Is Comcast's Packet Spoofing a Federal Crime?

The EFF has gathered evidence showing that Comcast is deliberately disrupting P2P traffic by spoofing RST packets to appear to come from the other end of the connection. See the EFF report for the technical details.

The US Criminal Code Title 18 Part 1 Title 47 Section 1030 covers "Fraud and Related Activity In Connection With Computers". I'm not a lawyer, but here is my understanding of the relevant bits of the statute (quotes from the statute are in italics):

Jursidiction: a "Protected Computer" is defined, amongst other things, as any computer "which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States". In other words if your computer is on the Internet, even if its outside the US, then its a Protected Computer. That includes anything connected via Comcast, and anything that talks to any computer connected via Comcast.

Offence: there are two things to prove here:

1. That someone employed by Comcast "knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer". Damage is defined as "any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information". A spoof RST packet instructs the receiving computer to drop a TCP connection, so it is a command that impairs the availability of data. I have no direct evidence that these packets were sent knowingly, but I find it difficult to imagine a scenario in which they were sent by accident.
2. That this action caused "loss to 1 or more persons during any 1-year period [...] aggregating at least $5,000 in value". "Loss" is defined as "any reasonable cost to any victim, including the cost of responding to an offense, conducting a damage assessment, and restoring the data, program, system, or information to its condition prior to the offense, and any revenue lost, cost incurred, or other consequential damages incurred because of interruption of service". This is a bit tricky, but people do value their time. $10 per hour is a pretty low wage, and many professionals charge many times that. If failed P2P connections have cost 500 Comcast users 1 hour each in wasted time then this threshold has been reached. You might also be able to make a case purely on the cost of running a computer and keeping it connected via Comcast. The professional IT people who have taken the time to run tests with packet sniffers could certainly count their time at a professional rate as "responding to an offence" and "conducting a damage assessment". There is also some evidence that Comcast inadvertently disrupted other protocols, including Lotus Notes and Windows Remote Desktop. These are used commercially and their disruption would have real financial impact. So while a detailed accounting remains to be done, it certainly looks likely that the $5,000 threshold has been reached.

Penalty: "a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or both, [if] the offense was committed for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain". Comcast's attempts to block P2P protocols are prompted by their desire to keep costs down while seeming to offer an unrestricted service. That counts as "commercial advantage".

So it certainly looks like a Section 1030 offense has been committed that could see someone put in the pen for five years. Any Comcast customers want to call the FBI?

Disruptive Innovation and the Walmart Linux PC

The Everex TC2502 is being sold by Walmart for $200 (no monitor included), assuming it hasn't sold out a second time. Part of the reason its so cheap is that it runs Linux and OpenOffice.org instead of Windows and MS Office. The first run sold out within days, which is a strong clue that it was a lot more popular than expected. This doesn't mean popular in an absolute sense, just more than Walmart and Everex expected when they decided how many to get in stock. But its the relative popularity that counts: Walmart and Everex produced this box because they calculated they would turn a profit on whatever number they expected to sell. So the fact that they sold out fast means two things:

1. A bigger profit than expected, which is nice for Walmart and Everex.
   
2. Cheap Linux-based PCs have a market niche big enough to make them worth-while. Other manufacturers will have taken note. Expect imitators.

Anyone who has read The Innovator's Dilemma will recognise this pattern: a market incumbent listens to its best (i.e. richest and most profitable) customers, and in consequence makes its products bigger, better and progressively more expensive. The incumbent also finds it unprofitable to compete with narrow niche offerings at the bottom, because they are low quality and aimed at poor customers that can't afford the market leader. So it forgoes the bottom end of the market and concentrates on its nice profitable high-end models. However over time the bottom-end offerings improve, and so become a cost-effective choice for more and more customers. Eventually this starts to make serious inroads into the sales of the incumbent. But by then its too late. The incumbent must choose between cutting prices to compete with the newcomer or else continue to see its market share erode. Neither option will bring back the glory days, and historically many such companies went out of business surprisingly fast.

I'm quite sure that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have read The Innovator's Dilemma and seen this coming. There is a bit of MBA strategy theory that sums up their position nicely. Plot their product lines on a chart with two axes; market share and growth potential. The high-share-low-growth lines are "cash cows": they should be milked, and the profits put into high-growth lines. Eventually all cash-cows turn into dogs (low-share-low-growth) and these should be killed off. You just have to hope that by then you have some new cash cows to replace them.

Microsoft has two cash-cows (Windows and Office), and Microsoft has indeed been milking them for all they are worth. The money has been ploughed into a bunch of ventures over the years, but none of them look like becoming future cash cows.

Now we may be entering the final act. People have talked about Linux as a disruptive technology for the last decade, and for server operating systems it definitely has been. Its effectively killed off proprietary Unix, and put a serious dent in Windows. Microsoft continues to fight a rearguard action in this market, but its reliance on big corporate customers is becoming more and more obvious as it tries to separate its premium products (which rich big companies will still reliably pay for) from its lower end offerings. But on the desktop Windows and Office have continued to reign supreme.

Now for the first time in a decade a competing office suite is starting to nibble at the toes of the incumbent. Its not going to make a dent in Microsoft's quarterly numbers just yet, but the future can only go one way. Microsoft sells Windows and Office to PC builders for less than the retail prices, but it cannot let Windows and Office go onto a PC that sells for $200 because they would be giving it away: it would actually be cheaper to buy the PC with the software than to buy the software alone at retail prices. But as more people find that bottom-end hardware with Linux and OpenOffice.org makes a perfectly useful home PC at a fraction of the cost of the Microsoft alternative, so the market will grow. Microsoft may try to segment the market by offering a cut-down version of MS Office (maybe Word with a 20 page limit), but they are competing with a fully featured product. No matter what they do to Windows and Office, Linux and OpenOffice.org are going to look like better value to anyone who is on a tight budget.

Initially it will just be cash-strapped consumers who buy these boxes (students in particular are going to love them). But this is a one-way street. Every consumer who buys one of these boxes is a consumer who is never going to buy a Microsoft box again, even when they get rich. Why pay more to learn a different set of software? And they'll tell their friends about how well it works too. The flow of money into multiple vendors coffers will stimulate investment and competition. All the vendors will want a slicker, more fully featured Linux offering with a bigger repository of instantly downloadable free (in both senses) software. The resulting competition will be downright Darwinian, and the offerings are going to get very good very fast. Everybody is going to race up-market as fast as possible because thats where the real money is. At the moment that money is being taken by Microsoft, but not for long.

Add to this the famous network effects. Part of the reason MS Office dominates is that you need it to exchange documents with everyone else. But if that stops being true then another good reason to pay for MS Office disappears as well.

So I predict that Microsoft is going to be in serious trouble, probably within the next few years. Their existing cost base is tuned to making and selling ever bigger and better versions of their cash cows, and there is no way that they can cut this back to compete with Linux and OpenOffice.org on a cost basis. But if they can't compete then their cash cows are going to turn into dogs before they can be replaced. So Microsoft will be left with two dogs, a bunch of ventures that require investment, and no cash flow. Sure they have big cash reserves they can burn through, but thats not going to be enough even if their investors let them do it.

Its the disks that are the problem, not losing them

The UK news this week has been full of stories about the loss of 2 disks (presumably CDs or DVDs) containing all 25 million Child Benefit records. For those outside the UK, Child Benefit is several pounds a week paid to the mother of every child (i.e. under 16) in the UK. In most cases it gets paid directly into a nominated bank account.

This is one of the biggest data losses ever, if not the biggest. The government has been at pains to point out that the disks are probably just mislaid, and they don't contain enough data for criminals to actually use. Meanwhile the Opposition has been alleging government incompetence and calling for them to "get a grip". People are being advised to keep an eye on their bank accounts and not use their childrens' names as passwords.

All this misses the point. The problem was not that a couple of disks got lost, it is that a comparatively junior person could burn the entire database to a couple of disks, apparently on his/her own initiative, and without further controls. There was a time when copying 25 million records would have required substantial resources, such as an overnight run on the mainframe and a boxful of tapes. The sheer volume of data made it physically difficult to copy, or to lose. However Moore's Law has turned that big, slow, expensive job into a few minutes with a CD burner. If those two disks were CDs then the whole lot would also fit on a £10 thumb drive, or even a cell phone. The story referenced above suggests that in the past the National Audit Office (the place where the disks in question never arrived) have made their own copies and sent them to outside auditors. None of the commentators seem to have realised that the most probably route for the data to get into the hands of criminals is not the loss of an authorised copy but the creation and distribution of unauthorised copies.

There are supposed to be procedures in place, but its no surprise that they are not being followed; when was the last time you reached for the Company Procedure Manual to check on the detailed procedure for some simple action? Its also too easy to blame the middle manager who decided that a written procedure was better than implementing a software access control system. Given a choice between implementing costly access controls and writing a procedure for making copies, which would you chose? Now try it again, but imagine that your annual evaluation is going to suffer if you "waste" money doing something that has no positive benefit on your departmental targets.

I would like to think that this incident will be a wake-up call for the civil service to revamp its data control procedures. However I doubt it. A scapegoat has already fallen on his sword (to mix the commonest metaphors). The government is keen to show it is doing something, but mostly to counter the opposition claims of incompetence. And the opposition is more interested in a ministerial scalp than in actually pushing for effective action. What is really needed is an audit of all databases containing UK citizen personal information, followed by a study into the necessary forms of access and the implementation of software-based authorization and logging mechanisms. But nobody in authority seems to be thinking along those lines.

The sad thing is that the Ministry of Defence has had hundreds of years experience in dealing with sensitive and secret data, and they have become quite good at it. Perhaps they should give the rest of the government some lessons.