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16th September 2007

INTERNET WOES

Brian Grainger

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brianATgrainger1.freeserve.co.uk


 

Ever since the early 1990s the Internet has gone from strength to strength. There are now signs of some rocks on the road ahead. This article outlines the problems that are occurring. It does not attempt to suggest any solutions - only to make people aware that things are not quite as rosy as they have been.

The views expressed here are very much from the view of the UK, where Internet usage is via dial-up 56K modems and, more frequently, ADSL of varying speeds up to 8Mb / sec. The ADSL UK users sit in the middle of two extremes. On the one hand are those still on dial-up. As far as the UK is concerned there are still some areas left where this is the only option. In other countries it can be quite prevalent. On the Puppy Linux forum that I frequent almost daily there are many people still on dial-up. Until recently, the chief developer, who lives in a remote part of Australia, was on dial-up. He has to travel to relatives in Perth to upload the new versions of Puppy Linux! Even now he only has satellite broadband that operates at much lower speed that ADSL. At the other extreme are countries like Singapore that are being cabled completely with fibre optic. This will enable very fast access to the Internet, a bit like having a souped up Virgin Media / NTL across the whole of the UK.

In the beginning the Internet was based on text-based communication. Even when the World Wide Web started HTML did not really add much overhead to a text based communication. Only the size of pictures was the overhead. The bandwidth required for such communication was small and as everybody had dial-up in those days they were happy. This has led to the Internet being the most fantastic world-wide library of information. It still is, providing you can sort the good information from the bad.

In the beginning the Internet was limited to the technorati and geeks. The quality of information was good and generally everybody understood each other, without causing friction. Then AOL came into existence and with it brought the novice user. These surfers were not technically minded. While they surfed within the confines of AOL, with its dumbed down interface, all was well. When they traversed into the wider world wide web and came upon the geeks there was friction. The novices didn't bother to read anything, kept repeating the same old questions when they had trouble and expected answers that were very precise in what they had to do. Geeks don't like answering the same questions over and over. It wastes the time they can spend learning new tricks. This was probably the first problem encountered with the new technology. The split between the two types of user. It is always there. You can see it in the forums. One of the major forces in the Linux world even wrote a code of conduct for asking questions. You would have to be a geek to follow it. If you were a novice it was simply impossible to follow the code. Fortunately there are some around who are a bit more patient with beginners. The essence of ICPUG in the beginning was that novices had access to a group of patient geeks. In the web world I have always tried to do my best to help novices get a foot in the door of this world. However, I sometimes find myself muttering that a question raised in a forum has been answered many times before - why don't they do a search! Of course, searching is a skill that some people find hard to learn.

The next problem to hit the Internet was spam and malware. I hear some people saying they are amazed they get 20 spams a day in their e-mail. Currently, I get about 300 and one day recently I got 450. If I was still on dial-up I would be in despair. I would be paying more, (in time and money), to download the spam rather than surfing. It is my own fault. I identify my e-mail address on the ICPUG pages instead of using a form. I did it to make it easier for the user to contact me. This is a problem that will affect all users and those wanting to use the web for commerce. The alternative is that you hide yourself. Not very sensible in commerce if you want to maintain customer satisfaction. Various solutions have been mooted for solving the spam problem but it remains unresolved. Some day soon it will have to be. As the percentage of spam to real mail goes up and up the wasted bandwidth is eating up available resources.

Malware has gone through a number of stages. First it was the computer virus. This was passed from computer to computer, usually via e-mail. Viruses made use of faulty programming to enable this transmission method. It spawned a whole new anti-virus software industry to check for and remove infections. For some people this is a regular additional cost in order to use their computer on the Internet. While not having gone away, viruses are not so much a threat as they used to be. Slowly, people have been educated not to open that e-mail from someone they do not know. They install anti-virus software, which at least guards against viruses that have been in the wild a few days. There are other things you can do, such as turn the preview pane off in your e-mail reader, view e-mails as text only, that will help to keep the viruses at bay.

The next stage of malware was the trojan. These are little programs that reside on your computer without you knowing and doing whatever the are written to do. The common way of getting these programs on your PC is to visit a web site where they might be lurking, ready to load onto your computer without you knowing. In the first instance, e-mails are used to trick people to visit such a web site. They might promise some compromising photographs of a well known celebrity or they prey on users normal predilections and vary depending on the time of year and the latest news. For example, at the time of writing, the American Football season had just started for 2007-08. I had numerous e-mails offering a fixture list for the new season. I, for one, would be quite interested in this but I know to retrieve such a list from the NFL web site. If you look at one of these e-mails with a text viewer you will see that you are directed to a web site only given by something like, 66.45.32.21. This is highly suspicious and not likely to contain what is promised. The second way to get a trojan is to visit a web site that has been compromised. If the appropriate security is not followed by the web site provider then a hacker can plant a trojan on a legitimate web site. Normal viewers of the said web site will then pick up the trojan. This is quite scary and has happened with well-known web sites. You cannot trust ANY entity, no matter what they say, to get their security right.

What will trojan programs do? In the old days trashing your computer was a possibility. However, with the rise of the web criminal this is not very useful. Now they might log your keystrokes and send them to some unknown destination at periodic intervals - the so called key logger. In this way typed passwords can be revealed to the recipient. I must admit I have never read of anyone falling foul of this. I think there are much easier methods of getting passwords! A second possibility is to allow your computer to be controlled by the hacker remotely. They will not want to control your computer all the time. However, there may come a time when they want a web site to attract as many viewers as possible at the same time. This will overload the web site and cause it to fail. If hackers can control enough machines, a so called bot net, they can be instructed to access the web site to be taken out. This mechanism allows a web criminal to create a web protection racket. They can demand payment from the owner of a suitable web site, say online gambling, and if the owner refuses they down the site with a bot net, probably losing the owner much more in revenue.

A more recent malware phenomenon is the 'phishing' e-mail. The senders are phishing for passwords - usually to bank accounts. The phisherman sends out an e-mail, purporting to come from a financial institution, asking the receiver, usually for the purpose of enhanced security, to log in to the institution's web site and verify their online details. Of course, a link to the site is provided. It may look like a valid link. If you take the link the site may look like the correct site. Rest assured though, it will not be the correct site. The phisher is trying to get your details so that they may then go to the financial institution web site themselves and help themselves to your cash. It is not just banks and building societies that are the subject of phishing attacks. Anywhere that money can change hands, E-Bay, Pay Pal, etc., can be used.

All the items mentioned so far have been the work of the nastier element of the web fraternity. However, there are now other forces, not normally associated with nastiness, that are likely to make our Internet experience more stressful. I am talking of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs)!

Since the dawn of the Internet there has been a war among the various suppliers of Internet access to entice us surfers to part with our cash to get such access. Because they are in competition we have had many juicy offers thrown at us. Free e-mail, security tools, etc; ever increasing speeds; lower and lower prices. Things are changing though. As the industry consolidates into a few big players and with the web moving to the movement of larger and larger amounts of data the ISPs are getting tricky. Those free offers are not what they seem. The small print hides the fact that the ISPs are not liable when services are not provided. In addition, they keep changing the rules to suit themselves, whereas most users have a fixed term contract of 12 months or more and cannot immediately jump ship when the rules change.

I first noticed the effects of tricky ISPs a year ago. Then I was on dial-up, pay as you go, Internet access via 0845 numbers. These allowed Internet access at about 1p per minute in the evenings and at weekends. This suited me fine. The fact I was paying in this way ensured I limited my Internet access and did not let it encroach on my real life. It also improved my search techniques as I wanted to find things quickly! It had a side effect in making me antagonistic towards flashy graphic sites because they took an age to download each page.

There was only one drawback for me. As I got more into Linux and I wanted to download distros, I could not do so on the dial-up connection. It just took too long. I got my files from magazine cover disks or sometimes bought disks from suitable suppliers. However, when I got into Puppy Linux this avenue was not available, because updates happen very frequently and Puppy did not appear on magazines often.

All was fine until the early part of 2006, when my ISP told me the telephone number to access the Internet was changing. It was moving to an 0844 number. I knew little about these numbers but found out about them quick! Basically, the 1p a minute charged only applied at weekends. Weekday evenings became 1.5p. A 50% increase in charges, just like that. I had been carefully monitoring my usage and costs. Up till then the cost to me was getting closer and closer to the cheapest broadband package as my Internet usage increased. With this price change dial up was no longer competitive for me. Perhaps this was the reason for the change. The ISPs perhaps wanted to kill dial up and wanted everybody to pay a fixed amount per month - giving them a regular and probably higher income. When I checked all the other ISPs, to see who I could change to, it became clear they were all changing to 0844 numbers. It was time to move to broadband - but not that of the supplier of my dial-up service!

When I started to look at the various broadband offers there were three things that were key drivers:

  • Price
  • Speed
  • Download limits

Nobody knows what they are going to download - and it will increase in time - so the ISPs could do pretty much what they liked there and nobody would be any the wiser. I decided I wanted no cap on the amount of data downloaded.

The next thing was speed. Did I want 1Mb/s, 2Mb/s, 8Mb/s or, as NTL were offering, larger than that. This is the main area where ISPs were, and still are, conning people. I am technically savvy so I did a check via the BT web site as to what my telephone was capable of. It said 2Mb/s. Instantly, those offers of 8Mb/s were a waste of time. BT had a competitive package at 8Mb/s. However, they had no other lower speed packages so it became uncompetitive with other suppliers who offered low speed packages. Over the past year people have become much more aware that even though 8Mb/s may be advertised the actual speed received may be very much less. The adverts usually specify up to 8Mb/s these days. As to whether anybody actually gets 8Mb/s is an interesting question. My ISP insists my telephone line is only capable of 1Mb/s, despite what BT say, and that is the package I am given despite asking for 2Mb/s. I do achieve the 1Mb/s speed but why does the ISP not give me what my line is capable of?

ISPs are becoming less than truthful about their download limits. Many people who have unlimited packages are finding that if they truly download lots of stuff strange things begin to happen. A simple technique is to disconnect the user after a certain period of user inactivity. Unfortunately, watching streaming video or downloading big files will result in such inactivity and you risk disconnection before the video or download has finished. A second technique is to slow users download speeds. This is known as throttling. You may have no limits but if the line speed is throttled to say 0.5Mb/sec and you only get full speed during the night you will not be able to download anything like as much - so the ISP creates a limit in another way. The excuse given by the ISPs is that their overall service has limited bandwidth. (Limited by the amount they want to pay to provide the service of course). If a small minority use a large bandwidth then the majority will have to suffer a low bandwidth. The ISP think it fairer to even things out by throttling the minority. They have a good point, but they are not providing an unlimited service as promised. I think this is going to become more of a problem with the advent of online TV and video. If we all start to download TV or video on demand the ISPs will struggle to make any profit on their deals as their own costs go up to support the demand. At some point someone might realise that the whole of the UK infrastructure needs updating to fibre - so that very high download speeds are available to every one. As this is not likely to happen in the short term it is inevitable that limits will be imposed somehow, or the service price will go up to compensate.

One of the ways in which costs can go up is if providers prioritise the type of traffic that they carry. If they take a dislike to, say, peer to peer transfer of files, they may prioritise standard Internet traffic over peer to peer traffic. Alternatively, if a supplier of a video download service, (which is charged for), offers the ISPs money for them to prioritise their traffic then the rest of us not using that service will suffer. Presently this does not happen due to an unwritten convention, called net neutrality, which gives equal access to all. Nevertheless, proposals have been raised in the USA to change this state of affairs. Clearly, some businesses would like to see net neutrality disappear because they could then make money from offering the services we currently get for nothing!

Have you ever thought what might happen if you suddenly did not have e-mail? It happened to me recently when the e-mail service of my provider went offline for a few days. I have backs ups available for outgoing mail but it is a bit tricky for incoming mail. You just do not receive it! Many people complained on the forums. The ISP said that the e-mail service was provided free and therefore not part of the service provided for the monthly fee. Consequently they had no responsibility if the service went offline! Where such services are essential, if you operate an online business for example, you better make sure your e-mail service is provided by something more substantial. You will pay for it though!

The ultimate problem is if your ISP goes under and you lose your Internet access altogether. How easy and how quickly can you make alternative arrangements? As consolidation amongst ISPs has taken place, this has happened a few times already and many people have had difficulty making quick alternative arrangements. As you get more used to online activity to run your life: online banking; online shopping; online dealing with the Inland Revenue; online booking of flights and holidays, etc., what would happen if you suddenly were unable to go online!

From the above it can be seen the Internet has the potential to be a force for evil as well as good. In addition, as we become more dependent on the Internet then the more difficult it becomes when the Internet is not there. The government, of the UK at least, seem to ignore this fact while they career headlong into basing all public services on computers and Internet access. Perhaps it is time you give it some thought and make sure you have your own personal disaster recovery plan!


 

 

 

 


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