Author: Eliot Lear

Perhaps I Was Right, Long Ago

Source: Computer History Museum

We are running out of addresses for the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4.  That protocol allows us to have 2^32 devices (about 4 billion systems minus the overhead used to aggregate devices into networks) connected to the network simultaneously, plus whatever other systems are connected via network address translators (NATs).  In practical terms it means that the United States, Europe, and certain other countries have been able to all but saturate their markets with the Internet while developing countries have been left out in the cold.

Long ago we recognized that we would eventually run out of IP addresses.  The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) began discussing this problem as far back as 1990.  The results of those discussions was a standardization that brought us IP version 6.  IPv6 quadrupled the address size so that there is for all practical purposes an infinite amount of space.  The problem is IPv6’s acceptance remains very low.

While IPv6 is deployed in Japan, Korea, and China, its acceptance in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere has been very poor.  It is not the perfect standard.  ALL it does is create a larger address space.  It does not fix routing scalability problems and it does not make our networks more secure.  No packet format would fix either of those problems.

One of the reasons that IPv6 is not well accepted is that it requires an upgrade to the infrastructure.  Anything that uses an IPv4 address must be taught to use an IPv6 address.  That is an expensive proposition.  IP addresses exist not only in the computer you’re using right now, but in the router that connects your computer, perhaps in your iPhone (if you are a Believer), in power distribution systems, medical systems, your DMV, and in military systems, just to name a few.  Changing all of that is a pain.

Back around 1990, I had posited a different approach.  Within IPv4 there is an address block 240.0.0.0/4 (16 /8 blocks).  What if one could continue to use normal IPv4 address space, but when needed, if the first four bytes of the IPv4 address space contained addresses from that reserved block, one would read the next four bytes as address as well?  View that block, if you will, as an area code, and everyone would have one.  That would mean that you would only need it if you were contacting someone not in your area code.  It would also mean that eventually we would have increased the address space by the size of a factor of 2^28.  That’s a big number, and it probably would have sufficed.

Even after these addresses became prevelant, since devices would only need to use them if they were communicating outside their area code, it would mean they could be upgraded at a much slower pace.

The problem that people had with the idea the time was that the cost to implement this version of variable length addressing would have been high from a performance factor.  Today, routers used fixed length addresses and can parse them very quickly because of that.  But today that is only because they have been optomized for today’s world.  It might have been possible to optomized for this alternate reality, had it come to pass.

You Say Tomato, I say Tomato. Let’s call the whole thing off.

Switzerland is one of the sticklers for the Doha round of World Trade Organization talks on agriculture subsidies.  We have mountains here, and a good way up some of those mountains are farm animals.  It costs a fair amount of money to bring those products to market.  Wherever those animals are, farm products are carefully inspected before going to market.  Salmonella has not been an issue here. NPR had a story on this back in 2005.

In the meantime it’s tomato season back in New Jersey and elsewhere in the States, and it has been marred once again by a Salmonella scare.  Official warnings have been canceled as of July 21, but a new warning has been issued regarding jalapeño peppers.  Here we go again.  U.S. farming practices remain a disaster.  Thanks to lax regulation of the food supply we have had repeated scares.  Last year it was spinach, with a bunch of pigs having taken a romp in a California field.  What will it be next?  People often mention the food supply as a potential terrorist target.  I don’t see why they should bother.  The farmers are doing a fine job of poisoning Americans without additional help.

Here is why the WTO is so important in this discussion.  The Swiss pay a premium to protect their food supply through tighter inspection regimes and a higher standard of farm practice.  Americans do not pay that premium.  If the Swiss authorities deregulated their agriculture, they would in effect be reducing their standards for food quality.  Perhaps instead Americans should  consider raising their standards so that fewer people get sick.

“Law Enforcement” Stupidity Harms People

People who are in the country illegally take many risks.  They risk being deported and not allowed back into the country.  They risk not being able to take advantage of many aspects of the financial market for fear of being deported.  They often risk their lives to get into America in the first place.  And while it may seem reasonable for them to be arrested because they have entered the country illegally, that doesn’t mean they should be mistreated by the government while in detention.  Such was the case with Juana Villegas, as the New York Times reported.

While in custody she went into labor, and was not permitted to see her husband in the delivery room.  After the birth she was not permitted to breast feed her child or to have a breast pump.  It is generally believed that breast fed babies are able to retain their mothers’ immunities longer than those who use formula.  Many branches of our own government encourage breast feeding.  And so by unnecessarily separating the mother from the child, the police effectively harmed the child, who is an American citizen and is eligible for social assistance.  The child having already become sick once, is now costing Tennessee taxpayers.

This is all as a result of a program called 287G that turns police officers into immigration agents.  The behavior of the police in Tennessee is precisely the result of design and desire of the Bush Administration.  This is sad, because although this president has many flaws, one of his supposed bright spots was to be immigration reform.  Unfortunately even there matters have gotten worse, as a fence is erected along the California border, and children suffer because of stupid policies such as that of this town in Tennesee.

One of the many remarkably stupid things in Mrs. Villegas’ case was the absurd statement made by the corrections official that they routinely bar medical equipment like a breast pump from a jail.  It demonstrates either ignorance of the benefits, incompetence at being able to service inmates’ medical needs, blindness to the fact that an illegal immigrant is not the sort that is going to turn a breast pump into a bong, or all of the above.  I wonder if they keep walking sticks away from the blind.

iPhone Rollout Redux?

iPhone

Well, July 11th, iPhone Day, came and went.  The Believers waited and most got their phones, but even I could not have predicted the farsical mess that then ensued.  Apple was unable to handle the registration of some 1 million phones in the period of a weekend, while their provisioning infrastructure ground to a halt.  This is the added kick in the pants Believers must really enjoy.

While we wait for news to leak out of Apple as to what actually happened, let me speculate just a bit.  Let us assume the following statements are true:

  1. Apple did in fact test their provisioning capability prior to rollout.
  2. That of the three days the million phones were sold, most were sold and activated in the first twenty-four hours.  In particular, let’s assume a 70%/20%/10% distribution.  I don’t actually know the real one, but we have reason to believe that the load was top heavy on Friday, as problems dissipated later in the weekend.
  3. There were a average of two transactions per registration.  That is- one to provision the phone with services, one to create MobileMe or whatever additional functionality that Apple offers.  Normally we’d include a third for creation of an iTunes account, but since we’re talking about Believers they already have their account.

700,000 sales times 2 transactions over 24 hours would be about 16 transactions per second.  That’s really not that many transactions, considering that benchmarking systems measure that number in the hundreds and thousands.  This makes one wonder: what if we introduced latency into a transaction.  Latency can occur for many reasons, but the biggest one would be some sort of wide area communication.  For instance, an 80 millisecond round trip time would mean that one might not be able to process any more than about 12.5 transactions per second.  Now add a second round trip and you cut the transaction rate in half.

As to Apple’s testing, if they tested their provisioning system either on a local area network or on a network that had lower latency than the time needed to complete the day’s transactions, they wouldn’t have caught the problem.  This is actually a classic concern that most database vendors fully understand, and it is often the reason to use stored procedures.

Anyway, that’s my guess.

Exclusionary Rule In Trouble

The police are supposed to be our protectors, but in the control of a despot, they are oppressors.  The Supreme Court formally recognized early in the 20th Century that the police could not be allowed to get away with crimes in order to find and convict the guilty.  Thus was born the Exclusionary Rule.  Prosecutors and law enforcement officials have, on the one hand, complained about the rule, and on the other hand, managed to provide generally strong protection against criminals without having to violate it.  According to this article by the New York Times, the United States is unique in its adherence to the rule.  The article goes on to say that we may not adhere in the same way for long.

While it might sound reasonable to allow a judge to hold a hearing to determine whether or not tainted evidence should be allowed, we should remember that the rule is there to protect us against wanton police abuse and corruption, that the government has a vast amount of coercive power, and that it incredibly hard to identify abuse, absent the rule.  A police officer already has enormous abilities to cite, arrest, and search individuals, pragmatically speaking without cause.  Now the Court will consider weakening protections against those cases where the situation is blatant.

Keeping in mind that no rule is perfect, and that some criminals have been able to use the exclusionary rule to get their cases dismissed, the Court should tread carefully in an area where despotism looms, especially when we can argue that the rule has done its job well.