News from PANUG - August 10, 2001 http://www.panug.org REPLACING TCP/IP by Ed Sawicki At last night's BizNix user group meeting, we discussed rumors that Microsoft plans to replace the standard TCP/IP protocol with their own "enhanced" version of it. This is a particularly plausible rumor because of the Halloween documents. In those internal Microsoft memos, Microsoft was cautioned that open protocols are not in their best interest if they are to maintain their market dominance. It would clearly be in Microsoft's best interest and our worst interest for this to happen. One way they'll attempt to accomplish this is to try to convince us that TCP/IP is the cause of many of our problems. They'll tell us that TCP/IP has poor security and can be easily spoofed by attackers and spammers. It turns out, this is true (for once) but the focus is misdirected (as usual). The solution to problems of security and spamming on the Internet are not best fixed by embracing Microsoft- proprietary communications protocols. This is the worst possible and most costly solution. The solution is to fix the broken procedures that manage and govern the Internet. Take spoofing, for example. It's a problem because most ISPs allow spoofing. Spoofing wouldn't be so easy to do if ISPs would filter out packets with spoofed addresses from leaving their networks. If IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) would require ISPs to implement filtering as a condition of using the IP addresses assigned to them, problems due to spoofing would be dramatically reduced. It's silly to redesign a fundamental and prolific protocol and affect the entire Internet infrastructure to solve a problem that is far, far easier to solve using capabilities that already exist in today's routers and firewalls. Another problem that makes tracking attackers and spammers nearly impossible is the domain name registries. Anyone can register a domain name and enter any information they choose. The only information that is checked is the credit card number. For an example of this problem, take a look at the following web page: http://www.alcpress.com/lindawang The solution to many of the Internet's problems is to convince IANA to do a better job on our behalf. XP Christian Bayer responded quickly to remind us that Star Office runs on Solaris as well. He also has experience with a pre-production version of XP. He writes: My eXPerience so far shows lack of support for formatting my 2.88 floppy, and no better than 800X600 resolution for my pretty decent video card. It took longer to install than any operating system I have ever installed (more than 30 different ones). Other than that it seems like Win2K minus a bunch of stuff with an OS X "Theme" plus Digital Video editing and CD burner software. WOOHOO!?? On a PIII 650 w/384Mb, it is definitely NOT faster. I remember something from MAD magazine in my childhood, it was a comic strip that imagined that advertising had to be truthful. "It's the same old garbage in an all new package!" was the slogan in one of these fictional ad examples. It seems to fit my eXPerience.