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Video distributor to FCC: Stop ISP traffic 'throttling'	15 November 2007
A distributor of online video content has filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, asking the agency to stop broadband providers from blocking or slowing p-to-p (peer-to-peer) traffic.The petition filed by Vuze, which uses the BitTorrent p-to-p protocol to distribute Web content, asks the FCC to set rules for network management by ISPs. Vuze's filing late Wednesday follows reports last month that cable broadband provider Comcast slows some p-to-p traffic, including BitTorrent.Broadband providers often promote their services as being necessary for watching video online, but then they slow access to a service such as Vuze's, said John Fernandes, Vuze's vice president of marketing. "They say that they're engaging in reasonable network management, but what they're doing is slowing down some traffic," he said.Vuze, which has partnerships with several movie studios, television networks, and PC game makers, wants to start a dialog with ISPs about what kind of network management is allowed, added Gilles BianRosa, the company's CEO. But the FCC needs to prohibit large-scale content blocking, what he called traffic "throttling," he said."The ISPs cannot decide unilaterally what to do with third-party Internet services such as us," BianRosa said. "We need to work with them to design a solution that works and is fair."By blocking or slowing video and other Web content, ISPs are fighting against customer demand for more multimedia services, BianRosa added. "We think that ISPs are spitting into the wind with that kind of approach," he said. "This kind of blocking has to stop."Representatives of two large broadband providers, Comcast and Verizon, didn't immediately respond to a request for comments on Vuze's FCC filing. Comcast has denied blocking Web content, but some broadband providers have opposed other attempts to create rules against blocking some types of traffic, saying they need to be able to ensure quality of service by managing their networks.The FCC has all the authority it needs to "address claims of unreasonable conduct," an AT&T spokesman said. "Broadband providers must have the ability to manage traffic to provide all consumers with high-quality service," he added. "Additional rules or legislation are totally unnecessary."Vuze's FCC petition is similar in some ways to calls by consumer groups and Internet-based firms for the FCC or the U.S. Congress to pass network neutrality rules, which would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors. The FCC has had an open inquiry into net neutrality rules since April, and a push to pass rules in Congress has stalled.But the Vuze proposal is more focused than net neutrality, BianRosa said. Net neutrality often includes other issues in addition to content blocking, including requirements for broadband and wireless providers to allow all legal devices to connect to their networks. Vuze is asking the FCC to "dig deeper" than the net neutrality debate, he said.Public Knowledge, a group promoting consumer rights on the Internet, praised the Vuze filing. Vuze is a good example of the harm caused by content blocking, said Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge's president."Comcast's actions frustrate Vuze's business and force the company to devote resources to play a 'cat and mouse' game with Comcast in order to maintain superior service for its customers," Sohn said in an e-mail. "We hope the FCC acts promptly before even more harm is done to more consumers and to more companies."Earlier this week, a Comcast customer in California filed a lawsuit against the company, saying the provider has caused several Web-based programs to suffer performance problems. In late October, Public Knowledge and other members of the Open Internet Coalition filed a complaint about the alleged Comcast blocking with the FCC.Vuze, based in Palo Alto, Calif., distributes video in partnership with movie studios and television networks including the BBC, Showtime, and PBS. It also distributes PC games, music videos, and audio files. Company officials say the Vuze client has been installed by customers more than 12 million times since the company, formerly called Azureus, rebranded itself in January.

Carrier security outsourcing making connections	12 November 2007
Massive telecommunications carriers, including AT&T, BT, and Verizon, are promoting their ability to take over a significant portion of customers' IT security operations, and some enterprises are already buying into the model.Over the last several years, the sprawling carriers have acquired and introduced a range of technologies and services that promise to help protect customers from the growing wave of IT-based threats, including denial-of-service attacks and Web-borne malware programs.And while the carriers all concede that delivering safe telecommunications and Internet access to their customers' doorsteps is a fundamental requirement of their core business, the companies also maintain that they are uniquely positioned to become broader security outsourcing partners for their clients.Florida-based First Advantage is already outsourcing a significant portion of its IT security operations to its carrier partner, Verizon Business.The publicly held risk management services company had previously seen a payoff from outsourcing elements of its call center and software development operations, and the increasing complexity of its security and compliance concerns made it a natural to enlist Verizon to take over more of the work, executives said."Compared to the cost of internal operation, price was obviously a major consideration, but it was also the idea that these are specialists in security who we would be turning to," said Isabelle Theisen, chief security officer at First Advantage."They can provide a level of monitoring and correlation that would not have been possible for us to achieve internally," she said. "And we wanted to take a more leading-edge approach to matching potential threats to specific assets, something that alone would demand a full-time team for us otherwise."Theisen estimates that First Advantage, which specializes in employee background screening and insurance fraud investigation, has already ceded approximately 70 percent of its IT security operations to Verizon.Among the services it consumes from the carrier, which include everything from AV (anti-virus) and IPS (intrusion prevention systems) to Web applications firewalls and operation of compliance-mandated server farms, many came to Verizon via its July 2007 acquisition of CyberTrust.However, the seeds that have grown into the company's portfolio of security outsourcing skills were taking root years before the deal for the MSS (managed security services) company came to pass, Verizon Business officials said."We saw tremendous growth in demand for additional security services starting in 2005 and knew we needed to scale up; adding CyberTrust has helped us expand rapidly, and we're seeing even greater demand today, especially among multinational customers," said Cindy Bellefeuille, director of solution and product marketing at Verizon Business.Some industry watchers have said that customers will increasingly expect carriers to eliminate many security threats as part of their core connectivity services just as they require the companies to guarantee network performance speeds in their SLAs (service level agreements).However, Bellefeuille said that companies such as Verizon can meet those demands while creating new opportunities for additional services aimed at thwarting targeted threats or providing automation services, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance server operation the company oversees for First Advantage."There will always be opportunities from an attack perspective for us to take action and protect customers on the backbone, and we'll do that," she said. "We've also driven a lot of internal innovation in last three years for fighting issues such as targeted attacks; we're building out the honeynets and doing more correlation of data. Now we're in the phase of launching services as both stand-alones and value-adds."Verizon marketers foresee a future wherein the company could become a provider of end-to-end security outsourcing services.While a majority of the services it has offered thus far have centered on external issues such as helping its customers ward off DoS threats and malware, the company is already getting its hooks into more internal security operations, such as identity management, filtering data pulled in by IDSes (intrusion detection systems), and providing protection for various types of databases and software applications.BT beefs up its security offerings BT is another carrier that has turned heads in the security community in recent years with its acquisitions and stated business strategies.The company's security aspirations were perhaps illustrated best by its October 2006 acquisition of Counterpane, another MSS specialist.As with Verizon, officials with BT said that the carrier is preparing to launch a far broader set of security services than merely those that it added through the Counterpane buyout.Along with anti-DoS services -- and Counterpane's array of network monitoring, vulnerability scanning, and e-mail filtering skills -- BT officials contend that the company will soon be able to provide customers with security offerings such as antimalware filtering, embedded firewalls, UTM (unified threat management), and intrusion prevention.Enterprise customers will become particularly amenable to such carrier security services as they continue to upgrade to next-generation networking infrastructure, said Mick Creane, head of managed security strategy at BT.While the company has been providing anti-DoS services for years -- using technology sourced from vendor Arbor Networks, which targets its products directly at service providers -- there is a far broader opportunity for carriers to realize in security, he said."When everything has gone IP, we will be able to offer even more services and flexibility," he said. "Organizations are recognizing that the threats are changing so quickly that it's a huge challenge to keep pace, but that within the large carrier service providers, we have the necessary economies of scale and expertise to deal with this problem."Over time, Creane contends that by pulling together more managed security and carrier services, companies such as BT will be able to provide an integrated set of network defenses that customers won't be able to rival with their own internal systems defense technologies.In addition to those defensive opportunities, the carrier also plans to offer more proactive security services, such as filtering out inappropriate or unauthorized Web sites and blocking access to those URLs for its business customers."Customers are beginning to get it, and in the short term, we can use it as a business differentiator, but in the long term, I think they will begin to expect a certain amount of security expertise," Creane said. "BT and other carriers are in a very powerful position because by embedding security into the network at a higher level, we will be able to do security cheaper than CPU-based products and services."For now, most enterprises are just beginning to familiarize themselves with the carriers' expanding security services, but proponents maintain that the transition from companies doing more in-house to outsourcing more of their security responsibilities over to their existing bandwidth providers, will evolve quickly.For some customers, the carriers' security vision has clearly already been embraced with enthusiasm."I believe that they can help us correlate high-risk incidents and threats with information about our IT assets that will allow us to focus on the most high-priority items at any given time, from a security perspective," said First Advantage's CTO Theisen. "We can then move into adoption of a more risk-based system for our information assets. Right now it's all about just getting the necessary framework in place."

'Radical rethinking' of Internet routing under way	27 September 2007
(InfoWorld) - Some of the world's top network engineers are engaged in a research effort that could lead to the most radical redesign of the Internet's underlying routing architecture since it was developed in the 1980s. The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is searching for a new routing architecture that would improve the Internet's ability to scale to support potentially billions of new users in developing countries. The IRTF is a sister organization of the Internet Engineering Task Force, one of the Internet's leading standards bodies. Under debate by the IRTF is how the Internet's backbone routers operate. Owned by carriers and some large corporations and government agencies, these backbone routers run the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange routing information across the many interconnected networks that form the Internet. The BGP routing table is a master list of network destinations that is stored in backbone routers and is used to determine the best available path from one network to another. Experts are worried about explosive growth in the BGP routing table, which is straining the processing and memory requirements of the Internet's core routers. Why BGP growth matters BGP routing table growth is significant because it drives up carrier costs, experts say. "What CIOs really care about is the cost of their Internet connections, and if the cost of the service providers goes up because the routing table becomes unwieldy, that will lead to incremental costs for everybody," says Tony Li, co-chair of the IRTF's Routing Research Group. "We're interested in avoiding that scenario." Slowing routing table growth would provide other benefits to enterprise network operators, too. It would make it easier to split network traffic over multiple carriers in a process called multihoming. "One of the major causes of routing table growth is due to the pervasive practice of site multihoming," says Lixia Zhang, co-chair of the Routing Research Group. "Multihoming substantially increases the number of global routing table entries, and the Routing Research Group is working toward decoupling multihoming from the global routing table growth." Zhang says another benefit will be easier renumbering of networks when enterprises switch carriers. "One of our design goals is to eliminate the need for corporations to renumber their networks when they change providers," she adds. "Renumbering is considered a very expensive and complex process." Seeking a new router architecture The IRTF's Routing Research Group has existed for many years, but it was rechartered six months ago to look at future routing architectures. As a sign of how serious it was about revitalizing its Routing Research Group, the IRTF in February replaced former chair, Swedish professor Avri Doria, with two high-profile experts: uber router designer Tony Li, who has worked at Cisco, Juniper and Procket and is now back at Cisco; and Lixia Zhang, a computer science professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Since the Routing Research Group was revitalized, dozens of network engineers and researchers from around the world have participated in its thrice-annual meetings and online discussions. Among the network equipment vendors and service providers involved in the debate are Cisco, Juniper, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, AT&T, BT and Arbor Networks. "The new focus of the working group is to work on a possible routing architecture that includes new ways of addressing, new ways of doing routing for the global Internet," Li says. "The IP address has both the identification of the node and the location of the node. The question becomes: Can we separate the identification from the locator semantics, and can we still run an Internet with that kind of architecture?" The IRTF's Routing Resea