Internet2 Taken Out by Stray Cigarette

AlHunt writes "A fire started by a homeless man knocked out service between Boston and New York on the experimental Internet2 network Tuesday night. Authorities say the fire, which also disrupted service on the Red Line subway, started around 8:20 p.m. when a homeless man tossed a lit cigarette. The cigarette landed on a mattress, which ignited and led to a two-alarm fire."

obligatory

Obligatory firewall joke here, please...

Re: obligatory

Forget hardhack, this is hobohack!

Re:obligatory

It actually was a successful test of the ultimate firewall. It prohibited all malicious hacking on Internet2.

G0d@|\/|N smokers!

You know cigarette smokers somehow think that flicking their butts isn't littering. It pisses me off to no end. HEY SMOKERS, YEH YOU! Put them out and then throw those butts in the trash, pathetic litterbugs. It's bad enough we have to smell your stink, we shouldn't have to look at your trash strewn all over the place.

Hopefully not too many smokers have mod points today...

Re:

Explain to me why you goddamn smokers can't just put your butts in your car's ashtray[1] or carry around a little cup of water or *something* that shows you're capable of not being utterly selfish about your butts. Then we'll get on the subject of why smo

Re:G0d@|\/|N smokers!

f you had just let them smoke in their offices

I'm old enough to have worked with smokers who could smoke in their offices. My girlfriend at the time could tell the days I'd gone into the smokers' offices, even for a brief visit, and would demand that I shower before I'd get any action.

Sorry, but having a smoking section in a building is like having a peeing section in a pool.

Re:

So you're saying that since some people leave bottles of beer everywhere, you should be able to leave cigarette butts everywhere too? Nice.

Re:

In other news, two wrongs now make a right?

If a cop saw you toss a beer bottle out the window, not only would you be hit with a littering fine, but you'd probably be subjected to all sorts of other unpleasantries to find out if you had just consumed said b

Re:

Cigarettes rarely, if ever, start fires in the wild. Lightning strikes and dry conditions are way more responsible than a cigarette being tossed out a window.

ORLY? [cnn.com]


As an aside, I don't dislike smokers, I just dislike discourteous smokers. And yes, I

Re:G0d@|\/|N smokers!

Smoking places second-hand smoke into the environment. I go for a drink somewhere with smokers (Only one or two), I come home smelling of cigarette smoke. I go for a drink somewhere with homosexuals (Only one or two), I do not come home gay.

I dislike people who pollute my local environment. This includes people who thing playing dance music on their phone at full volume is the height of cool and those who otherwise do things which irritate me if I'm not really paying attention. Smoking falls into this category, and I fail to see how things like 'noise pollution' can be covered by laws yet 'smoking pollution' can't.

Re:

In other news, a molehill has become a mountain. Here's tom with the weather:

I am reminded of This 2001 train accident [com.com] in Baltimore, where a tunnel fire severed a major internet backbone among other things and disrupted local communications as far away [thestandard.com]

Re:obligatory

The same thing happened here in Minneapolis in the mid 1990s. As I recall, some homeless people had built a fire under a bridge, and it destroyed a couple of conduits mounted beneath the bridge deck. The conduits held the main fibers of US West connecting Minneapolis to the backbone, blacking out the city. Apparently US West was unaware that their backup fiber providers leased space beneath the same physical bridge as their own fibers.

Since then, more carriers have installed more fibers. I don't know if carriers ever sit down and compare "bottlenecks" but I doubt that a single point of failure remains here.

As far as the Africa thing you pointed out, it's a case of a single application being down because the required servers were offline. It's certainly not a reflection of weakness with "the internet" but with that corporation's architectural design -- if they were dealing with a mission critical application, why didn't they have geographically diverse redundant data centers? The answer could have been "money" or it could have been "inexperience". Either way, the internet didn't fail the people in Africa, WorldCom failed their subscribers (there's a news flash.) It's a huge difference.

Re:obligatory

I worked somewhere once which had one main comms link and then a backup comms link if the first one went down. They had bought each one from a different carrier to be on the safe side only they hadn't realised one carrier was simlpy leasing space on the other carriers link, the exact same link their main one ran over.

Geek priorities...

INTERNET DOWN! THE experimental INTERNET that nobody uses WENT DOWN, in a fire that killed three people and did millions of damager to property.

Re:

Take it easy, nobody died, as well there is no structural damage.

Re:Geek priorities...

~ <-- joke

* <-- your head

If a cigerrette can

take out the internet... what hope do we stand against nukes?

Re:If a cigerrette can

This is what happens because the internet is designed to deal with nukes. If a nuke took out the Longfellow Bridge, Internet2 users in Boston wouldn't be complaining about their network connection to NYC, or doing much of anything else. The internet is only designed to route around damage at larger-than-blast-radius scales, and the affected area was actually quite small by those standards.

Re:

This is what happens because the internet is designed to deal with nukes.

This is common misunderstanding, so you have nothing to be ashamed of. Internet and Internet2 were first built for fast porn delivery, later military got interested and started using

Re:

You fool! The entire online porn industry is just a way to fund the NSA. What better way to ensure they have enough bandwidth and ability to shift lots of data than to control a huge chuck of it. When the time comes the porn will be the first thing they sw

Re:

I'm not sure you're right. Well, you are right about it being designed against nuclear attack, but I don't remember anything in DARPA being specific to smaller than nuclear?

Everything is based around: "oops, that route is down, lets try another". That s

Re:If a cigerrette can

take out the internet... what hope do we stand against nukes?

No need for anything that elaborate, terrorists will just send a DMCA notice to ATDN/AT&T/GX/LVL3/Verizon/NTT/Qwest/SAVVIS/Sprint informing them that their core routers are caching the IPv6 address 09F9:1102:9D74:E35B:D841:56C5:6356:88C0 inside the routing tables.

Hmmm.

I wonder if there will be a new Internet protocol for protection against malicious smoking hackers.

Re:Hmmm.

Is IPv6 flame-retardant?

An MIT student's take

It apparently also knocked out normal service to MIT students living on the Boston side of the Charles. One of my friends called me around 9:20PM (an hour after the fire started) to see if my internet connection was down. Fortunately, I live on the Cambridge side (with the main campus) so I wasn't affected. Here's what MIT IS&T had to say.

--
Wed, May 2nd:
Internet2 Service has been restored.
We have re-routed our connectivity to the Verizon TLS service, so all ILG's should be back in service as of 01:47AM this morning.

Tue, May 1st, 2007:
There was a fire earlier this evening under the Longfellow Bridge, on the Boston side of the river. This fire appears to have destroyed electrical and communications conduits that run over the Longfellow, including fiber used by MIT and other Boston area institutions to connect to Internet2.

MIT and other New England Schools are currently disconnected from Internet2. Traffic to Internet2 institutions is being routed via the Commodity Internet, but performance may be less then normal experienced.
--
They got things back going again in less than 6 hours, even though it started in the evening. Not too shabby.

Re:

No they run them through storm drains. your phone, cable, and electrical company's do it all the time. At least for the larger trunk lines of the drains.

Homeless?

It wasn't a homeless guy, it was a torch job paid for by Internet 1.

Re:Homeless?

Or, more likely, the RIAA and/or MPAA. ;)

Level3?

Internet2, level3? What's level3?
"Level 3 Communications cables used by the network went up in flames"
"Level 3 engineers estimate it could take one to two days to restore the circuit"

Taken out by a level 1 homeless person?

Re:Level3?

He obviously rolled a 20 on his attack roll.

In other news

In other news, witnesses reported a spontaneous cheer coming from the corporate headquarters of the Recording Industry Association of America.

This is why we need tougher safety standards...

Obviously the newly imposed mattress fire safety rules [consumeraffairs.com] just aren't working!

We Must act Now!

Clearly the homeless are not only unsightfull to look at, they also pose a direct threat to homeland security by sabotaging our infrastructure.

It seems clear that we must *eradicate* the homeless.

(don't mod this a troll straight away)

Re:We Must act Now!

I heard they have hammers.

Re:We Must act Now!

I was going to mod this comment -1 Unsightfull but for some reason I couldn't find that option...

Smokey says...

Only YOU can prevent Internet fires!

O How the mighty have fallen.

From the article: "The homeless man, whom authorities identified as one Kevin Rose, was apparently despondent after the recent shutdown of his tech news aggregation site. Witnesses reported seeing him staring into the flames and rocking slowly while mumbling a series of letters and numbers."

Re:O How the mighty have fallen.

"He just just kept saying '09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0' over and over"

so the fire starter didn't have a home?

Sorry, but isn't a little absurd, and likely judgmental, to mention TWICE in the abstract that the fire was started by a homeless person?

If the cig was tossed from a car window would we be hearing repeatedly about how a Toyota driver started this all?

Re:so the fire starter didn't have a home?

Sorry, but isn't a little absurd, and likely judgmental, to mention TWICE in the abstract that the fire was started by a homeless person?

I agree that twice looks a little suspicious (and how do they even know how the fire started?), but my guess is that they are trying to make it perfectly clear that it wasn't one of their own that caused the failure. That is, it wasn't a fire started by someone using Internet2, so they aren't directly to blame (but might be to blame for inadequate preparations for such events, I really don't know).

Re:

We also eat lost tourists. Throw another Aussie on the barbie, Billy-Ray! The young'uns is hungry!

Re:so the fire starter didn't have a home?

Anyone who's been beaten by an Aussie after complaining about the steak can confirm both points.

Torben

smoke kills

smoke kills [antimult.ru]

Internet and Internet Killers have this in common:

What are cigarettes, after all?

They are tubes, a series of tubes...

Old Slashdot poll

I am reminded of This [slashdot.org]

I remember voting backhoe.

Firehose

No wonder Slashdot developed Firehose....

Re:reliability?

The Internet was designed originally as a means of communication in the event of nuclear war.

No it WASN'T. It was certainly financed through DoD but go read a book on the subject instead of talking out of your ass. Where wizards stay up late is recommended, nay required reading.

Re:

But after having said all that: it still seems fair to ask why core infrastructure isn't better protected against ordinary accidents, much less sabotage.

No, it isn't fair. The Internet2 is an experimental network, and I'd certainly vote against spending

Re:reliability?

It is still safe this was just a lucky strike.

Re:

Nightmare scenario ... they merge by some obscure genetic process (involving a spider bite or something like that) to form a backhoebo.