Posts by Mark D.

Linked post is wrong

"The communications law of nearly all countries permits the interception and recording of content of communications only if a police or judicial warrant is issued. All other interception is deemed unlawful. Some jurisdictions provide leeway for "incidental" or "accidental" interception. However where intent to intercept is established, a violation of criminal law is inevitably created."

This is not accurate. In the United States, for example, it is generally legal to intercept or access "to intercept or access an electronic communication made through a system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public;" Otherwise you couldn't legally listen to the radio. No doubt _every_ country has a similar exception.

What is not legal is to make use of or disclose the contents of a communication that is intended for someone else. In other words, it appears you can capture unencrypted traffic on a network configured to provide ready access to the general public, but you can't make use of the contents of what you capture if the communication isn't intended for you. (cf 18 USC 2511(g), 47 USC 605(a)).

Deep buffering

This doesn't sound particularly helpful for networks with heavy TCP traffic. With sufficient load, TCP is designed to eat up all the buffering you give it, and the consequence of that is high latency for other traffic. If the "rogue wave" is TCP traffic, what you really want to do is start dropping packets or set ECN bits so the sending stacks will back off. There is no reason to buffer in the switch what you can buffer on the sender. Without ECN, excessive buffering just makes things worse.

It would seem what would be really useful is the equivalent of ECN at the layer 2 (ethernet level), such that if a outgoing switch port is congested the source ethernet adapters can throttle back on a (source MAC, destination MAC) pair basis. And isn't that more or less what the new 802.1Qau congestion management draft is trying to accomplish?

Google not an ISP

The ECPA doesn't even mention the term "Internet service provider". Of course, Google isn't an ISP by the conventional definition of the term either. It does arguably operate an "electronics communication service", however.

The ECPA prohibits operators of electronic communication services from disclosing the _contents_ of electronic communications. The addresses of the people you have previously corresponded with are generally not considered _contents_, but rather addressing information, and there doesn't appear to be any restriction on the disclosure of the latter.

That doesn't mean it was a great idea for Google to do this without prior notification and/or consent. Of course, if you are a user of a free service, stuff like this is par for the course. Providers of free services must cover their costs somehow.