'SKYNET?' - SpaceX Files with Government to Provide Internet Service from Space.

'SKYNET?' - SpaceX Files with Government to Provide Internet Surveillance Service from Space. (Wapo).

Elon Musk’s space company has asked the federal government for permission to begin testing on an ambitious project to beam Internet service from space, a significant step forward for an initiative that could create another major competitor to Comcast, AT&T and other telecom companies.

Elon Reeve Musk is a South African-born Canadian American entrepreneur, engineer, inventor and investor. He is the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and chairman of SolarCity. He is the founder of SpaceX and a cofounder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and Zip2.He has also envisioned a conceptual high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop

The plan calls for launching a constellation of 4,000 small and cheap satellites that will beam high-speed Internet signals to all parts of the globe, including its most remote regions. Musk has said the effort “would be like rebuilding the Internet in space.”

If successful, the attempt could transform the L.A.-based SpaceX from a pure rocket company into a massive high-speed Internet provider that would take on major companies in the developed world but also make first-time customers out of the billions of people who are currently not online.


The idea of saturing Earth with Internet signals from space has long been the dream of prominent business tycoons, including Bill Gates in the 1990s.

But many of these ventures have run into obstacles that Musk is working to avoid. Musk has his own rocket, and he has said his swarm of satellites will be more efficient and inexpensive than relying on a handful of big devices that are difficult to replace. Hmmm......Why are all these alarm bells going of in my head? Read the full story here.

Somebody Forced the World’s Internet Traffic Through Belarus and Iceland.

Somebody Forced the World’s Internet Traffic Through Belarus and Iceland.HT: Allthingsd.

This is a deeply technical but potentially very troubling story. Imagine one day you’re using the Internet the same way you do every day. Reading the news, shopping, sending email, checking your bank and credit card balances. Maybe even doing some work for your employer.

Typically, but not always, the bits being sent from your computer, tablet or phone will flow from where you are to where they need to be via the most direct route available.

But what if they didn’t? What if someone slipped in between you and the various servers you’re connecting with and diverted your traffic elsewhere, funneling it through a choke point of their choosing, so they could capture, copy and analyze it? Your data takes some extra — and imperceptible — milliseconds to get where it’s going and ultimately everything you’re doing online works just fine. But your traffic has been hijacked by parties unknown and you’re none the wiser that it has happened.

In network security circles, this is what’s known as a Man-In-The-Middle attack. And for years it has been understood to be possible in theory, but never seen in practice. That changed earlier this year when someone — it’s unclear who — diverted Internet traffic from some 150 cities around the world through networks in Belarus and Iceland.

The troubling disclosure came yesterday from the research company Renesys. The firm specializes in tracking the operational health of global Internet infrastructure. When Internet traffic goes down in one country or another, whether because of a natural disaster or political unrest, Renesys is usually among the first to see it.

The attack — and Renesys maintains that it was an attack — targeted large Internet carriers in every major city in the U.S. and numerous major cities in Europe and around the world. (See their map here.)

The first incident took place during most of the month of February, when Internet traffic was silently redirected through an Internet service provider called GlobalOneBel, based in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. The targets of these attacks included financial institutions, government agencies and network service providers.

Renesys tracked the attacks as they happened. Read the full story here.

"Halal Internet" - Internet Enters ‘Coma’ in Iran – Ahead of Presidential Election.

"Halal Internet" - Internet Enters ‘Coma’ in Iran – Ahead of Presidential Election.HT: UskowiOnIran.

“The Internet is in a coma,” wrote Tehran’s Qanoon daily earlier this month. The Middle East Online in a piece published today explains the symptoms. The authorities, mindful of massive street demonstrations post-2009 election, have tightened control of the Internet, deliberately slowing it down for average users.

“It only happens in Iran: the election comes, the Internet goes,” Qanoon quoted a recent tweet in Farsi.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and numerous other sites, including thousands of blogs, have been censored in Iran in the aftermath of the 2009 protests. Now the Internet has become so slow that the average person cannot download almost anything. But the drop in bandwidth and widespread disruption of the Internet is now severely affecting businesses, banks and even government organizations.
A network administrator at a major Internet service provider in Tehran is quoted on the report that his company had been unable to address complaints about slower speeds, particularly accessing pages using the HTTPS secure communications protocol.

“Browsing (the net) is difficult due to the low speed. Even checking emails is a pain,” he said.

The problem is not limited to slower speeds, but also affects what people can actually access online. The censors have taken great care to ensure that people do not see or read things deemed to be inappropriate from their viewpoints. The last remaining software that enabled users to bypass filters imposed on net traffic, like the virtual private networks (VPN), “have become practically inaccessible,” said an Iranian IT website. (The Middle East Online, 19 May)

VPN uses certain protocols to connect to servers outside Iran. In that way, the computer appears to be based in another country and bypasses the filters. Use of VPN, or its sale, is illegal in Iran.

Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard, a member of Majlis and chairman of its communications committee, said VPN was blocked in early March, which has contributed to slowing the Internet.

Last year, the authorities established the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, tasked with guarding Iranians from “dangers” on the Internet. The council is now the lead agency for implementation of official Internet policies and behind the recent disruptions in the use of the Internet in the country.Read the full story here.

US Internet providers will start throttling connection speeds for customers alleged to be pirating copyright-protected materials.

US Internet providers will start throttling connection speeds for customers alleged to be pirating copyright-protected materials.(RT). Starting this week, Internet Service Providers will start throttling connection speeds for customers alleged to be pirating copyright-protected materials.

Months after a controversial “six-strike” program was slated to be rolled out by the biggest ISPs in the United States, the Copyright Alert System (CAS) confirmed on Monday that the initiative has gone live.

The program, critiqued by Internet freedom activists and privacy advocates alike, will let ISPs take six steps of escalating severity in handling incidents where customers are believed to be illegally sharing material. Through the “graduate response” approach, suspected copyright criminals could be issued a series of warnings for illegally downloading protected content.

With the first strike caught by the CAS, a customer could be issued a warning. As strikes increase, however, “mitigation measures,” connection speed throttling and termination of service are all possible options.

“Practically speaking, this means our content partners will begin sending notices of alleged P2P [peer-to-peer] copyright infringement to ISPs, and the ISPs will begin forwarding those notices in the form of Copyright Alerts to consumers,” Jill Lesser of the Center for Copyright Information rights in a blog post on Monday.

“Consumers whose accounts have been used to share copyrighted content over P2P networks illegally (or without authority) will receive Alerts that are meant to educate rather than punish, and direct them to legal alternatives. And for those consumers who believe they received Alerts in error, an easy to use process will be in place for them to seek independent review of the Alerts they received,” she adds — neglecting to mention that the appeals process costs customers $35 a pop.

Previously, Time Warner, Verizon, AT and T, Comcast, Cablevision Systems and other ISPs have signed onto the program, which was last scheduled to start in July 2012.

When the six-strikes program was first introduced, the White House issued an official statement saying it should “have a significant impact on reducing online piracy.”Read the full story here.

Related: The Copyright Propaganda Machine Gets a New Agent: Your ISP.