On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Martin Hamilton wrote:
> There's also the question of what constitutes a VPN, but obviously
> it's not in their interests to spell this out. I mean... CIPE, ssh
> connection forwarding, stunnel, ICMP tunnelling... ? At what point
> does it become a VPN ? Now PPTP, L2TP and IPSEC are a bit more
> clearcut ;-)
I'd also like to see someone come up with a decent way of 'detecting'
(ahem) a CIPE tunnel, when the endpoints are UDP ports. Especially as it
would be reasonably trivial to firewall them using whatever chain/table
system you'd like to use so that only the 'far end' endpoint can actually
connect to it :)
OK, it'd be easy if they actually analysed the traffic, but it strikes me
that much of their 'analysis' involves scanning well-known TCP ports.
> BT OpenWorld doesn't appear to have any equivalent restrictions ...
> And nor does Telewest/BlueYonder...
Nor, AFAIK, do _any_ of the DSL providers. Of course, on BTO, you're NATed
to bits which can make VPNs kind of interesting to setup. And far, far
easier to monitor, too...
It strikes me that NTL have knee-jerked about all manner of services
because their [cable modem] network has been perilously close to collapse
at points in the past. Now, why are they worried about performance
problems (!) caused by VPN traffic when there's all that high-bandwidth
nasty illegal[0] KaZaA traffic out there? Makes you wonder. Make me
wonder, anyway.
[0] yes kids, "sharing" copyright material really is against the law. No,
really! Only yesterday one of my neighbours was telling me at length about
all the films he's seen recently before they came out at the pictures. He
was so keen I didn't really have the heart to tell him that it's against
the law... but that's another thread entirely.
Imagine if RIPA got extended to cover P2P systems? Now _that_ would need
some storage ;-)
G
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