[PLUG-TALK] Server sky - geographic routing

[Keith Lofstrom]

About 10 months back, I presented Server Sky to advanced topics,
and have presented it about 20 times since.  Data centers in 
orbit, not competing for grid power, direct high bandwidth data
links to ground sites, open technology, and thousands of jobs for
our region.  The idea is taking a long time to "launch", but it
is gaining traction.  

I wanted to talk a bit about the pros and cons of the direct data
links.  Like anything new, there are pluses and minuses.  I would
like to hear more ideas.

The pluses include:

1) Supplementing current ground infrastructure:  With rapidly
steerable radio links, we can provide broadband to regions that
don't have it, or extra to regions that are congested, shifting
capacity in real time.  A boon for developing nations.

2) Reliability: If the electricity driving key repeaters or
switches or routers on the ground fails, Server Sky radio links
are still running.

3) Transnational provisioning:  Server Sky can provide internet
and data to regions that are cut off or censored by local
political or legal restriction, though still subject to
International Telecommunication Union restrictions (sigh).

And here's the one I want to focus on:

4) Geographic route verification:  IP address assignment is partly
geographic - a particular IP address can be routed because the
routing fabric knows what particular set of switches to run it
through.  However, switch manufacturers cut corners, maintaining
transient connection tunnels rather than stateless routing of each
packet.  This permits bogus IP addresses to be used for spamming.

Server-sky permits "direct routing", straight from the orbiting
data center to the client's neighborhood or even personal antenna. 
Ground spot size from full size arrays will be less than a kilometer, 
and routing will be geographic.  It will be very difficult for an
spammer on the other side of the world to pretend to be in a
particular footprint.

4a) This is very good for protecting the Server Sky array itself
from attack.  The control packets are validated on a separate
band.  The array knows where its control centers are physically
located.  If those are secure (hetrogeneous technology will help),
then the array can easily ignore bogus control signals sent from
elsewhere, while detecting where the bad guys are (control band
communications coming from where it should not be) to within a
1km spot.

This may also be a minus, and I want some ideas here.

Minus 4:  The localization properties help bad governments locate
good guys, too. :-(  The localization is within a kilometer, but
this greatly reduces the size of the search team necessary to
locate particular users.  The information stream is encrypted,
of course, but packet timing analysis can still match the source
of a data stream to a particular node.

While this is "more anonymous" than tracking individual users with
Carnivore-style monitoring and hard fiber links, there may be ways
of evading detection on hard links that will be harder to use if
kilometer-scale radio localization is available.  We will still
have access to steganography and anonymous remailers and such.
Using virtual technology in space, those remailers will be at 
least as easy to operate and protect.

While Server Sky facilitates what we do for free software and free
information, the radio links may (or may not) reduce privacy.  What
am I overlooking here?

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs