5% of the Net is Unreachable 198
dasheiff writes "A BBC
Story says
US researchers reveal that up to 5% of the internet is completely unreachable. However the most interesting part is that they reported that many of the lost net sites flare into life briefly when being used to send spam or to launch attacks on other parts of the net."
Perhaps they had ECN on? (Score:2)
Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ironic (Score:2, Funny)
Right now, I can't get to BBC [bbc.co.uk], The Guardian [guardian.co.uk], or The Register [theregister.co.uk].
Maybe they've shut the uk domain down for boxing day.
Re:whois theregister.co.uk (Score:2, Informative)
Domain Name: THEREGISTER.CO.UK
Registered For: The Register
Domain Registered By: DETAGGED
Record last updated on 24-Dec-2001 by .
Domain servers listed in order:
WHOIS database last updated at 08:21:01 26-Dec-2001
Re:Ironic (Score:2)
Re:Ironic (Score:1)
In related news... (Score:5, Funny)
Unreachable? (Score:4, Insightful)
When I turn off my router, I don't really consider my home machines part of the Internet even though they are running and connected by a physicall wire.
Re:Unreachable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Unreachable? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Unreachable? (Score:3, Insightful)
Spammers or system crackers often seem to do the trick of hacking into a set of home user broadband machines, I guess using a trojan or worm, turning them into a chain of proxies, then nailing the router between the last of the proxies and the rest of the net. In this way they make their own dark space.
Re:Unreachable? (Score:1)
Content-free article (Score:5, Funny)
Spammers hide on the 'net by playing with unsecured routers.
What worries me is that it took someone three years to figure this out...
Re:Content-free article (Score:5, Insightful)
What worries me is that it took someone three years to figure this out...
I think you may have jumped to a wrong conclusion here. It didn't take three years to figure out that spammers play around with unsecured routers. It took three years to prove via experiment and measurement the extent of the problem, and to quantify the extent of the problem.
When the little boy has cried "Wolf!" often enough, the lone cry is quickly ignored. When the little boy then yells "Wolf, range 600, bearing 219" the cry takes on a bit more significance, don't you think?
If you can't measure it, it's opinion not science. (No, I can't find who said it first -- it's not original with me.)
Re:Content-free article (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:science (Score:2)
Re:science (Score:2, Informative)
That's the "inverse" not the "contrapositive."
Statement: P implies Q
Inverse: ~P implies ~Q
Converse: Q imples P
Contrapositive: ~Q implies ~P
Statement is logically equal to its contrapositive (both true or both false), and ditto for inverse and converse.
Re:Content-free article (Score:2)
If you can measure it, it's a fact. It's not science without a model that incorporates it.
It's not good science unless the model also incorporates other facts, and makes refutable predictions.
It's never certain.
.
Spammers don't hide. They use dedicated ISPs. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Spammers don't hide. They use dedicated ISPs. (Score:2)
Re:Content-free article (Score:2)
The article mentions US military sites (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe they just, um, are delisted due to paranoia, perhaps justified?
Only 5%? (Score:5, Funny)
Well.. not all of us are bad. (Score:2, Informative)
Most of the time, don't give genius the credit when stupidity could do.
Now, I've been atacked by these spamholes as well. There's nothing like hijacking a DNS server.. oops..
NXDOMAIN for theregister.co.uk (Score:2)
I've certainly noticed problems resolving various places from
Flaky DNS service in the last few weeks (Score:2, Interesting)
After they switched our cable modem over to AT&T's new network from Excite, I noticed that even though they were dynamically assigning the router 5 different DNS servers on widely disparate networks, I still couldn't resolve regular sites like slashdot [slashdot.org] or CNN [cnn.com]. Just errored out.
Did Excite do some sort of large scale public service that I'm unaware of? Were they providing really top of the line DNS service and I was just too dumb to realize it?
Doesn't this sound like a country song... "Didn't know what good DNS I had, until it was gone..."
Maybe it's time I press this old windows box into service as a public DNS server. I mean, small contributions make the world go around, right? I bet I could get redhat running in an hour or less...
This just proves, an idle mind is the devil's workshop...
Re:NXDOMAIN for theregister.co.uk (Score:1)
Does anybody no what is happening?
Re:NXDOMAIN for theregister.co.uk (Score:1, Informative)
Re:NXDOMAIN for theregister.co.uk (Score:1)
Re:NXDOMAIN for theregister.co.uk (Score:1, Interesting)
I resisted the temptation to re-register the domain for them for $6.75 per annum, as it would probably cause too much trouble, and I have no idea what their DNS servers are, etc.
Re:NXDOMAIN for theregister.co.uk (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=there
.co.uk domains are linked to an isp by tags. the isp then sets things like the name servers and stuff. Detagging happens when you no longer want a domain, your isp is crap, or there is some sort of contract/legal dispute going on. Lets hope it was just the isp being crap.
I look forwarding to reading theregister's first article once their site goes live again. Last time they had problems (with a router iirc) the article about it was the best laugh i had in ages (sad i know).
--dan
ps. the parent may be offtopic but this post is not offtopic as a reply to its parent
Re:NXDOMAIN for theregister.co.uk (Score:2)
Seems they haven't noticed yet either - I wonder if there's anything listening for mail on that IP. Guess not, no reply on port 25.
Anyone know how to tell them what's happening? Do they own any other domains?
What if I am in the 5% ? (Score:1)
Re:What if I am in the 5% ? (Score:1)
In the case of waring ISPs mentioned in the article, you'll see 95% of the net, you won't see the 5% served by the other ISP.
If you're behind a hacked router then you might see all the net you might not. Most likely you won't see anything.
There's also the case of companies that had IP addresses assigned to them, that keep them unreachable from outside. Depending on their policies you may not see the net.
And if you're on an IP address assigned to an ISP or company that ceases to operate, you'll most likely not see the other 95% of the net.
It all depends on the net, the net isn't all that deterministic. Its kind of like a living organism with a personality you have to beat with a large stick. Usually you apply the stick to your neighbours if you're using a cable modem. Or to your ISPs first tier support (who often need a good thrashing, 'No its not my computer your router isn't working').
slashdotted? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:slashdotted?: Nope, I'm just keeping them safe (Score:1)
Thanks for asking
Re:slashdotted? (Score:2)
I wonder if they took into account the number of address blocks allocated but not assigned and thus not, yet, announced? The last block we were assigned wasn't in the global routing table for several months. And what about NATed networks? Or people who have 50x more addresses than they need (a
Spammers, may they rest in the damnation of hell (Score:5, Funny)
These spamists spam not merely to waste bandwidth, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every piece of unsolicited mail, they hope that genuine e-mailers grow fearful, retreating from cyber space and forsaking news groups. They stand against me, because I stand in their way.
I am not deceived by their pretenses to piety. I have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the spamist ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing bandwidth to serve their advertising visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded trash cans.
My response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated replies.
I should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic e-mails to ISP's, visible to News groups, and covert operations, secret even in success. I will starve spamists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from ISP to ISP, until there is no refuge or no rest. And I will pursue ISP's that provide aid or safe haven to spammers. Every ISP, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with me, or you are with the spamists.
From this day forward, any ISP that continues to harbor or support spamists will be regarded by me as a hostile regime.
Re:Spammers, may they rest in the damnation of hel (Score:1)
Re:Spammers, may they rest in the damnation of hel (Score:1)
That shit was just too funny....
Re:Spammers, may they rest in the damnation of hel (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Spammers, may they rest in the damnation of hel (Score:1)
These terrorists spam not merely to waste bandwidth?
Just couldn't resist
Re:Spammers, may they rest in the damnation of hel (Score:3, Insightful)
I's rather get 50 pieces of spam in my email, then 1 piece of junk snail mail.
The way to slowdown spamming is control, not outlaw. If you outlaw spamming, you will be outlawing anything similiar to it regardless of intentions. This will have an impact on free speech, on others beside spammers.
We also need an official definition of "spam" put before congress, before ANY laws or actions are taken.
Is it spam if it's primary use is to make money?
is sending you a joke spam?
Is sending you a political announcement spam?
IS sending you any email you didn't explicitly ask for spam?
Don't get me wrong, I don't like unsolicited email from certain groups, I just feel we need to exam and define what spam is, and consider possible unexpected consquence before we make laws.
Laws are the wrong answer (Score:3, Insightful)
The right answer is a configurable e-mail filtering system. With certain pre-programmed options. And easy customization. And PERHAPS a neural net that can learn what it considered spam (or, perhaps better?, not spam).
It needs to be cross-platform. It needs to be able to work with MSIE. It may be MSIEvil, but it's the predominating e-mail recipient.
This doesn't get around the need to receive the verfluct stuff, but if the job is done well enough, it will get around the yammering for more laws. People should be able to set their own priorities. (If it were easy enough, I'd automatically reject anything that was predominately non-indoeuropean letters. I don't read Japanese, Chinese, and whatever those other languages are, so it would be nice to avoid them. But sofar I haven't bothered figuring out how to reject them before reading.)
I can't even imagine any way to reject the garbage without receiving it, except rejecting based on ISP, sender, addressee (e.g., list suppressed), subject, or date. And that's not usually enough to go on. But sometimes it is, and it would be nice to delete those before downloading them.
.
Re:Laws are the wrong answer (Score:2)
true..
The answer is kicking china and most of russia off the internet. These seem to be where 99.8% of spam originates from.
Re:Spammers, may they rest in the damnation of hel (Score:2)
So it would be illegal for me to send my mother an email with the subject re:Work From Home ?
just say Spam is illegal with out a clear definition that anybody, even a non-techie, can understand what you mean by spam, would be both foolish and stupid.
If having a medum where somebody could make dubious offers was outlaw there would be no way to sell anything at all.
I just don't want some knee jerl legislation to bite us in the butt later, which almost always happens with legislation that isn't clearly defined.
personally I think anyemail thats makes an offer, and is sent to sell you something should conatain a number in the subject that indicates what it is for. That way spam filters would be much more helpfull.
The only way to stop it all is to make every email tracable to the sender by law. That would have serious consequence on free speech. Plus the abuser would find some way around it.
maybe it's because (Score:5, Funny)
Re:maybe it's because (Score:1)
Re:maybe it's because (Score:1)
Oh wait, I forgot Solaris.
Re:maybe it's because (Score:4, Funny)
I think it's closer to 3%, actually. Slashdot is linking to the other 2%.
Sites behind NAT (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sites behind NAT (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sites behind NAT (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sites behind NAT (Score:1)
I don't think that being behind a NAT device constitutes being "unreachable". granted, you're reachability is governed by policies with NAT, but that's an administrative matter, not a Layer3 (IP) reachability issue.
Re:Sites behind NAT (Score:2)
Jesus, no-one else has picked up on this. This is a dangerous myth. NAT IS NOT A FIREWALL. NAT IS NOT A SECURITY DEVICE. NAT'd MACHINES CAN STILL BE CRACKED FROM THE PUBLIC NET.
If you think I'm wrong, I suggest you dig out some networking docs and look for proof that I'm wrong....
Hijacked IP-Blocks (Score:1, Interesting)
Route Distribution (Score:2, Informative)
A different theory (Score:5, Interesting)
I've run into sites which are up or down and often they're in a small shop and they actually power down their server (or it happens with a power/service outage) Lots of broken links on images. It would be interesting to see a statistic on how many pages which are technically non-functional still exist, i.e. with parts unable to display due to broken links, from sites gone away or pages moved but links not updated (which even M$N does from time to time)
Re:A different theory (Score:1)
I'll have a guess. Ooh, 99%?
Pardon? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with lost peering agreements between ISPs causing partial 'net outages is well-understood. So what exactly have they measured here?! Seems like a shaky story to get one's name in the news.
Justin
Re:Pardon? (Score:3, Interesting)
You do a disservice to the memory of Abha Ahuja with your uninformed yelping. This had nothing to do with a cheap gimmick to get publicity.
--------
Public addresses on Private networks (Score:4, Funny)
More than once, I've said "Here you are, you get an entire Class A because we think you are so great. Your adresses are 10.x.x.x"
Re:Public addresses on Private networks (Score:1)
Re:Public addresses on Private networks (Score:1)
Because there's no private IP registry (Score:2)
That address space works well for the WAN side of private links, or for testing or other stub networks that can't be connected elsewhere. But if you even think you might interconnect with other providers or other organizations, get real addresses.
It's Not Always Stupid to do that (Score:2)
Whenever I use 10.x addresses, I never use 10.1.*.* - 10.10.*.*, and usually pick a random number to subnet under (10.RAND.*.*) so that if I have to merge it with another numbering system, there's less chance of collisions, renumbering, NAT, etc.
This leads to an interesting possibility (Score:5, Informative)
Seems to me that you could make some progress against the spam by simply refusing any email from a domain that hadn't been recognized on the net for at least several days or maybe weeks.
If you haven't followed the PDF link, there are some interesting time history graphs of various routing parameters. Worth checking out.
Re:This leads to an interesting possibility (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:This leads to an interesting possibility (Score:3)
The PDF link [arbornetworks.com] is over in the sidebar; I didn't even see it until you mentioned it.
Re:This leads to an interesting possibility (Score:2, Insightful)
> against the spam by simply refusing any email
> from a domain that hadn't been recognized on
> the net for at least several days or maybe weeks.
They will just add sites (unused) 2 weeks before the spam-attack, but you will hurt honest users and admins a lot, because you just tremendiously increased the time it takes to move/add sites.
You look to me like those "copy protection" guys. You are participating in a cat-and-mouse game, but don't care about hurting other people's interests for your cause, without even achieving it.
Spam protection must never hurt honest users. [eff.org]
repeated article... (Score:5, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/15/051
Re:repeated article... (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/15/05172
Be kind, everyone is still hunge over from xmas egg nog, etc.
Re:repeated article... (Score:2)
Thank god kuro5hin is back...
If only (Score:4, Funny)
It's obviously Wintermute (Score:2)
Reminds me of George Carlin (Score:3, Funny)
Ummm.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems kinda silly if you ask me. Why not declare that 59.28% of the internet is unreachable? Why not 600%? They're all equally unprovable and meaningless
Thats the @home Part of the Internet (Score:4, Funny)
enough said.
Re:Thats the @home Part of the Internet (Score:1)
Already posted (Score:1)
/. (Score:1)
Priorities (Score:5, Funny)
Research paper (Score:4, Informative)
It's irritating how people don't even read the BBC quick-article, but for those who actually want to know what the researchers figured out: the paper is here; [arbor.net] it's in Acrobat format, sigh.
People get paid to run "ping"? This is research? (Score:3, Insightful)
- A.P.
My part of the 5% (Score:4, Funny)
Link to html version of report (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Link to html version of report (Score:1)
try here [adobe.com] instead
Hmmm.... (Score:2, Redundant)
How unreachable? (Score:4, Funny)
:^)
5% ? It's a lot more! (Score:3, Funny)
First Saturday of Every Quarter (Score:2, Insightful)
Hurt could be legal (complaints, blocking, etc), quasi-legal (nmap, ping attacks, etc) or illegal (kill the bastards and drag their guts down the block as an example of what could happen to spammers in the future). Let your rules of engagement be your guide.
If we all spent 1-2 hours on this four times in 2002, I'll guess that there would be fewer spammers in the trade by the end of the year, not more.
Thoughts? I'll stay legal for the moment.
-- Multics
Re:First Saturday of Every Quarter (Score:3, Informative)
That said, I got all my spams in threes this morning, and they were all individually addressed to me (rather than BCC'd), which meant I actually had to look at them. What's worse is that all three of the addresses that they were sent to were dummy addresses on my domain, used only once, in this article [slashdot.org]!
Nice to see that the spam spiders are hitting
So yes, today I think I'm quite willing to get on board the spam battle. It seems that having an unmunged email address appear on
MILNET doesn't rely on DNS (Score:5, Informative)
MILNET uses IP addresses in the same space as the public Internet. The MILNET is normally connected to the rest of the Internet through gateways, but during crisis periods, those gateways are sometimes turned off. After September 11th, much of the MILNET was inaccessable from the public Internet for a day or two. That may be what those researchers saw.
You have to admit (Score:2)
Slashdot on Exodus (Score:4, Informative)
At first I though thats what this story was refering to
Even worse (Score:3, Funny)
ummmm (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ummmm (Score:4, Insightful)
RBL blacklist (Score:2)
Re:Where "news" is not "new"... (Score:2)
So did Slashdot, with the same byline and the same link to the same SecurityFocus article:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/15/05172
I think tomorrow we'll be hearing that the Mir is about to plummet back to earth
Shaun