What Happens When 99% of the Net Crashes? 167
Sara Chan writes "The Internet remains connected on a global scale even if a randomly chosen 99% of its connection points break down. It is, however, in danger if its most highly connected points are selectively knocked out. Recent computer simulations have shown that the Internet is fairly resilient because it is scale free. The latest work, published in Physical Review Letters strengthens this conclusion. Two independent groups of researchers applied percolation theory. Percolation theory deals with systems containing points ("sites") and connections between them, and it analyzes the behavior of the system when some of the sites or connections are removed (it was developed by geophysicists for estimating how much oil could be extracted from reservoirs in a porous medium). Abstracts of the papers are available here and here."
sigh (Score:1)
what happens when people kill 99% of your body?
or 99% of your car?
i guess the only thing that doesn't fit this scenerio is killing 99% of the human race...
unless there's only like 100 people living here... but that would suck anyway
of course the internet will die...
most of the hubs/backbones won't be there, so there will be like an isp here, and there, for people connected to that isp will be able to communicated with others, only on that isp...
it's taking a spider web and cutting it into neat lil pieces...
this was a great work of literature... took some real genius to predict that
scale-free but... (Score:1)
Is it (back)bone-less too? I like my Internet experience nice and squishy.
Author of study replies (Score:2)
First, our work deals with resilience of many kinds of networks, not just the Internet, and may be a better model of some of the others than it is of the Internet. As several people have pointed out, preserving connectivity in the Internet is kind of pointless if the performance is appalling, as it would be if you destroyed most of it. (We did actually make this point in an earlier version of the PRL paper, but it got cut out to make way for other things.)
The whole paper is available here [arxiv.org], and if you look at it you'll see that we also talk about applications to things like the power grid, and contact networks which result in disease transmission. There are also many other important networks which one could apply it to. Distribution networks, like UPS or regular mail; transportation networks, like airline routes or highways; food webs; neural nets. One of the most interesting, perhaps, is not the Internet, but the Web, which is also a network (of pages linked together by links). This has also been shown to have a scale-free degree distribution (A. Broder et al., Computer Networks 33, 309 (2000)) and so should be highly robust in the sense that you can still surf from one place to another even if most of the pages in the Web disappeared overnight.
To answer the question about non-random failures, yes, things are very different there, and this is also discussed in the article. If you attack only the most highly connected domains/web sites/people/airline hubs, etc. you can destroy the operation of the network in no time at all. These networks are very vulnerable to directed attack. This could be very bad, but it some cases it is good. For instance, it means that a focused attack on a disease-causing contact network, for example through vaccination of the people with the highest number of contacts (the so-called "core group"), could prevent an epidemic with comparitively little effort. (Of course, identifying the core group may not be trivial.)
The guy who made the point about the Australian fiber dying last week is onto the right idea. This is the same effect - if you take out the right connection (or wrong, depending on your point of view), then you can do a lot of damage. It's only if you take out a random one that the network is robust.
All the best,
Mark.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! (Score:1)
C'mon. Stop and think about it for a second. The amount of resources to take out 99% of the net would be astronomical. Also, the associated collateral damage would likely mean that NOBODY'd give a damn about the nodes being destroyed because it'd be almost like Armageddon (the event, not the movie).
For the 1% that DID remain online, they'd notice that lots of major sites were dead. And if they looked out their windows, they'd probably be seeing mushroom clouds off in the distance.
Also, think of this. If 99% of the nodes ARE offline, that means that approximately 99% of the user-base is offline too. So these mental gymnastics about funnelling 99% of the net's traffic through 1% of the hardware/bandwidth are about as useful as doing multiplication tables in your head.
Anyhoo. Wasn't this covered on Slashdot like MONTHS ago already?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It Dont work!! (Score:1)
This is a constant thing on the internet, the routing tables are constantly screwed.
It dont work and I would say several percent of the internet is down every moment.
99% Gone? (Score:1)
"Oh no! They nuked both coasts and now I can't find my warez!"
Do the really important things which require communication in the face of global catastrophe make use of the net? I guess that's how it started, but honestly, I hope they have good alternate means of communication as well.
full text (Score:1)
http://ojps.aip.org/journal_cgi/getpdf?KEY=PRLT
Re:Imagine... O/T... Way O/T (Score:1)
Re:bullshit. (Score:2)
As I understand it, the Internet wasn't "designed" to deal with nuke aftermath. It's a wives' tale with a grain of truth deep inside to make it sound good.
The communications system of DARPA may have maximized the advantages of routing, so that .mil sites would have enough redundancy to still talk if a node or a few went down. Computers were just as unreliable then as they are now. Some stay up for months, others bluescreen or blow tubes weekly.
However, DARPA is the Internet . As the name implies, the Internet is an amalgam of many smaller networks. Thus, the whole Internet may not share the fault tolerance that DARPA enjoyed. It's not even clear that the .mil network even still has such traits.
Big business is building most of the Internet infrastructure now. While it costs lots and lots of money if a cable gets cut, corporations still don't have the long-term vision attitude it would take to put in enough redundancy. Dig two transcontinental trench projects with two cables, when you could just dig one? That's a cost.
There's relatively few undersea cables. If there's maybe fifty crossing the North American continent, there's only ten crossing the Pacific. Satellites offer long slow alternatives, but if a deep cable is cut, it's BAD.
Re:Minnesota (Score:2)
I remember working for USWest, and large sections of MPLS (as we called it) going out for no known reason quite frequently, although our guess at the time was because whoever was in charge of 204.147.80.1 had taken off the internet software so they could play Frogger.
Re:Then you're SOL... (Score:1)
And ironically, cities like Boston, San Francisco, etc... are much more prone to be wiped out than Texas. For one, they're on the shore and since the Earth is 70% covered by water statistically any comet or meteor is much more likely to wipe out a seaside city (Hmm, I suppose that includes Houston). For another, large population centers are decent second or thrid wave targets for things like nuclear strikes.
A Similar Thing Happens in USENET (alt.*) (Score:2)
The result: a similar situation to what is mentioned here. Perhaps worse, as many don't have a clue of what has happened. An example of this is alt.tv.sliders.creative. On some ISP's you can read some messages, but on other ISP's on the other side of the world, you can only read OTHER messages, and never the two shall mix!
Re:Lovely Idea, but... (Score:1)
Users hell. MicroShaft uses the Type of Service bits in the IP packets to indicate all their packets are interactive. This of course makes it look like MicroShaft has a better TCP/IP stack, when in reality they're cheating.
Take out the root.a (etc...) NS. then... (Score:2)
Take out the root.a (etc...) NS. then watch 99% of the population not know what to do!
Main sites would go down in min because their ttl's are set so low.. someone does a look up.. oops not cached anymore.. nowhere to get the authorative ns from.. no ip resolution..
this would stop the web dead in a matter of hours.. and since 99% of people don't use anything other than their AOL browser. gameover.
article deals with random networks (Score:1)
Re:What's the point of a 1% Internet? (Score:1)
Re:Imagine... (Score:2)
1% of the internet? (Score:5)
Re:Net Crash (Score:1)
everybody dies. (Score:3)
I am not fucking joking about this.
--Shoeboy
Here's a more important question (Score:1)
Something like this? (Score:5)
Lather, rinse, repeat...
Yeah, right (Score:2)
Fault tolerance, yay!
Re:Imagine... (Score:1)
Yes it probably is a moot point as there are far more reliable methods of communication. If it were a supervirus I'd imagine most people would be turning their machines off as fast as possible rather than hunting the 'net for the latest news. As for Nuclear war, well, who would give a damn anymore anyway?
(har har)
effects on network / system administrators (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Then you're SOL... (Score:1)
Easy (Score:2)
99%? Try about 0.01% (Score:2)
How to destroy the Internet:
My research is just as valid as theirs, and mine is much more plausible. So pfft.
A high redundancy Internet. (Score:1)
The Internet as we all well know was designed to survive a nuclear strike by the military and DARPA. However, that was before the corporate world got a hold of it. Universities with mega-million dollar government grants can afford multiple connections to the main stream Internet and lets not forget their elite Internet2 hookups. The corporate world takes the bottom dollar and decides if the cost is worth the remote possibility that 99% of the Internet should fail.
Face it the redundancy which was a major feature of the first generation Internet has gotten to the point where as many posters have stated two or three t3's being knocked offline could indeed take out major portions of the United States from the internet. As for Europe we all know most of you are probably, accessing US sites ala Slashdot
Now the press would have a field day and chortle over the fact that the e-newsrooms were dead while the broadcast ones were running fine and gloating that they wouldn't be put out of business by this fad called an online news room.
Would I have a fit if the Internet went down to 1-% capability for an extended period? I think not. Sure I would have to find another job eventually and who knows it might even be outdoors. *hisses as the sunlight hits his lily white skin* I have actually on the rough days been thinking of taking up truck driving. The LA freeways would be a vacation compared to what we would be dealing with if the Internet dies that badly.
Do I actually think the situation described in the initial article could happen? Damn right I do. Just imagine a mid-continental plate earthquake say on the New Madrid Fault. Do not believe me? Just check out Uncovering Hidden Hazards in the Mississippi Valley [usgs.gov].
but..then... (Score:1)
...there'd be no more slashdot?
*whimper*
Hypothetical Qn's like this are a waste of time (Score:1)
I fail to see the relevant usefulness of this to anyone....?
A lot of the replies seem to assume that they're part of the 1% and on top of that, that the remaining 1% of the net also contains all the sites they normally visit.
* If it does happen, the reason behind it happening (catastrophe of some sort or other) will be much more of a concern, so basically, who cares?
* If 99% of the 'Net goes down, on average it loses 99% of its value - It depends on what 1% of info. is left. (ie. is the 1% entirely pr0n, or something vaguely useful like global climate statistics?)
* If it goes down to a major exploit or bug / 'feature' it will be fixed in a reasonably timely manner. (Even if you have to use the phone to book your airline tickets to reach an unaffected part of the 'net, solve the problem and then begin a mass sneakernet / replication strategy to get everyone else back up).
About the only useful thing is in theory the Eskimo's and Greenlanders will be able to talk to the Tasmanian's & New Zealanders about a solution to the alien invasion / meteor hit / whatever.
Chances are us remaining 99% have other things to worry about.
Re:Isn't this inconsequential? (Score:3)
I have access to the full article and gave it a read. Its a perfect example of why physicists shouldn't write articles about the real world. They are assumed that all nodes of the network are equal. This is most definitely not the case with the Internet. There nodes upon which others depend. And, as if that wasn't enough, there are also choke points in the real Internet. I liked the LA Freeway analogy that another poster gave. Let me elaborate on this analogy. Half the traffic, maybe more, takes the Harbor Freeway to the Hollywood Freeway to get out to the SF Valley. The other half or so use the 405 to the West. The geography breaks down so that if you live SE, you take the Harbor, Hollywood. If you live SW you take 405. Now, the interchange from Harbor to Hollywood is a narrow two lane affair left over from the fifties. If that goes down from an accident, no one on the east can get to the valley. The same thing can, but is less likely, to happen on the Internet. Take out Downer's Grove and one or two other spots, and whammo, the Internet is segmented and cut off.
One suggestion (Score:5)
Re:Isn't this inconsequential? (Score:3)
Re:Junk Character Post??? (Score:1)
Net Crash (Score:1)
Is some of this a zero-one outcome? (Score:1)
If you take out 99% of the backbone links, things get really ugly but may still work. If you take out 99% of the "access" links, most of the end users see the Internet as being completely gone, not just ugly.
Re:Imagine... O/T [EMP building] (Score:1)
Well, that's good... (Score:4)
That way, if nuclear war breaks out in the US, you can still send a message to the other side of the country that says "NE1 HERE??? A/S/L???" on IRC...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
I'll tell you what happens... (Score:2)
I'll teach them razzafrazzit LPBs...
Jay (=
Stuff that in your pipe and sever it (Score:2)
bullshit. (Score:1)
Imagine... (Score:2)
I've thought about this a few times and wondered what effect the portalization of various markets would have on the stability of the 'net as a whole.
Some companies pay $$ to have traffic routed across their networks, what happens if their network gets toasted by some super-malicious script kiddy or some super-malicious asteroid? How redundant is the 'net now-a-days? A lot of traffic routers through LA and San-Fran (I ran a tracert on my home connection from work, [I live in Washington State] and it seems my packets route through california... You'd think there'd be a shorter way to travel 20 miles...). What happens when Cali slides into the ocean after a 9.99 quake? Then again I think there'd be more important concerns if that happened, but still, in the aftermath I'm sure some of us would be jonesin' for our 'net connection.
It would be... (Score:1)
Re:Imagine... O/T (Score:1)
In a major earthquake, the best place to be is (obviously) somewhere else. But if you have to be caught in one, the best place to be is L.A. The building code takes quakes into account. The idea is that the building is still standing. It may not be safe, but it's not supposed to pancake on you.
Re:look behind you (Score:1)
Re:Net Crash (Score:1)
__________________________________________
Didn't something like this already happen? (Score:1)
Re:Imagine... (Score:1)
I don't mean to give terrorists any ideas...
------------
Converge! Diverge! Submerge? (Score:1)
If 50% went down, yes it would still work, but it might take a few hours probably for convergence. Depending on which routing protocol they use they usually send updates to connected routers every 90 seconds (the default IGRP interval) and even after that a downed router isnt removed from an active routers routing table after I believe 3 or 5 update periods. Depending on if hold down timer, split horizons, or poison reverse updates are in use, I think that there would probably be routing loops created that could last a while making convergence even take a day or more.
What about power stations? (Score:2)
When you get to point of having 99% of the internet down, don't you think that whatever caused it (bombs etc.) will have messed with the power supply?
Don't be shocked, fellow reader, but i'm afraid that your average joe doesn't even know what a UPS is, so i'm guessing there may be a shortage of web users at that point. Not too many people are going to experience a nuclear war, and then ask "I wonder if slashdot is still up?".
Minnesota (Score:2)
Isn't this inconsequential? (Score:5)
An anogolgy: You could probably destroy lots of surface streets in a large city without affecting the entire city much, but if you knock out a freeway you're fucked. Same with the internet.
Besides, if 99% of the nodes go down, surfing out to read slashdot probably isn't going to be at the top of my priority list... I'll most likely have my hands full fighting off alien invaders or trying to find shelter from the massive meteor storms that are destroying the world...
99% less pr0n! (Score:1)
However, in the vein of Chicken Little...
When the Martians land, all hell will break loose. Until then, I have work to do.
--The Sage
--
Available without a subscription (Score:2)
The full article is available without subscription to PRL ... you can get it from the lanl archive here [lanl.gov].
Re:bullshit. (Score:2)
Re:Take out the root.a (etc...) NS. then... (Score:1)
For a real interesting experiment, turn off the power in MAE-East [mae.net] and watch what happens...
Online Elections down? (Score:1)
Re:Dorky post : (Score:2)
Most Heavily Connected Points? (Score:2)
You mean like the root nameservers? What are there, 12 nowadays? Hmm...
We all seem to forget that the whole commercial internet would come to a screeching halt if those twelve servers--including any backups that might be in place--all decided to crash at about the same time. Minimal chances, I suppose, but the number of root nameservers is a very tiny fraction of the number of hosts on the Internet.
Granted, the connectivity wouldn't be there, but I'm have no idea what the IP address for the Slashdot web server is, and I'm not going to look it up. If the nameservers went down tomorrow, I'd have connectivity to my school and my ISP, but that's about it. Most of the web would be absolutely useless to me.
Do we solve this by distributing DNS? I have no idea. I can't believe that distributed DNS works. This danger of putting all our Internet eggs into twelve root nameserver baskets may be a danger we just have to risk.
The only policy I would implement if I were ICANN has nothing to do with risk, but opening up TLDs to everybody. Why can't they sell TLDs like they sell subdomains now? I'd love to own the .commandant TLD. Plus you could be a lot more creative and natural in the naming of websites. For instance, you could go to staroffice.sun instead of sun.com/staroffice, or netscape.navigator to check the latest netscape browser.
That's my $0.02 about TLDs and root nameservers crashing.
I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.
Re:What's the point of a 1% Internet? (Score:2)
99% of these posts contain.. (Score:2)
Re:Lovely Idea, but... (Score:2)
have to deliver quickly, but try to ensure that they aren't dropped.
This would be a bad setting for urgent content delivery, but it might
be a good setting for spreading information about traffic spikes, etc.
Huh? (Score:2)
So, what use is a "globally connected net" if 99% of the users are cut off, as well as 99% of the web servers?
There is a 99% chance that google is cut off, so that you can't search the net with google anymore. If you're lucky, google still works, but returns 99% broken links.
Maybe from a theoretical viewpoint there will still be a link from Europe to America, however, "the net" will be completely useless.
(argument: but many ISPs have more links to the internet than one. Sure, ok, but there are more nodes than one involved before you get a useful link through a secondary link. In the end I estimate that still chances are less than 1% that you'll be connected, even if you have an ISP that has multiple redundant links....)
Roger.
Re:Any bets on what that 1% will be? (Score:3)
"After a nuclear war, there's only three things that will surive: Cockroaches, Lawyers, and Spammers."
Could you borrow Lars a dollar? (Score:2)
Ask Mudge (Score:2)
Then you're SOL... (Score:5)
>ocean after a 9.99 quake?
A few months ago there was an article, an "Ask Slashdot" I beleive, that asked the question: "what would happen to the net if the US dissappeared?".
The results were somewhat supprising (once you got past a lot of the crap)....
Now, by and large, we got a lot of the standard, "good riddance to the lazy fucking arrogant "USians"" trolls. But SOME people had enough clairity of mind, and desire to contribute to actually post trace routes. And I found the results quite astounding.
Austrailian packets tracerouted through San Jose to get to New Zealand. Packets from London were going througn Boston to get to France (!!!). Vancouver packets went through San Francisco and Boston to get to Toronto. Hell, one Australian, IIRC, had a traceroute go through San Jose just to get his packets from one Sydney ISP to another!!!
So to answer your question, if California crumbles into the Pacific, I think that much of the rest of the world goes into the shitter with us.
Now, much of the REST of the US, I doubt would be missed, or, indeed, it's absence noticed. (I, for one, am still hoping for a bigass comet to take out texas... (before January 20, please)). But the Bay Area and New England ARE rathar critical.
So, as long as San Francisco, Boston, and the appendage cities that surround each, survive whatever apocolypse that wipes out 99% of the world, I think we'll be just fine. Take out either or both, and the results will NOT be pretty.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
What happens? (Score:2)
---
Re:You think failure of a few key sites is bad? (Score:2)
If we have no magnetic poles, not only does our electronics fail but so do humans due to radiation.
Keep in mind its the magnetic attraction at the poles that drag the various radiative particles from the sun away from the human populus. Can you say deep fry in 2 minutes when outside?
Re:Imagine... O/T (Score:2)
Re:Lovely Idea, but... (Score:3)
The point is, to avoid the scenario you're suggesting, there needs to be a deterrent against marking all traffic as high-priority. It could be done as placing network limitations, as it is done with IPv4-TCP out-of-band data (out-of-band data is a mechanism to send "urgent" packets overriding TCP's congestion-control mechanisms; said limit consists in only allowing one packet of OOB data to be alive in the network at a given moment), but it would probably be quite expensive to enforce. Or it can be done (much more effectively) using billing: "you can mark your packets high-priority. We charge by the byte, and high-priority packets cost twice than 'bulk' packets".
This is not, as you can see, a technical issue, but a marketing one. Unfortunately the current dominant pricing scheme is flat, which offers no such deterrent, indeed it's quite the opposite.
Re:20$ for downloading the article (Score:2)
The traceroute route is not the only route (Score:2)
Remember that these routes are just the most preferable routes at any one given time. It doesn't mean that they are the *only* routes. If San Jose died, ymight find Australian packets going via Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa, then Norway to get to New Zealand. Just because the best route is geographically a long way, it doesn't mean it's the only route.
etc. (Score:4)
" ... the powerful percolation-based approach may help Internet architects to maximize resistance against Internet attacks, by controlling the distribution of nodes having certain numbers of connections."
Re:bullshit. (Score:2)
Answers (Score:5)
You and that hot chick from high school, she still wont go out with you.
How many nukes would a missile defence umbrella stop and at what efficiency?
0, the defense department has no nuclear missle defense umrella. Give it 500 billion dollars and it will be happy to build you one with 100% efficiency right away.
If I was cleanly severed in half and survived, how long before my body dies from being unable to relieve itself?
About a week
What quantity of LSD (insert any other drug) would be needed to get an elephant high?
It is unknown wether elephants experience highs the same way humans do, but if they do, a dose of approximately 10 times the normal human dose would do it
If Microsoft finally developed the perfect OS, what would it's next killer app be?
Re:Imagine... O/T (Score:2)
People ask me if I'm afraid of earthquakes here in CA, I'm not too afraid but chances are they should be.
Tony
Lovely Idea, but... (Score:5)
If the users control it, the best you can hope for is "Geeks who know how to set IP Precedence fields get to go first!"
On second thought, maybe that's not a bad thing, after all.
Seriously though, unless you're policing the priorities, it's impossible to make this work in the real world; and if you *ARE* policing the priorities, you're more likely to introduce latency that will degrade performance when there isn't a crisis.
*sigh*
_________________________________
Re:One suggestion (Score:2)
no problem (Score:3)
It makes me really happy that I am part of the 1% that does Not use AOL.
Best Practice (Score:2)
If two men in a boat can sail up to the side of a miltary vessel and blow a fucking great hole in it, I'm sure that if anyone that dedicated wanted to, they could make a real mess of the Internet. But physical damage is going to be reasonably easy to fix as most major net nodes should have disaster recovery plans in place.
To really make a mess, why not write a nice virus or worm [hackernews.com] that would be much harder to react to and recover from.
Of course the ultimate would be to combine a few pieces into one large puzzle :- mass client infections, Root DNS DDOS attacks, email hijinks, and take out a few key cables/bottlenecks with backhoes. The trick is to create cascading failures that individually could be fixed, but the presentation of all problems at the same time makes the response and recovery that much more difficult.
Best Practice dictacts that anti-virus and firewall vendors get hit as well, just to highlight the point.
Re:Then you're SOL... (Score:4)
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were sharing some pictures (ahem) and we were getting pretty bloody slow upload/download speeds. So a quick traceroute later showed that I was sending my packets to new york and they were coming back across the atlantic to him.
Not so bad until I tell you that I live in Israel, and he lives four houses down the street.
Yikes.
Rami
--
Re:Then you're SOL... (Score:2)
Dorky post : (Score:2)
Re:Well, that's good... (Score:3)
Re:bullshit. (Score:2)
Do you have any reliable links to back that statement of yours up with.
It seems a little strange to me that a communications system that was designed to allow remote users to communicate in the aftermath of a nuclear war would be so fallable.
Dubious (Score:2)
Granted the net has changed since I last did Netop work, but there's still some practical concerns that I dunno if the article addressed. Yeah, globally the net is up with 1% of the routers going, but locally you're screwed. Here's a couple of cases in point. Several years ago there was a fire at Downer's Grove in Illinois. Downer's Grove besides being a suburb of Chicago is home to a large portion of the telecommunications interconnections in the country. From my view, it seemed as if Downer's Grove connected every thing east of the Missippi to the western part of the country. Sorta like the corpus callosum--I know I mispelled it-- in the brain. So the fire took out a couple of MCI's backbone routers--more than that. From my point of view it looked a whole lot like the country had been split. The west was fine. The east was fine, but when the two tried to talk there was nothin going through. It was a mess. No one knew why, what or where. I dunno if it is still possible to have this kind of break, but I have to wonder if the article takes into account the phsical topography of the net vs the network topography. The fact is that if the net still runs the way it did, and I'm pretty sure it does, the distributed nature of the net is misleading. Truth is that the major infrastructure is piecemeal centralized in physical locations. I'm talking about places like Downer's Grove, Arlington, and Denver--I think. These cities support a lot of the net's critical backbone routers. What's more an awful lot of them are centralized in single POPs. That means they're in a single building a lot of the time. So, when we say there's connectivity with 1% of the routers, I have to ask what if we still have connectivity with 99% of the routers. It all boils down to which ones. This incident was Octoberish '94 for those who wanna go digging through trouble ticket archives. Another incident happened in like 92. There was a bug in Gated that caused a routing problem in Boulder to propagate all across the NSFNet backbone. Everything went down. A few of the more robust machines came back up on their own and the net lurched forward, but for practical intents, unless you had a big 'ol cisco connecting your lan, you were off the net. Anyway, I should actually read the article before shooting my mouth off. Besides I'm sure a lot of people can find other cautionary tales by digging through their trouble tickets.
Re:Dubious date corrections (Score:2)
More Appreciation (Score:2)
Destroying the Net for dummies (Score:2)
1. Build a EMP "bomb" that consists of several farads worth of capacitors and a big solenoid. Have it activated by a timer, remote control, or (if you're particlarly fancy, put an embedded controller like a uLinux simm in there and wire it to ethernet).
2. Mount the bomb in a rack-mount server case.
3. Mount the rack-mount server case in a full-size rack full of "real" networking equipment; servers, dialup servers, and a router.
4. Colocate this rack at MAE-East.
5. Repeat 1-4 for MAE-West, Atlanta, Chicago, etc.
6. Have them all generate massive EMPs at the same time, preferably during a usage spike (Monday at 9AM EST, weekday evenings around 10PM EST, etc).
Extra Credit:
If you're charging the EMP bomb using 220V (which isn't entirely uncommon in colo sites), you might even be able to get a couple blasts off before it melts itself.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Well... (Score:2)
Re:Any bets on what that 1% will be? (Score:2)
Re:Answers (Score:2)
From:
http://zoo.pgh.pa.us/wildlife_search_animal.asp
Females, or cows, will reach a height of 9-10 feet tall at the shoulder; males, or bulls, will grow to 10-12 feet tall at the shoulder. The cows are smaller, weighing 8,000-10,000 lbs., and bulls will weigh between 10,000 and 12,000 lbs. when full grown.
So ughhh that would be a closer to maybe 40 times the LD for humans.
BTW i forgot what the dose was but in my pharmacology class we found out that the lethal dose is some outrageous amount like thousands of times greater than the dose needed to get off. There have only been a very few deaths due to lsd toxication. The ld is so hiigh that on the way to that dose the user usually does something like jump off a roof.
What's the point of a 1% Internet? (Score:2)
So if 99% of the web is taken out, what's left to view? If fate has a sense of humor, a bunch of Geocity pages I suppose. But really, most sites are going to be down, so it's improbable that you could get any work or business done over the Internet under such conditions.
I couldn't get to the provided links (Slashdotted already?), so maybe I'm missing the point of the study. My question is, it's nice to know the Net will still function with 99% of it gone, but if it ever came to that, what would be the point of it being up at all?
It's full of Spam! (Score:2)
[shudder]
You think failure of a few key sites is bad? (Score:2)
I dread to think of the assumptions that have been made in electrical and electronic equipment that would be affected by this!
Re:bullshit. (Score:2)