Protests Mount In New Zealand Against New Surveillance Laws 138
An anonymous reader writes "New revelations about Ministerial orders requiring backdoors into online services in New Zealand are fueling nationwide protests against new surveillance powers to be granted to the Government Communications Services Bureau. Speaking at one large protest meeting, Kim Dotcom described the 'Five Eyes' X-Keyscore surveillance system as 'Google for spies'. He told protesters he first noticed he was being spied on when his internet speed slowed by '20 to 30 milliseconds'. 'As a gamer, I noticed,' he said."
John Key walking out when questioned about spying (Score:5, Informative)
Re: I can tell from the pixels (Score:4, Informative)
are you perhaps retarded?
not only is that kind of delay noticeable by anyone with a bit of experience with networks, Kim Dotcom had FIBER OPTIC CABLE INSTALLED WITH 1-HOP ACCESS TO SUBSEA CABLES.
A 20ms increase in latency would be a WTF is wrong with our hundred-million dollar infrastructure, not just a gamer who felt he had too high latency as an excuse for bad KDR.
Re:I can tell from the pixels (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, as a major Modern Warfare 3 enthusiast, and living at more or less the far end of the earth, Dotcom took his ping pretty seriously and had a dedicated line installed from his house to the peering exchange in Auckland's Sky Tower. When his ping increased, he pulled customer support in to sort it out and they determined that his connection had picked up a few extra hops within NZ.
Re:20-30 ms is massive (Score:5, Informative)
You are right. He would really need to use some sort of computer to be able to measure whether his Internet speed had changed by that amount. How unlikely is that?
Seriously, we can't know what he meant by noticing the speed change. It may just be that as a gamer, he keeps an eye on his ping times regularly and noticed the numbers change. Frankly, that is not the important part of the article so it isn't worth worrying about that quote.
Re:20-30 ms is massive (Score:5, Informative)
He runs servers. People who run servers often have some idea of the ping time to them. I know the ping time to my servers from home even though I can't react at super-human speeds, catch bullets in my teeth, fire lasers from my eyes, or anything of that nature.
Re:20-30 ms is massive (Score:2, Informative)
I can definitely tell the difference of 20ms to 30ms ping when playing an FPS like counterstrike or tactical ops that doesn't perform latency gimping. Its huge, and makes all the difference in the world if your base ping is under 100. Above 100ms, its not even worth playing anyway. Way to slow.
Re:I can tell from the pixels (Score:5, Informative)
sadly, it's gotten to the point where you could assume if there's no bloody toilet paper it's due to a spy agency.
I can't tell if you are trying to reference when this actually happened in the Cold War or not, but figured either way I should include a link for people who didn't know that toilet paper theft was really a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tamarisk [wikipedia.org].
Re:Coordinated (Score:2, Informative)
Notice that the following are flagged as "Suspected NSA listening facility in the city
Just FYI, you won't see the sniffers on a traceroute. There are generally two ways of installing data captures on high-capacity backbones, which method is used depends on the ISP.
The first method is to use a Sandvine or something similar in between two routers. You won't see any indication that the traffic did not go directly from the first router to the next, other than a slight latency increase. If it's adding 20 -30 ms then they are horribly overloading the sniffer, it should add less than 1ms doing full DPI if you're running it right.
The other method is to mirror a port on a router/switch. In this case you also won't ever see anything, and should not even see latency increases unless they are overloading the backplane or CPU on the switch/router.
Again, you will NOT see them on a traceroute. So the list on that site shows, at best, facilities where there's a router which might handoff to a sniffer. But it's not something you can determine via ping times.
In regards to the story, it sounds to me like someone changed the routing on his dedicated circuit to possibly add in a sniffer... and they didn't know WTF they were doing. But it's also possible his routing/circuit path changed for other reasons, and he's just extra paranoid about having his traffic monitored. But to respond to several posts calling bullshit on his ping time detection- you're completely wrong. When you're paying for dedicated fiber with a tight SLA, you damn well pay attention to your latency because you're paying out the ass for that circuit and if your ISP slips outside the SLA you want every last cent of credit/penalty in the contract.
Re:I can tell from the pixels (Score:3, Informative)
sorry Izal the medicated toilet paper that given the choice of using it or a bit of newspaper the newspaper is preferable. Usually only ever found (and not in recent years) in public toilet facilities maintained by the local council. practically guaranteed not to be swiped from the facilities, it was that bad. If you took a sheet of grease proof paper and sprinkled detol or jeyes fluid on it, that would be close to Izal