It couldn't last. After two days of official radio silence, on May 31st, official state-sponsored radio stations (run by the Marconi company under special contract) began transmitting a clean slate of government-sanctioned programming, and the brief era of grass-roots Egyptian radio was over.

Although they certainly could, countries typically don't exercise any control over the routing hygiene of the companies operating within their borders. Countries might tax those companies, filter their traffic for objectionable content, mandate the types of software or equipment they can use and even spy on them, but if a company wants to screw up routing on the global Internet, well that's their business. As we've noted in the past, no driver's license is required on the Information Superhighway, as there are essentially no rules, regulations or enforcement. So in this blog entry, we'll apply our scoring idea to those who can easily effect change, namely, those organizations who are ultimately responsible for how traffic flows on the Internet.

]]> http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/05/keeping-score.shtml http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/05/keeping-score.shtml Internet Mon, 04 May 2009 06:00:00 -0500 Since Renesys maintains large quantities of data on the Internet going back many years, we sometimes get the question: If you guys are watching the entire 'net, why don't you just warn people when things break? My response is generally along the lines of: Sure we can do that. Simply tell us the correct state of the Internet at each moment in time and we'll alert you to any operational differences we observe. This is generally met with silence.

Renesys can tell you a lot about the current state of the Internet, but absolutely no one can tell you the correct state. And that is because no one is in charge, and so there is no central authoritative source of information. Think of the Internet as a highway system where anyone can buy a car and simply start driving: no need to register the car, attach a license plate, buy insurance or get a driver's license. You don't even have to show an id or be sober. Just pay some fees, buy some equipment, hook up and go. The barrier to entry really is that low.

Obviously, this arrangement can cause some problems. When Pakistan hijacked YouTube last year by announcing YouTube IP space, out of the hundreds of thousands of routing announcements seen on Internet, how was anyone to know this particular one was incorrect? Okay sure, you couldn't get your videos, but maybe YouTube had just opened a data center in Karachi and the problem was internal to them? Without some way of checking the authenticity of routes, the routers that direct traffic on the Internet simply believe what they are told. And if the best route to YouTube appears to be via Pakistan, then they are all going to use it, no questions asked. This is not a new problem, and this blog explores an old and largely failed attempt to address it. We then compare the differences between countries with respect to their routing hygiene.

• How could anyone be this dumb?
• Why did this cascade throughout the planet?
• Can you provide more details about the impact and its spread?
• How do we prevent this from happening again?

Although we ultimately succeeded in answering the question and in developing a general Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) detection algorithm for the global Internet, we ended up writing a lot of code over the course of several months and burning through endless CPU cycles looking for attack evidence. Our results were presented this week at Black Hat and the complete presentation can be found here. In this blog, we'll hit on some of the highlights from the presentation.

]]> http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/01/the-adventurous-parts-of-the-i.shtml http://www.renesys.com/blog/2009/01/the-adventurous-parts-of-the-i.shtml Economics Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:40:26 -0500 It's been an interesting year in many ways, not least of which for the Internet. This year, I started to contribute in earnest to the Renesys blog and back in January I was wondering "How am I going to find anything interesting to talk about on a regular basis? Nothing much happens on the Internet, right?" Well, it certainly did this year and now I've got many more ideas than I have time to research and write about. In hindsight, I guess it isn't too surprising. As the world becomes more interconnected and more Internet-dependent, we're bound to bump into each other more and expose the limitations of the current system. So let's review what 2008 brought us and take a guess at what is in store for the new year.

Calamity returned to its customary end-of-year schedule this year, when early today (19 Dec. 2008) several communications cables were severed, affecting traffic in the Middle East and Indian subcontinent. According to a press release by France Telecom three major cables were damaged: Sea-Me-We 4 at 7:28 UTC, Sea-Me-We 3 at 7:33 UTC, and FLAG FEA at 8:06 UTC. It appears that the SMW3 cable was only partially cut, the SMW4 cable was completely cut, while the FLAG cable was "observed down" with no other information given. The location of the cut appears to be between Sicily and Tunisia in a section which is the responsibility of Egypt Telecom. The causes of the cut remained unclear. It seems that ships were deployed to repair the damaged cables, but no ETA was given.

All of our reports and products are based on hard facts and objective analysis. Perhaps the only controversial thing we do with our data is to rank all the service providers in the world: globally, by geography, and by market segment. The rankings are a rather crude measure of size, as they are based entirely on the quantity of IP space ultimately transited by each provider. Although there are obvious shortcomings in this approach, it is certainly objective and the process is fully automated. It also happens to be derived from data that is readily available for all providers. Routing data, unlike most other metrics we could consider using, is inherently public.

While everyone wants to be #1 (hence the controversy around rankings), changes in rank can be far more revealing than the actual rank itself. In other words, while there are surely big differences between #1 and #50 in our rankings, the differences between #5 and #6 are much less clear given the nature of the metric. What we tend to look for are abrupt changes and long-term trends. Did a provider just jump in the rankings? Maybe they picked up a large customer or a nearby rival lost one? Who was it? Is another provider showing steady gains in the rankings? Maybe they are consistently taking market share with an aggressive, well-executed business plan in a particular part of the world? This is why changes in rankings matter: they capture some of the dynamics of the business of providing Internet service. With this in mind, we will take a look at the top 13 providers in the world for 2008 and how they have jockeyed for position throughout the year. We will also highlight some of the more interesting changes.