Editorial/Admin: The Chat Experiment and The Janitors
With a few analogies to justify the wasting of your time
Published: 2024-04-01
Updated 2024-05-06: see Update.
With a Little Help From My Friends
A helpful community member alerted me to an account using the recently enabled Chat for self-promotion. In response to her care, the individual has been reported for all chat postings of 'self promotion' to the Substack Gods whose fickle response remains as mysterious as the Fates. This post is for transparency down here in the realm of the mundane.
I enjoyed using Chat infrequently to post minor content. This received very little engagement and so I assume it was not of significance to the community. It was an interesting experiment and has, for the meantime been turned off as a vote of confidence in the community reporting this individual's inconsiderate activities.
It will be turned on again if I feel that it would be useful again, or if the community requests it. The associated message is that this individual is most welcome to spray their own somewhat incoherent ideas in their lowest common denominator language all over their own site, but advertising it here is unwelcome. I am a fairly benign dictator in my space, but sometimes the janitors need to do their work.
I hope that the reported individual receives appropriate assistance in recognizing their behaviour.
However, this is not a counseling service, but a newsletter.
End Admin, Start Analogies
The first analogy which came to mind for managing these types of behaviour came from my experience in IT management. The question is what does an IT organization do when empowered users install dangerous software? The most powerful response, which was the one we used, was to listen to our colleagues to understand why they did this and to find less dangerous software to achieve the same ends and then inform others of the benign solution. But, see above for ‘couseling service’.
The more dramatic response is known as black/white listing. One begins by banning various software until this in itself becomes too burdensome. At this point, all software is banned except for a whitelist, an approved list. Apple is a 'whitelisting ecosystem. The equivalent at Substack would be 'comments are only for paying subscribers'.
Spotting Network Abuse
There was a far more interesting, and insidious, case of nasty software, Spotify. To understand it, I'll need to explain a little bit of networking technology which is not difficult and some may enjoy. Please feel free to tune out and move on to other more interesting activities.
The reason the Internet is called the inter-net is because it is composed of individual networks which are inter-connected. The points of interconnection are the routers of which we've all heard. One's network communication (traffic) passes through the routers to pass into, and then most likely out of, a neighbouring network on the way to its destination. The same happens in reverse for a response. The traffic is passing through networks of extremely different carrying capacity, but the treatment of the traffic is essential identical everywhere.
The Internet has standards which define many different languages, or protocols for the traffic. Network devices use 'protocols' which distinguish them from programmers who use 'languages'.
Anybody can download the documents which define these standard protocols from the IETF for free and implement (program) them for whichever sort of 'computer' or network connected device they wish. You will also have heard of many of these protocols, with extremely important ones being HTTP (web page fetching), DNS (translating names like 'yesxorno.substack.com into a number like 172.64.154.11) and TCP (which allows an ordered fetch/response type conversation).
All of these must use IP addresses (the result of the DNS name translation, which is why it is such an important service, infrastructure and protocol). Routers use the addresses to select where to send the traffic. Modern routers can do lots of interesting things, but their core purpose is fundamentally trivial. Just as DNS has an almost perfect analogy of “the internet ‘name to number’ phone book”, so a router is a road junction.
Imagine a city in which some intercity junctions are reserved for buses only, and that all buses have a number which identifies their route, or trip. A router is just an intelligent junction. It sees the number on the bus at the front of a queue to the junction. The router picks the bus up and puts it on the road out of the junction which leads to the place the bus wishes to travel. The bus numbers are the IP addresses. All of the other traffic, without the bus numbers, gets the network version of Gandalf's "You Shall Not Pass". Its gets “dropped on the floor”, or sent to the pergatory of /dev/null.
The vast majority of routers are junctions on a single road; one road in and one road out. The sign on road out of the town and into the router says "Anywhere But Here". The sign on the other side heading out of the single road junction says "default route" which means "all other towns".
Getting back to protocols, there are also lower level protocols which are used within a network and which a router will refuse to transmit. In our analogy they are vehicles which are not buses with numbers. These protocols are designed for speaking on the local network, of which you may also have heard, referred to as a LAN (Local Area Network). For around 3 decades devices have had both local non-IP addresses and local IP addresses (which routers know about about and ignore). The most common example of an older non-IP local addresses is a MAC address (this has nothing to do with Apple).
To return to our analogy, the local IP addresses are like bus lines between the Town Hall and city bus depots. They never go out of town, and so the router ignores them. MAC addresses are like street addresses which people on their bicycles, feet or other transport, use to get from A to B within the town.
The reason that Spotify was a problem for us was that it was speaking both local protocols (layer 2 in network speak) as well as internet protocols (layer 3 and up). What Spotify needed was to be able to speak the higher layer protocols to be able to fetch the audio data which it was being asked to play. It had no need whatsoever to make all the noise which I saw it making on the local network using local protocols (layer 2). There are no music stores in small towns, so Spotify should have been using numbered buses and not running around town in cabs.
The closest cousin to Spotify is a worm. A worm is a piece of software which will, once installed, inspects the local network for computers poorly configured to defend themself against local attack. The worm would then infest other local computers. If one happened to be a portable device, like a laptop, the behaviour would continue as that device was moved into another network.
Spotify was not attempting to install on other local systems. But, it knew how to interact at that layer and was constantly hunting for other Spotify installed systems within the LAN. It was a latent attack vector with an army of local installations contantly moving between networks.
Our response to this was to recognize the time we were in. It was the era of "BYOD" (Bring Your Own Device). Which is to say that not only were devices which we were responsible for managing physically visiting other networks, but the opposite was also true. Essentially, local airports had been built in most of the towns.
Thus, our job was to ensure that our systems were not vulnerable to local attack and to forget Spotify, treating it as just another nasty latent threat among a sea of others. This era was the one in which the concept of treating the router as a significant point of defense got swept into the dustbin of history.
Who knows where the Substack Gods will sweep the individual who started spraying their scent on our local streets?
Update
The individual, having learned nothing, returned to spray their coarse language and self-promotion. They will not be doing this again anywhere here. Good riddence.
This, happily, opens the way for Chat to be re-opened if and/or when that seems a good idea.
Culture
For the helpful community member. She knows who she is.
Joe Cocker - With A Little Help From My Friends, uploaded by sveta14 on 2006-11-04
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