[NTLUG:Discuss] YIKES! Texas bill could render firewalls/routers illegal...

[Kelledin]

On Friday 28 March 2003 04:57 pm, Rob Apodaca wrote:
> "...conceal from a communication service provider, or from any
> lawful authority..."
>
> Could this mean 'without consent of the ISP'? Many ISP's
> willingly allow nat routing and even provide routers along
> with the connection.

Perhaps.  The law's letter could be applied more broadly than its 
spirit, though.

Plus, remember that groups like the RIAA/MPAA are pushing to make 
service providers accountable for users engaged in peer-to-peer 
piracy.  They'd like ISPs to be responsible for knowing the 
human identity behind every 'net connection, in case they decide 
to play P2P police.  Needless to say, NAT boxes sort of 
interfere with their "Divine Cause."

> Is there any known way to detect the use of nat?

A research group just pioneered a method of detection--a fairly 
reliable way of figuring out exactly how many NAT'ed nodes are 
supposedly behind one IP address, though not necessarily which 
connection is associated with which node.  The methodology uses 
an IPv4 header field that normally just gets incremented for 
each new packet a node sends.  Since NAT code often doesn't 
bother to rewrite this field...you probably have some idea where 
the methodology goes from there.

(BTW, OpenBSD's NAT code recently evolved to defeat this method.)

> I wonder what the motivation for this bill was. For some
> reason I have a sinking feeling it was "Homeland defense".
>
> Ok, now that you've pointed this bill out, what can we do?

Well, the traditional means is to send a letter to your local 
government representative.  On the federal level, this would be 
your Congressman, but that doesn't really apply here.  Not sure 
what the equivalent would be on the state level...

Also spread the word...not just to your local buddies, but to 
people you know in the other seven affected states.

-- 
Kelledin
"If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does 
it still cost four figures to fix?"