Don't fear Internet single gateway: Thai ICT minister

[Skygod2000]

1984 was meant to be a warning, not a guide

[sawadee1947]

"Information and Communication Technology Minister Uttama "

Is this a cabinet level position?

in other countries it's called Propaganda Minister......"Thailand moves forward"....but where to?

[barryw52]

In the design of networks you do all you can to eliminate any possible single points of failure. Why would you want a single gateway when this gateway fails Thailand will be isolated from the rest of the worlds internet. What a great way to encourage business to leave Thailand or business to never come to setup here. The internet these day is as essential to business as power, water gas, road transport and shipping. There are enough outages and slow downs on the international links into Thailand right now. We absolutely do not need any more possible reasons for the internet to fail here.

[jabis]

I wish the fiber router in&out of my mooban wouldn't quirk every nth day rendering the whole 50Mb connection useless until the guys reset it

That must be annoying but at least you get great internet most of the time, that's a great speed for Thailand, most places can't get fiber.

Well of course the advertised speeds only mean inside Thailand. The international gateways to Europe give ~10-13Mb downstream and ~2-7Mb upstream, depending on multiple variables (how many hops and which providers etc)- and a regular latency (ping) of ~300ms - so it's by no means an automatic fortune to happiness, the fiber line. But it is indeed manageable for a lot of things, now only if they'd know how to upgrade the router firmware to something less 2008'ish, or replace the old hardware... Well one can only wish

EDIT: Uh oh, forgot to add that it costs about 4x more than a 300/100Mb connection back in Europe - not that that matters now that I live here, but for reference

Edited September 25, 2015 by jabis

[GinBoy2]

The single gateway in itself isn't the problem as long as the bandwidth is there to support it. The problem is why do they want it, and more importantly what do they want t do with it. Choke points in the internet access provide paranoid regimes better points at which to examine, block and filter.

The Great Firewall of China is the best and most sophisticated of these regimes'

Here are some of the tricks China uses to censor its Internet:

DNS Poisoning:

When your try to connect to a website like twitter.com, your computer contacts its DNS servers and asks for the IP address associated with the website. If you receive an invalid response, you’ll look for the website at the wrong location and you won’t be able to connect. China intentionally poisons its DNS caches with wrong addresses for websites like Twitter, making them inaccessible. SOPA would have brought this technique to the USA.

Blocking Access to IPs:

China’s Great Firewall can also block access to certain IP addresses. For example, to prevent people from accessing Twitter’s servers even by accessing it directly at a certain IP or by using unofficial DNS servers that haven’t been poisoned, China could block access to the IP address of Twitter’s servers. This technique would also block other websites located at the same address if they’re using shared hosting.

Analyzing and Filtering URLs:

The firewall can scan URLs and block connections if they contain sensitive keywords. For example, Website Pulse shows us that http://en.wikipedia.org is accessible from within China, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People’s_Republic_of_China is not accessible — the firewall is looking at the URL and deciding to block web pages that appear to be about Internet censorship.

Inspecting and Filtering Packets:

“Deep packet inspection” can be used to examine unencrypted packets, looking for sensitive content. For example, a search performed on a search engine may fail if you search for politically controversial keywords as the packets associated with the search are examined and blocked.

Resetting Connections:

There are indications that, after the Great Firewall blocks such packets, it will block communication between both computers for a period of time. The firewall does this by sending a “reset packet,” essentially lying to both computers and telling them that the connection was reset so they can’t talk to each other.

Blocking VPNs:

In late 2012, the Great Firewall started trying to block VPNs. VPNs were previously used to escape the Great Firewall. They’re also critical for many business users, so this was a surprising move. The firewall learns to identify what encrypted VPN traffic looks like and kills VPN connections.

This isn’t an exhaustive list — there isn’t complete transparency so we can’t know exactly how everything works.

All of that requires a large and fairly costly infrastructure and support mechanism. Given that we are here in Thailand, which struggles to keep the power on at the first clap of thunder, I'm somewhat skeptical of their ability to actually accomplish very much. What I'm more concerned about is that in their bungled attempts to actually do this, they further hobble the international connectivity out of the country.

It'll all probably happen about the same time as they eliminate Jetski scams, reform the RTP and dictate the price of Som Tam!

[robblok]

They're ALREADY blocking sites now!

And have been for years only this could be even worse. 100% against this plan. Thankfully its still in the planning stages and might never get off the ground. If this would just be an extra gateway im all for it as long as the internet providers are free to use their own.

well that's one junta supporter finally waking up to this repressive regime where's the junta boy djjamie defending it, or Rubl, H90, Jinjag, Baerboxer and the few others?

I still support them but certainly not all their plans. Is that such a hard concept ? I bet you did not support everything your beloved Shins did.

There are quite a few things that the junta does that i don't support and on a personal level i don't like Prayut and think he is a PR disaster.

Just see it as better as the previous mob, but if many more of these crazy ideas really get implemented (still a plan now and we know what often happens with these plans) i might start disliking both governments.

[SoFarAndNear]

What businesses? There will be no new bussines. How Thailand can compete now with Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Many International hosting companies settled there and Thailand was on the way to become a player too..... this will be a complete set back......

[smedly]

"BANGKOK: -- The objective of the international-Internet single gateway initiative is not to enhance national security, but to help Internet businesses reduce costs by sharing a single gateway, Information and Communication Technology Minister Uttama Savanayana said yesterday."

Which is why they tried to do it on the quiet, as a surprise treat for Internet businesses. And to think that some imagined there were sinister motives behind the whole thing...

the problem with this is that it introduces an infrastructure that has no competetive business interest into a highly competetive environment and forcing those busnesses to use it, not the right way to do things apart from the sinister aspect

[tfbpa]

Of course the whole idea of a single Internet gateway is wrong and dangerous on many different levels, but it might be a good idea to read the list of Internet censorship and surveillance by country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country

It is quite interesting to see how many Western countries censor the Internet in various ways. Some could be considered for the general benefit, such as blocking child p0rn websites, but it is all censored content nonetheless and many Western countries surveil the Internet.

Who are the Enemies of the Internet?

United States, North Korea, Syria, United Kingdom, China, Iran, India and Russia to name a few.

[aslimversgwm]

I feel so much better now.

Me too! Ha, ha, HAH!

What utter nonsense - on the true sense of the word -

absolutely no sense at all!

[GinBoy2]

Of course the whole idea of a single Internet gateway is wrong and dangerous on many different levels, but it might be a good idea to read the list of Internet censorship and surveillance by country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country

It is quite interesting to see how many Western countries censor the Internet in various ways. Some could be considered for the general benefit, such as blocking child p0rn websites, but it is all censored content nonetheless and many Western countries surveil the Internet.

Who are the Enemies of the Internet?

United States, North Korea, Syria, United Kingdom, China, Iran, India and Russia to name a few.

Out of wikipedia curiosity, I've love you to show me what website in the US would result in one of these screens?

[smedly]

I don't fear it, but I'm pretty sure I'll loathe it. Slower browsing speed, greater censorship, a single failure point which will likely be quite consistent in its high failure rate, slower banking transactions, slower POS transactions... I can't think of a single upside.

there isn't one, it is just flawed thinking on so many levels and ill advised and quite frankly a very stupid idea for so many reasons too long to list here, it would be like trying to run the electricity network for the whole of Thailand from one huge government run powerstation, this is the problem when you have a none technology educated person in government trying to plan how a national communications network should be implimented - they simply have absolutly no clue what they are talking about and the implications of what they are suggesting

[LannaGuy]

They're ALREADY blocking sites now!

And have been for years only this could be even worse. 100% against this plan. Thankfully its still in the planning stages and might never get off the ground. If this would just be an extra gateway im all for it as long as the internet providers are free to use their own.

well that's one junta supporter finally waking up to this repressive regime where's the junta boy djjamie defending it, or Rubl, H90, Jinjag, Baerboxer and the few others?

I still support them but certainly not all their plans. Is that such a hard concept ? I bet you did not support everything your beloved Shins did.

There are quite a few things that the junta does that i don't support and on a personal level i don't like Prayut and think he is a PR disaster.

Just see it as better as the previous mob, but if many more of these crazy ideas really get implemented (still a plan now and we know what often happens with these plans) i might start disliking both governments.

good job! enlightenment comes slowly

[Tywais]

Thailand's International Internet map. Nothing could go wrong from what I can see. High resolution map here.

inetmap082015_international.jpg

Trying to make sense of that map has made me realize just how dumb I am. So are you suggesting it's too difficult for the government to make a single gateway?

Actually the large blue ellipses in the middle are the primary ISP gateways where all traffic goes through before being sent out the appropriate International routes (the rectangular grey boxes around the edges of the map). It would require each 'owner' of that gateway to redirect to the new central gateway then it has to come back to them to route them back out to the International lines. Some of the intermediate pipes are 200Gbps or higher. The total aggregate of traffic is enormous and redirecting it all through a single pipe, round trip at that, is going to bottleneck everyone. Then there is the latency through the new firewall itself.

As I said, can't see anything going wrong there <sarcasm> Can hardly see where it is able to actually improve business networking (International). Seems to me smoke and mirrors.

[cumgranosalum]

It's freedom of speech, jim...but not as we know it

[nikster]

"It is to be done on a volunteer basis when we develop the infrastructure. It is not to force them. That is impossible,"

The bold above is about the only thing i believe in the entire OP.............................

Really one can only read between the lines. This particular statement seems like it's a way out for everyone without losing face. I also think a single gateway would be impossible - the cat is out of the bag, and it can't be stuffed back in - or doing so would require a huge effort and go against the interests of all the red-colored stakeholders.

The only reason the military wants a china style firewall is to control news. So I can imagine them saying "hey lets just do what they're doing" without giving it much more thought than that. But if you look into the details, it's not practical. News get through in China too - even China, with a huge effort, and an effort that started on day 1, they can't block all news.

Technically, any time new blocks go into effect in China, programmers go wild finding ways around the blocks. It's always going to be a cat-and mouse game. Surely, news are more difficult to access in China than other places. But there's no way to block it all.

And then, most news spread on social networks and the government already has first hand experience with that - it's impossible to block social networks. They can't just block Facebook - that would impact like 80% of the population.

So the next time you see Thais excessively take photos of their food, or see them running around with selfie sticks - this is what is currently saving freedom of internet access, so you should applaud that activity

[BestBitterPhuket]

What was this laughable suggestion launched last week about parts of Thailand becoming IT hubs? I guess IT hubs go "hand in hand" with Internet cencorship...

[chrisinth]

This government reminds me of the boy telling his girlfriend: "I just want to put the head of it in. Honest."

And the public saying "Next time you're going to do that, kiss me first"..............................

[Usernames]

I will not fear the single internet gateway. I will rejoice in it. And I will be happy. Because if I don't, your rod and your staff will beat the bejesus out of me.

[Yann55]

There's a whole raft of expressions eg ' please believe me / trust me, honestly, don't worry ' etc that when used by politicians and officials immediately provoke the opposite reaction

LOL ... you forgot : "the truth is ..." and to politicians and officials, you can add businessmen.

[thaimat]

The single gateway in itself isn't the problem as long as the bandwidth is there to support it. The problem is why do they want it, and more importantly what do they want t do with it. Choke points in the internet access provide paranoid regimes better points at which to examine, block and filter.

The Great Firewall of China is the best and most sophisticated of these regimes'

Here are some of the tricks China uses to censor its Internet:

DNS Poisoning:

When your try to connect to a website like twitter.com, your computer contacts its DNS servers and asks for the IP address associated with the website. If you receive an invalid response, youll look for the website at the wrong location and you wont be able to connect. China intentionally poisons its DNS caches with wrong addresses for websites like Twitter, making them inaccessible. SOPA would have brought this technique to the USA.

Blocking Access to IPs:

Chinas Great Firewall can also block access to certain IP addresses. For example, to prevent people from accessing Twitters servers even by accessing it directly at a certain IP or by using unofficial DNS servers that havent been poisoned, China could block access to the IP address of Twitters servers. This technique would also block other websites located at the same address if theyre using shared hosting.

Analyzing and Filtering URLs:

The firewall can scan URLs and block connections if they contain sensitive keywords. For example, Website Pulse shows us that http://en.wikipedia.org is accessible from within China, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Peoples_Republic_of_China is not accessible the firewall is looking at the URL and deciding to block web pages that appear to be about Internet censorship.

Inspecting and Filtering Packets:

Deep packet inspection can be used to examine unencrypted packets, looking for sensitive content. For example, a search performed on a search engine may fail if you search for politically controversial keywords as the packets associated with the search are examined and blocked.

Resetting Connections:

There are indications that, after the Great Firewall blocks such packets, it will block communication between both computers for a period of time. The firewall does this by sending a reset packet, essentially lying to both computers and telling them that the connection was reset so they cant talk to each other.

Blocking VPNs:

In late 2012, the Great Firewall started trying to block VPNs. VPNs were previously used to escape the Great Firewall. Theyre also critical for many business users, so this was a surprising move. The firewall learns to identify what encrypted VPN traffic looks like and kills VPN connections.

This isnt an exhaustive list there isnt complete transparency so we cant know exactly how everything works.

All of that requires a large and fairly costly infrastructure and support mechanism. Given that we are here in Thailand, which struggles to keep the power on at the first clap of thunder, I'm somewhat skeptical of their ability to actually accomplish very much. What I'm more concerned about is that in their bungled attempts to actually do this, they further hobble the international connectivity out of the country.

It'll all probably happen about the same time as they eliminate Jetski scams, reform the RTP and dictate the price of Som Tam!

Great, informative post, thank you.

[Bangkok Barry]

I seem to remember early on Thailand only really did have one international connection by one company and the internet was almost unusable as there was too little international bandwidth.... and this is what they want to move back to? If you are focusing on improving international bandwidth you do not restrict it down to one line/organization - you incentivise and allow competition to increase the bandwidth and you make sure to eliminate and restrict any organization that creates market restrictions and monopolizes the resource. The truth is obvious..... (BTW, the cutting off of facebook which they said was a technical glitch - happened across multiple providers and thus was proof that the government ordered it).

I recall 2001 when I got a 1 mb attachment and was able to finally download it in Pattaya on my dial-up connection after 16 tries.

As far as Facebook goes...... I think the world would be a better place without it.

FB has to be the stupidest concept ever IMHO, yet the masses seem to love it.

More than a billion people use Facebook, so perhaps you are not using it to your best advantage, or haven't used it all all. On a personal level, I've been able to use it to rediscover old friends and use it in a profitable business capacity. Or perhaps you know better than those billion+ people, and can tell us why it's "the stupidest concept ever".

[DaveinAsia]

https://youtu.be/IcTP7YWPayU

Edited September 25, 2015 by DaveinAsia

[DaveinAsia]

There's a whole raft of expressions eg ' please believe me / trust me, honestly, don't worry ' etc that when used by politicians and officials immediately provoke the opposite reaction

LOL ... you forgot : "the truth is ..." and to politicians and officials, you can add businessmen.

Politicians are errand boys of businessmen...it's all the same game

[animatic]

Every single rational for this the minster stated is 100% wrong,

the ONLY reason is the one he says we shouldn't fear,

controlling information that the Thai people and all other can see.

Funny how earlier in the week this is one of the main points they were pushing,

suddenly it's gone, don't fear it.

Never mind that VPN or proxy servers are available by the thousands

and will go right around their 'safeguards' like like a blowtorch through butter.

Utter Bilge from the minister of silly talks.

Active total access from dozen of gateways for the 19 million internet users (2014).

Call it twenty gateways, less than 1 million per gateway

or

Funnel all 19 million computers going through 1 gateway

and past keyword filters for bad stuff we KNOW they don't want seen...

That will be better for all?

This Minister has no clue about computer realities besides his personal PC.

Edited September 25, 2015 by animatic

[Shaunduhpostman]

The only hope is that they won't be able to pull it off. Not that that would stop them from going ahead and doing it anyway. Then I suppose they could use that as the excuse as to why Thailand can't have internet at all. "mai dai!"

[dageurreotype]

I seem to remember early on Thailand only really did have one international connection by one company and the internet was almost unusable as there was too little international bandwidth.... and this is what they want to move back to? If you are focusing on improving international bandwidth you do not restrict it down to one line/organization - you incentivise and allow competition to increase the bandwidth and you make sure to eliminate and restrict any organization that creates market restrictions and monopolizes the resource. The truth is obvious..... (BTW, the cutting off of facebook which they said was a technical glitch - happened across multiple providers and thus was proof that the government ordered it).

I recall 2001 when I got a 1 mb attachment and was able to finally download it in Pattaya on my dial-up connection after 16 tries.

As far as Facebook goes...... I think the world would be a better place without it.

FB has to be the stupidest concept ever IMHO, yet the masses seem to love it.

I LOVE it. I can sign up under a false name and then spy on anyone everywhere without them knowing it

Before the flames start I was being sarcastic, albeit factual.

[Time Traveller]

What businesses? There will be no new bussines. How Thailand can compete now with Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Many International hosting companies settled there and Thailand was on the way to become a player too..... this will be a complete set back......

You are confused. The goal was never for thailand to compete with other nations. The goal is simply to stop information that makes certain powerful people in thailand look bad, under the guise of "national security".

Progress and development was never their goals. And it's not a step back. It's actually a step forward to them (the thai military)

realizing their goals of complete control over information.

The only question left to answer is why do they fear thai people knowing something. Perhaps because it's actually TRUE

Edited September 25, 2015 by Time Traveller

[ldiablo]

I believe you Mr. Minister. I believe you about as much as I believe Somyot's statement that the Thai police are the best in the world.

Edited September 25, 2015 by ldiablo

[Tatsujin]

Despite what they say, a single gateway would be a disaster to business here ... it won't be set up correctly, it will be slow, and the worst part is that every single piece of information that passes through it can and will be monitored by the paranoid people in power. No thank you.