such as Flash, Silverlight, and Java, and towards putting it into the interpreted HTML code itself. In fact, and this is pure speculation, creating a viable alternative to the Flash near-monopoly on Web multimedia would foster Google’s standing compared to their competitors – and maybe that’s why the announcment, which come down to: “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a faster way of doing things,” was worth Google making a big deal.

(An interesting sidenote: with the proprietary Flash, we wait on Adobe to make improvements to the code; with HTML 5 an open standard, code improvements would occur according to the standards association. I have no idea which would actually produce faster code improvements, but I do know that I’d rather code multimedia for free than pay Adobe for the Flash application.)

Protocols such as TCP/IP were invented at a time when bandwidth was much scarcer than it is now. Newer protocols which can better take advantage of more bandwidth are a natural evolution. “Less bandwidth used,” after all, doesn’t mean “better performance” just as no one will consider Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS running on 256k RAM more productive than Office 2007 running on 2GB.

Client computers – even the itty bitty ones we keep in our pockets, like Blackberries and iPhones – have become much more powerful since the days of yore, when dragons roamed the earth and wore Unix beards. One of the reasons that multimedia has grown so well on the Web over the past decade is because we now have computers that can handle more complex and more powerful tasks on the client-side. That is, there could be no YouTube HD if our computers couldn’t handle high definition video playback. There would be no Ajax, if JavaScript interpretation taxed our machines.

I do think it’s time for change in Internet standards. Then again, when is it not time for change in Internet standards? If you can measure the change in performance, and it’s a clear improvement over the old system, do it.

While the world looks at Iranians getting past official government censorship via Twitter, in another part of the world, Internet filters imposed by the government are also causing problems.  We’re talking, once again, about Australia.

Australian Senator Conroy, who tried to bully a network engineer who pointed out that a mandatory Internet filtering scheme would be ineffective and create massive network performance problems, is now going after, of all things, World of Warcraft. 

A bit of background on this: In most industrialized nations, video games have ratings systems.  The United States uses the ESRB rating system, the U.K. uses the British Board of Film Classification, Europe uses PEGI, and Australia…

Well, Australia is a strange duck.  While in the United States we have the “M” rating for mature games, and PEGI and BBFC have 18/18+ ratings for games,  Austraila’s Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) has no problem with the “R18+” rating for films – similar to our “R” rating, but it offers no “R” rating for video games – classification stops at MA15+ - or content suitable for 15 year olds. 

The effect of this has been that in Australia, retail sales of video games have been limited only to those that the ratings board feels are suitable for 15 year olds.  Never mind that the age of the average gamer in Australia is 28.  So in order to get a retail release in Australia, often violent games, such as Prototype, have to be censored and re-edited – or they cannot be sold in Australia’s retail stores.

Games requiring editing before they could be released in Australia include: “50 Cent: Bulletproof,” “Fallout 3,” and “Grand Theft Auto IV.”  In the case of Fallout 3, the only change was to rename an in-game drug from “morphine” to “Med-X.”

Anyway, Australian gamers could order these games internationally, or download them through the Internet, but the filtering scheme proposed by the government is set to be expanded to block any video games that do not receive a rating from the OFLC – and since the OFLC does not give an 18+ rating, the effect is to ban all game content not suitable for 15 year olds.

But this will affect one game in particular: “World of Warcraft.”  As Escapist Magazine writes:

MMOGs like World of Warcraft have so far been exempt from classification in Australia but could also be impacted by the scheme. "That exemption is the only reason why multi-player games with user-generated environments are possible in this country," said Mark Newton, an engineer and critic of the filtering plan. "Without it, it'd only take one game user anywhere in the world to produce objectionable content in the game environment to make the Australian Government ban the game for everyone."

It won’t work, of course.  But the reason why it won’t work is particularly important for network performance reasons – that is, the solution around most Internet censorships is through the use of proxies.  It’s how tweets are coming out of Iran, it’s how people access facebook at work.  With mandatory Internet filtering, however, Australian gamers are going to start using proxies in nearby countries – Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, etc., to bypass Australian censorship filters. 

And as much as this may seem like the punchline to a baudy geek joke, people spend way more time playing World of Warcraft than downloading Internet porn.   The information on how to set up a proxy overseas will spread very quickly.  This will cause a major change in traffic patterns in the entire Oceania/SE Asian region. 

So if your company has business interests in either region, it might be a good idea to make sure that you’re monitoring your network for changes in traffic densities in overseas lines – and make sure that no one’s desktop-computer WoW proxy impacts performance for the enterprise.

When Cisco Live! (a.k.a. Cisco Networkers) starts up next week, every vendor is going to try to get you to their booth, learning about their products, and telling their stories. We’re no different.

I would like to take this time to point out that all the cool kids are going to booth 807 this year, and the more time you spend at booth 807, the cooler you are.

Now, anybody can make that claim about their booth. For example, we just did.

In all seriousness, I am really looking forward to the presentation on Tuesday, June 30^th at 2:30 that NBC Universal is going to be giving along with Steve Harriman, our Senior VP of Marketing, at Cisco Live, because while there are “swagger stories” abounding in this industry, sometimes some stories are just too cool.

In this case: How do you send live coverage of the Beijing Summer Olympics through to television viewers, cable viewers, mobile device viewers, and Web viewers – data totaling 3.4 petabytes?

3.4 Petabytes is over three and a half million gigabytes. Put into context, if you put that on 1.44MB floppies, the height of the stack would be roughly 2500 miles - equal to the distance between New York and Los Angeles by air. In order to pull it off, NBC had to use three 155Mbps OC-3 pipes to get the footage from Beijing, of course, monitoring and maintaining the network the whole time.

There are plenty of stories about optimizing your network, but that’s a story I really want to hear – it’s a big task, no room for error, and only one shot to get it right. Plus, you know, it’s Television. Say what you will about mocking the “old” media in the age of the Internet, television has always been glamorous, exiting, and even today remains the best way to reach the most people. So, I’m pretty psyched about it.

It’s not a particularly controversial statement that most of what we go through at the airport in the name of “security” is in actuality, “security theater,” as security expert Bruce Schneier wrote in “Beyond Fear.” Security theater measures are measures that don’t actually have any real effect or purpose towards keeping us safe, but they seem like they might, so we go through them anyway, and pay for them.

Whether or not the theatre creates a discouraging effect on attack attempts is debatable, and how much restriction on people’s behavior without any actual tangible benefit is acceptable to maintain the psychological discouragement, if any, is also very controversial.

What isn’t debatable is that airport travel is annoying as hell. The No Fly List has expanded tremendously, even for those of us lucky enough not to be on the list, we have to take our laptops out of our backpacks or briefcases and scan them separately, even taking off our shoes. Some airports are using a backscatter X-ray which means you’re essentially posing nude for the camera every time you walk through.

To quote Janice from The Muppets, “Listen, I don't take my clothes off for anyone, even if it is ‘artistic.’”

Anytime I quote the Muppets, it’s a sure sign I’m starting to get off-track. Anyway, where there’s annoyance, someone will try to make money by selling convenience, and airport security is no exception. In this case, it was the “Clear” lanes at airports, where you would pay $99 per year for a card that signified that you were a minimum security risk, and therefore you could be processed through airport security more quickly.

(Apparently, the main qualification for being a “minimum security risk” is being rich enough to blow $99 on a membership that gets you through lines faster. It also helps if your name isn’t Al Kyder or Terry Wrist.)

Despite some snags, such as “Clear” passengers unable to keep on their shoes or jackets, as they had hoped when Clear launched, Clear continued and it is the business success that it is today because of a savvy—

--Hold on, someone just handed me a note.

Ah. They failed, and are shutting down today.

Which brings me to the idea of doing QoS incorrectly. Yes, QoS priorities can help with making sure mission critical data gets there first, but stuff that isn’t mission critical, merely “mission nice-to-have” can get bogged down as well. If there is some external reason why every packet on the link seems to be performing slowly, maybe it’s a good idea to figure out what that reason is.

One of the reasons for long lines at security in airports (which themselves are a security risk – a suicide bomber could take out a planeload of people without even purchasing a ticket if he blew himself up in the security queue) is because of this security theatre. If that can’t be shown to be effective, maybe it’s time to do something different.

On the network, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to prioritize packets until you look at the entire network, from end-to-end, and figure out why the network is slow. Sometimes QoS prioritization is the answer. Other times, it may just be an expensive mask to a more deeply rooted problem.

Earthweb’s Bruce Byfield recently wrote about the innovations in KDE 4 and GNOME; the two main Linux desktop platforms.  More specifically, he wrote that the upcoming versions of KDE and GNOME were designed with numerous improvements that developers decided to put in because they were “cool” – but which may overcomplicate things for the end user on the desktop, using Linux as an alternative to Windows or Mac as a workhorse machine.

(For the uninitiated, KDE and GNOME are desktop environments that provide a unified “look and feel” among graphical applications running on Linux.  It’s similar to the relationship between the Windows XP “look and feel” and the Windows Vista “look and feel” – both do the same thing, but look different and have different functionality.  Each desktop environment also provides tools for developing standalone applications – while applications designed to run in KDE will run in GNOME, and vice versa, they are likely to look and feel slightly out of place.  The difference is, while XP and Vista are developed by the same company, sequentially, KDE and GNOME are developed by different teams of developers, in parallel, and end-users choose the desktop system that meets their needs. )

The theory is that open-source developers who aren’t working for a paycheck are instead working to either add the features that they think are personally cool, and what they think they’d like to see in a desktop platform.  But end-users are more likely to prefer simplicity and familiarity.  While “doing new things” is always a bonus, more people would rather focus on using the computer to do the things they already know how to do, and any “new thing” which gets in the way of that is likely to be seen as an annoyance. 

From Byfield’s article:

“What innovators and early adopters can easily forget is that they are a minority. Where they are excited by change, most users are uncomfortable with change. Many will reject any change out of hand, no matter how logical or convenient, simply because it is new….

…But what the innovators are forgetting is that, for the average user, the desktop is not the destination. Nor is the destination even the application…. Rather, the destination is the user's purpose: finishing the quarterly report or IMing a girlfriend. As they focus on the task at hand, users may not want to linger on the desktop to play with its features.”

This is one of the reasons that we often harp on having network tools that can provide the necessary information to the right audience.  The network engineer is concerned with throughput and latency, the CIO more concerned with how much money good throughput and low latency save, if any. 

Real human usability factors are often as important, or more important, in developing software products – any software development company often has specialists in user interface designing the look and feel of products – NetQoS is no exception.  But user interface design isn’t just about making the functionality “look pretty” – it’s finding better ways to present information – even if that means finding a “less clever” way to present information in favor of a “more parseable” way to do so. 

I don’t know if there’s as much of a disconnect between IT and the business as there used to be; I think that over the past few years, more executives see the value of IT because more people in IT are explaining the value of IT in terms that matter to business executives.  But the quickest way to encourage that disconnect is by giving the C-level executive information he neither needs nor cares about – it’s a quick way for him to tune out anything important that you may have to say.  

Cisco Live! a.k.a. “Cisco Networkers” is going to start the week after next on June 27^th, and I thought it might be time to start plugging our appearance at the—wait a minute…

“Cisco Systems.”

Based in San Francisco.

Oh my god.  I just got that.

I feel like such an idiot now.  Really – I thought it was named after someone like a John Cisco or something.  Like he was the founder of the company.  I’m probably thinking of John Chambers, the current CEO, but the company was founded by Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner.

What else am I missing out on?

Anyway, NetQoS, as “diamond sponsor” of the event, we’ll will have a “Super Session” on Tuesday, June 30, at booth 807 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, and--

I’m not going to be able to get that out of my head now.  It’s like seeing the arrow in the Fedex logo.  What else have I been missing in my life that’s so obvious to the people around me?  I feel like Grover, who found out that the monster at the end of the book was him all along.  (Him and his drinking problem.)

I’m going to need some time to think about this. 

Well, coming from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow, the Norwegian based Opera Software is following in the footsteps of the Vikings.  Opera Unite is a technical achievement and if it – or a worthy imitator - is widely adopted, will be a game changer.  The Vikings were the game changers of their day, engineering the best seafaring technology of the time.  They also pillaged and burned a whole mess of Europe, which many people may find reprehensible, but, hey, the Vikings were the best at what they did. 

At its core, Opera Unite is nothing more than a webserver – we’ve had these things for years, of course.  What makes it different is the ease at which it can be set up – download the browser, create an Opera.com account, and you’re done.  By routing through Opera’s servers, you don’t need to mess with VPN, Remote Desktop, IP addresses, or configuring those fiddly little port forwarding settings on your home router – you don’t even need to have access to it – or even to know what a router is – to use Opera Unite.

Right now, the immediate use is to run it on the home computer to access files from work, and vice-versa.  And that’s where the snag comes in.  Opera Unite cannot be considered in any way “secure” – the fact that it connects to a third-party server makes it ripe for a man-in-the-middle attack, people might mistakenly share sensitive information on their work or home computers, and of course, there’s the problems that you’d expect to have with any filesharing app on the PC.

But more importantly, this will have a major impact on performance.  Employees running data servers can choke the network links your company pays for; we have already seen this when highly technical users run FTP or Web servers from their office desktop machines.  Opera Unite doesn’t change the nature of FTP servers – it just places creation and access of FTP servers and hosting services in the hands of the many, rather than the few. 

Even so, I can’t help but think that overall, Opera Unite is a good thing overall.  It reduces dependence on third-party hosting sites and cloud apps – like YouTube.  If there’s a video that YouTube doesn’t like – or has to take down because of a mistaken or fraudulent copyright claim, the video can still be made available.  (Often times, copyright law is abused to get hosting services to remove unflattering footage of a company or organization.)  And if a particular hosting service should die, the data can still be accessed.  In this manner, it removes some of the risk from cloud computing by allowing anyone to run their own hosting services. 

It doesn’t hurt Opera that they’ve found a hail-mary pass for desktop software to remain relevant in the age of the “software as utility” philosophy of cloud computing… by essentially providing a desktop app that turns your desktop into a cloud computing platform. 

Additionally, although I don’t hold out much hope for it, it may increase demand for more uploading capacity for home users.  AT&T DSL, for example, maxes out at 768kbps upload speed – over three hours to upload a single gigabyte of information. There’s been little complaint about this because most people care more about download speeds than upload speeds – with their own hosting services however, people might be more likely to notice, and care, about what speed they can access their home computer from work, or their friends or colleagues can access their files.  That may lead to increased upload capacity provisioning. 

Ultimately, I’m psyched about Opera Unite as a desktop user, but in the trenches of IT, I’d want to make sure I had a way to track this traffic and see if it affects network performance in a meaningful way.  It may be nothing but a flash in the pan, but if it does catch on, I’d rather err on the side of caution.