On Sundays I offer comments on some of the most interesting information technology stories that I have found on the web that week. Please feel free to join in the discussion or suggest stories during the week.
arstechnica.com: Deep Packet Inspection is good for us
ArsTechnica provides an excellent piece of technology reporting in bringing us this news story. It describes the congressional testimony of National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) head Kyle McSlarrow as he explains to congress the “benefits” of Deep Packet Inspection. This is a new front on the computer network security front that has opened because network packet sniffing applications can now process packets fast enough to not degrade performance noticeably for most uses. The question becomes – just because you can do it, should we?
Wikipedia describes the subject of today’s news item as such,
Deep packet inspection (DPI) (also called complete packet inspection and Information eXtraction – IX -) is a form of computer network packet filtering that examines the data part (and possibly also the header) of a packet as it passes an inspection point, searching for protocol non-compliance, viruses, spam, intrusions or predefined criteria to decide if the packet can pass or if it needs to be routed to a different destination, or for the purpose of collecting statistical information. This is in contrast to shallow packet inspection (usually called Stateful Packet Inspection) which just checks the header portion of a packet.
The article provides a great point – counterpoint analysis of the discussion and does a great job of highlighting the dangers associated with permitting the cable companies to see into their customers internet use at the packet level without any sort of oversight at all. While, the so called right to privacy is not actually protected by US law, it certainly seems to be wrong to allow a utility company to have unfettered access to their customer’s private data without any requirement to safeguard it from improper use. I, for one, think that it is wrong and should not be permitted.
I think that this issue falls directly into a common line of thinking that runs contrary to common sense. If you followed, at home, the “because we can, we must” argument that the cable companies make in the article, then you would run home and brick up all of your home’s windows since it would obviously improve the structure’s security. What is always missing from these computer security discussions is a true risk analysis and cost to benefit ratio evaluation.
So I shared my opinions on this thought-provoking story… what do you think about it?
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for May 3, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin.
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News Commentary: Packet Inspection by Cable Companies
On Sundays I offer comments on some of the most interesting information technology stories that I have found on the web that week. Please feel free to join in the discussion or suggest stories during the week.
arstechnica.com: Deep Packet Inspection is good for us
ArsTechnica provides an excellent piece of technology reporting in bringing us this news story. It describes the congressional testimony of National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) head Kyle McSlarrow as he explains to congress the “benefits” of Deep Packet Inspection. This is a new front on the computer network security front that has opened because network packet sniffing applications can now process packets fast enough to not degrade performance noticeably for most uses. The question becomes – just because you can do it, should we?
Wikipedia describes the subject of today’s news item as such,
The article provides a great point – counterpoint analysis of the discussion and does a great job of highlighting the dangers associated with permitting the cable companies to see into their customers internet use at the packet level without any sort of oversight at all. While, the so called right to privacy is not actually protected by US law, it certainly seems to be wrong to allow a utility company to have unfettered access to their customer’s private data without any requirement to safeguard it from improper use. I, for one, think that it is wrong and should not be permitted.
I think that this issue falls directly into a common line of thinking that runs contrary to common sense. If you followed, at home, the “because we can, we must” argument that the cable companies make in the article, then you would run home and brick up all of your home’s windows since it would obviously improve the structure’s security. What is always missing from these computer security discussions is a true risk analysis and cost to benefit ratio evaluation.
So I shared my opinions on this thought-provoking story… what do you think about it?
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for May 3, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
This entry was posted by Scott Coughlin on May 3, 2009 at 3:15 am, and is filed under Information Assurance, Information Technology, News Commentary, Security. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0.You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.