1373721
story
latro writes:
"A BBC story talks about a recent study that claims that knocking out the top 4% of busy nodes would break the Internet into "disconnected islands." Here's the Nature article, which is really more about the error tolerance of complex systems in general, with the Web as an example."
nice article NAME (Score:1)
Re:Backhoe experience needed (Score:1)
The article explained that the cross-thai cable got dug up on a near monthly basis. You're supposed to check for that when getting your building permits, but
Re:Well, Duh! (Score:1)
Oh well. The historical nit-picker in me rejoices that the old chestnut about the Internet being designed to survive a nuclear war has finally been put to rest.
Re:Backhoe experience needed (Score:2)
Re:This is about links, not routers. (Score:2)
For the web, it's kinda like the difference between taking out google and my home page [slashdot.org] For the 'net, it's like the difference between taking a backhoe to (one of) Seattle's bacbone links vs. your phone company dropping your ADSL link.
Pretty much the same kinda response in both cases.
Re:OT: Re:A few facts, if you can handle them: (Score:2)
Re:This is normal!! (Score:1)
Re:OT: Re:A few facts, if you can handle them: (Score:2)
I don't know about that 17,500 figure being solely homicides. Gun-control advocates have a habit of playing fast and loose with facts--the recent 'child killed every day' statistic counted everyone from 0 to 19(!) as a child. Turns out that when 15-19 are dropped from that, the number is nearly nil.
What I would really like is to know what proportion of those killed are `innocent.' Obviously guns are a favourite tool of criminals, and obviously they spend a lot of time killing each other. It's hard for me to get excited over one mafioso killing another or a drug deal going sour; I get very disturbed when some kid gets his head blown out for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Re:US as an Internet hub (Score:2)
has a decent deconstruction of precisely this question.
The article is precisely about the building of that OC192 in the late 90's in response to the KMI study (well, it's about a lot of other things too, but that's what's at the core of the article.Re:Er, sorry. I'm right. Think about it. (Score:1)
The laws are written(see other posts in this article about case/common law precedent), its just the constitution that isn't.
Although actually, now that we have the EU declaration of human rights, we do have a written constitution anyway.
And another thing, where does this 80% tax theory come from ? I pay 25% on the first thirty-five thousand pounds, give or take a bit, and 40% on the rest. Doesn't seem that burdensome to me.
Re:This was already discussed on NANOG... (Score:1)
Re:OT: Re:A few facts, if you can handle them: (Score:2)
Speaking of which... (Score:1)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Re:OT: Re:A few facts, if you can handle them: (Score:2)
As an example, it produced numbers showing that gonorrhea cases went down when liquor taxes went up, and up when taxes went down. It has thus decided to push for higher liquor taxes, enver mind the fact that a) people should be free to hurt themselves however they choose and b) statistical correlation is not proof of causation. Twits, IMHO. Just another example of their antics, not that it necessarily discredits this particular set of statistics. But one always tries to consider the source...
Not impressed (Score:1)
Not counting that no error correction was taking into account nor was the propagation time of the attack.
No, it really looks like another case of journatist going for the sensational line instead of doing a factual anylysis of the subject.
Not right, either (Score:1)
Re:actually (Score:1)
Re:Backhoe experience needed (Score:1)
Re:Military Destruction (Score:1)
It wouldn't be so bad... (Score:3)
Re:Mudge finally makes sense (Score:1)
Re:Well, Duh! (Score:1)
Re:Military Destruction (Score:1)
-----------------------
Re: (Score:2)
Re:But they don't go into the more disturbing side (Score:1)
Re:This is normal!! (Score:1)
They might have financial woes, but do few entities ready to file Chapter 11 can lob a nuke into your backyard.
Andrew Borntreger
+5?? (Score:1)
The only thing that makes a member of the 4% special is that their site is a bridge between large sections of the Web. Nothing else. It needn't even be highly connected itself. For instance, let's say all sites were partitioned into two groups: A) Those you could get to via Yahoo and B) Those you could get to via InfoSeek. Further assume that none of those sites linked to sites in the other group. Now I start a site that has just two link: 1) To Yahoo, 2) To InfoSeek. MY site is the only one linking "the whole internet" together. What power do I have? None.
Furthermore, let's say that I DID have power by virtue of my accidental placement. That power is easily wrenched from me by anyone who sets up their own site that links Yahoo and InfoSeek.
Yes, the Web has "link bottlenecks". But they web is three-dimensional, you don't have to travel linearly. Just hop right to the location you want and bypass the bottleneck altogether. Better yet, create your own site and make the bottle neck disappear.
--
Give us our karma back! Punish Karma Whores through meta-mod!
where?? (Score:1)
Re:But they don't go into the more disturbing side (Score:1)
As far as the concentration of this power, you're entirely bass-ackwards. First off, telcos everywhere around the world are being privatized. This brings new competition into the mix, and actually increases the amount of diverse ownership. More routes are created, more connections, less bottlenecks.
That can already be done, and it IS being done. I'll agree with other Slashdotters woh have at times mentioned the fact that, more than likely, we're being egoistic when we think governments are spying on us. The government could care less what 99% of its population's communication is.
This looks to be a combination of oversimplification and lack of evidence to support your view. Interesting, but for practical purposes, worthless.
Re:voilŕ qui qu'on a icitte asteur encore une fois (Score:2)
Dang someone did it fast... (Score:2)
A problem with the requested page prevents us
from delivering it.
If this problem persists, please contact customer
support.
Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2000 Registered No. 785998
who would have expected?
Military Destruction (Score:1)
-----------------------
Re:Correct. Australia mostly has fewer gun laws. (Score:1)
As mentioned, no NRA. The right to bear arms such as it is in the US [constitution.org] has no equivalent in the Australian constitution (a formal document [aph.gov.au]) nor the constitutions of the states of Australia (usually not formal documents).
Yeah, speaking of the web being broken... (Score:1)
A problem with the requested page prevents us from delivering it.
If this problem persists, please contact customer support.
I see they're talking about more than broken routers here when they mention the 'Web' being broken... :)
Re:A few facts, if you can handle them: (Score:1)
Re:Oh look, it's the boy who can't read again. (Score:1)
The point being made, and no matter how one cuts the figures, the point remains the _VAST_ difference between firearm mortallity in the US and Oz is due to the availability (legal, righteous, de facto or otherwise) of firearms.
Period.
If the Australian Statistics do not entertain then look at, gee I don't know, the UK where I predict (without having looked at the data) that the figures will be more like the Australian ones than the US ones.
Oh, BTW, I ain't no antigin campaigner, I just think if you like to have 'em around you gotta take the statistical medicine that is so bleedingly obviously there.
Oh great... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:A few facts, if you can handle them: (Score:1)
As far as rights, the Monarch signed the Magna Carta, giving certain rights to the people of Britain. The rest of the law and the sitting of parliament is, however a pleasure of the Queen.
It seems to work, though.
Re:Physical attacks? (Score:2)
So what??? (Score:4)
Someone could write a windows email virus that will shut down 50% of the machines on the net..never mind, already happened.
A person can shut down half the city of Boston with a fertilizer truck in the right place.
There is no real security. Someone can always find a way around it.
People don't realize that they lose their rights in the name of security, but are defrauded because they don't get security.
First, web != net, Second, you're an idiot (Score:1)
Evidently you don't - the article refers to attacking core internet routers. This has essentially zilch to do with HTML/HTTP trials at CERN.
It's time to privatize the architecture of the Web. It's time to start over with something done on time and under budget, the way private enterprise can and must do things because of its very nature.
Thankfully you had the common sense to post this trash as an AC - your comments are completely uninformed. The internet was the creation of big government planning and spending.
Re:It's probably only a matter of time... (Score:4)
Nah. You see, this Internet thing, aside from its intended purpose of trafficking all sorts of salaciousness, has the curious side effect of making a large number of people in the U.S. a great deal of money. Heaps and gobs of the stuff, in fact. And if there's one thing the U.S. government is addicted to it's mad cash flowing into the coffers. To suggest that they would pinch off the stream of greenbacks heading their way is like thinking a guy can stop peeing midstream. It just ain't gonna happen.
Re:This is normal!! (Score:2)
Re:A few facts, if you can handle them: (Score:1)
Fact: the US has more citizens incarcerated for violent crimes per capita than any other industrialized nation. Oops, correct, about five times.
As it stands, most of the European nations have crime rates far lower than even the safest US states.
This is why the KKK has always been in favor of gun control (along with public education).
This is tantamount to invoking Hitler/Nazis as a straw-man couter-argument. Under Godwin's law, you lose.
Fact: That's a pretentious way of talking around the fact that you have no rights as men or as citizens. The truth is that British citizens are subjects of the Queen,
The Queen has the same symbolic role as Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Don't kid yourself into thinking the US doesn't have royalty that is worshipped in the same pathetic way as the Windsors.
Fact: European tax rates vary between 70% and 90%
Next year when you're in grade eleven, you'll learn all about serious research, and all of this will be a distant memory.
OK... that's annoying.. (Score:1)
I assume some people READ the articles (Score:2)
I think that there is an important point to be made concerning the Web. The nodes and pages and the edges and links. But our lists of bookmarks consist of nodes with lots of outgoing links. Also, there are links that are connected logically, but not physically. URLs in magazines, on TV and radio, on T-shirts and billboards are logically part of the Web. There are nodes that can't be taken down via the Internet. That is the crux of the argument that many searches begin with URLs that are typed by the user.
Re:Yeah, but it'd take quite a bit of doing. (Score:2)
Then there is the problem of what happens after taking out a location such as MAE-East. Within hours the network engineers would be figuring out ways to reconnect to each other, and how to route around the damage.
Yes, a large scale attack would hurt the internet for a short period of time. But the internet is resilient and would bounce back in dozens of alternate routes, and all the network admins would be on alert for any more outages. Law enforcement would also be on a hightened state of alert, making it much more difficult for criminals or terrorists to continue attacting the internet.
This report has already been dissed as just so much FUD by someone selling something. And clueless media are now picking up on the report and spreading the FUD around. But to take out 4% of the routing nodes on the internet would require a large sized military force with excellent communications and coordination, who would immediately be the target of both law enforcement and the military.
the AC
Re:It's probably only a matter of time... (Score:1)
I wouldn't know. I could guess what Kegel exercises are, but I'm probably better off not knowing... Probably.
I just have to ask why you'd expect most people to just know? Scratch that, I think I'm better off not knowing that either.
In any case, I don't know about most people, but I do that I (and probably a bunch of other guys as well) learned how to do it because of too many "General Quarters" called at the most inconvenient times...
Hmm, incentive.
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
Re:It's probably only a matter of time... (Score:1)
--
Re:It's probably only a matter of time... (Score:2)
There are no federal taxes and few local taxes on Internet sales. The federal government, I am sure though, is quite delighted with the high-income tax returns from the amazon, ebay and other DCM (Dot Com Millionaires) out there.
However, place an Internet Sales Tax of 1% on all online sales and have those revenues go to the federal government and the Internet will have more safety and contigency plans than the stock market or the postal service.
Don't you wish people would quit refering to the Internet as "The Web"?
I can't believe this got moderated up (Score:1)
Not as bad as it seem (Score:1)
Ok, you disrupt 4% of the most important nodes, then the internet is a bunch of islands.
You still have all those little islands. Each one of these are a small Internet on their own. You can still do a lot of things. You will just get a little be more local.
I have yet to see research on how fast these little island could interconnect back to each other with zillion of small bandwidth links.
Also how hard would it be to disrupt the 4% top node at the same time. Nobody did a study on that.
Re:It's probably only a matter of time... (Score:1)
Re:"Seems to work"? (Score:1)
I agree, the first thing the US did as a nation was to separate the blacks and the whites.
Re:A few facts, if you can handle them: (Score:2)
IIRC, the only legal responsibility of the Queen is to open sessions of pariliment.
Fault-tolerant system my ass. (Score:2)
Too bad we woke up.
Nowadays, as I'm certain every person reading this has experienced, if a single router goes down somewhere in the path, you are completely cut off from that machine. It doesn't matter that your ISP has a dozen peering arrangements, because the routing tables on the machines are static. They say "The shortest path to machine x.x.x.x is by gateway y.y.y.y, and I don't care if no packets are getting through on that path, that's the path you take."
It may be that you could get through if you used your ricochet or (worse yet) telnetted to another machine to force a new path around the problem, but until someone manually updated the routing table of an upstream machine, or the router is fixed, you're screwed.
This problem is doubled by the fact that the 'chosen' path from machine x to machine y can easily be very different than the path back from y to x, doubling the single points of failure.
When darpa-net was designed, it was with the intention of providing a system that would still be effective even if 80% of the nodes were knocked out or otherwise severed in a nuclear attack.
Now a doink with a backhoe can knock out a million users.
Kevin Fox
Re:You know.... (Score:1)
Re:This is normal!! (Score:1)
Re:This is normal!! (OT) (Score:1)
Does anyone know when they're turning off VHS broadcasts?
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Re:Mudge finally makes sense (Score:1)
If anyone could do it, my money'd be on the l0pht.
Hmm, I bet my employer'd be pissed if I ran l0phtcrack on their SAM file.....
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Re:Mudge finally makes sense (Score:1)
Good to see the beeb are up to date
jh
imminent end of internet predicted! (Score:1)
Re:Fault-tolerant system my ass. (Score:1)
Sure, the backbones aren't going down. The larger ISPs might not go down. The smaller local ISPs (say 20,000 users and smaller) are the ones who have problems with this sort of thing.
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Re:This is normal!! (Score:2)
And then private peering nobody knows about would take up most of the slack very quickly.
4% sounds small because it's a single-digit number, but it would be easier to assassinate every member of Congress simultaneously than it would be to take down the Internet this way.
Admittedly, we spend more money defending against the former, but a lot of that money is ALSO spent defending against the latter.
To coordinate such a strike, you'd have to risk butting heads with an FBI that has ALWAYS found out about anything attempted on a similar scale.
I'm not worried about it.
DDoS attacks are orders of magnitude less costly, and nearly as effective.
--
Re:So what??? (Score:1)
God Bless You (Score:1)
Re:Yeah, speaking of the web being broken... (Score:2)
This is about links, not routers. (Score:4)
They're looking at the web topologically, as usual, but rather than measuring distance from site A to site B by the minimal number of router hops required, they're measuring the number of clickable links from A to B. In other words, if you started at A.com and had no keyboard, could you click your way to B.com?
The results were that topological diameter was 19 links. Anyone know the diameter of the internet (average traceroute hops from any site to any other)? Furthermore, the overall connectedness is low, so if you took out (e.g.) Yahoo and MSN, you might not be able to click from someone's panda hentai page at Geocities to my Jar-Jar hate site. I can't seem to find in the articles whether this only deals with static linking, or if search engines are accounted for somehow.
This is sort of an odd way to look at the web. Most people don't start from their home page and start clicking until they find something interesting. You start at some place you type in, do a search, make a huge leap into a topologically distant area, then start moving around connected nodes, then make another huge leap. If MSN died and their routers stayed up, would the web be geometrically less useful, as they claim, or just linearly less useful?
I'd say that this focus on the topology of links is really vieaux chapeau now that most people use interactive services to grab information. The web isn't a static, well, "web", anymore.
dangerous to the environment too (Score:3)
The scary thing is that the environment and ecosystems operate on the same principle (scale-free). And we are just plucking away, destroying bits and pieces without much logic or foresight. That's good because we are not likely to kill the critical nodes right away. But eventually we will, and various ecological systems will start to collapse. This is already happening in Borneo, where the rainforest is rapidly collapsing and dying off [yourplanetearth.org] due to the combination of human and natural stress.
The really really scary thing is that we will never know what the critical nodes are in the various ecosystems until it is too late. Yet we keep on destroying and polluting. We are doomed unless we wake up soon.
What's vulnerable? (Score:2)
And while that might be within the capabilities of some hacker, hack attacks are pretty temporary at worst; it's hard to imagine anybody being able to hold "own" 4% of the world's routers for any length of time without getting caught. To do any serious damage, it would take explosives, lot of them. And well-aimed ones at that, so we can rule out Russian-built missiles. Ryder vans, of course, are another story.
It's certainly an interesting study, but it's also a case of researchers using a scary headline to puff their research. If there were enough explosions to blow up 4% of all the routers, I think the 'net would be the least of our worries.
Re:Fault-tolerant system my ass. (Score:2)
The article is saying that the web (or scale-free networks as they call it) is resistant to random failures i.e. fault tolerant, due to the fact that very high connectivity is given to some nodes in the network - the probability that the relatively small number of high connectivity nodes are knocked out by random failure is low, as a simple statistical fact. But the web is vulnerable to systematic attacks, for the same reason.
Re:Not as bad as it seem (Score:2)
What I'd like to know... (Score:2)
However, for those of us who have domains that were registered through NSI, how would we update our domain information? If NSI's billing info and whois database were lost, what happens then?
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OT: Re:A few facts, if you can handle them: (Score:2)
It has been shown in the US that cities which implement gun control see rising crime rates, while those that relax gun restrictions see falling crime rates. Concealed carry laws drop crime quite spectacularly, while gun bans tend to raise it just as spectacularly.
I know of no instance where gun bans have resulted in a drop in crime, although I will not deny the possibility outright.
Bear in mind that something like 40-60% of US gun deaths are suicides, not assaults. Also bear in mind that studies have shown that resisting an attacker with a gun is more effective at reducing or eliminating injury than complying with the attacker's demands, but resisting in any other fashion is less effective than complying.
That, and the right to bear weapons has been historically (in Europe, at least) one of the primary distinctions between the slave and the freeman. Not that gun control advocates want to enslave people. I think that most of them are genuinely concerned about crime and that sort of thing; they are simply mistaken about the means to address these problems. But the fact remains that a man who cannot defend himself has no freedom; he is in the position of the child who must rely on his parents for protection. I think most of us outgrew that phase of our lives a long time ago.
Re:But they don't go into the more disturbing side (Score:2)
It would take an ungodly amount of processing power to check each packet to see where it is going and reject/drop it. Then you can come back and say well processing power is always increasing but I come back and say so is bandwith and the use of bandwith.
It just ain't possible to block those certian sites without bringing everything down to a crawl, i.e. killing your routers. It would be like DDoSing your self.
Re:actually (Score:2)
Re:Moron spouts about routing, moderators clueless (Score:3)
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The whole purpose of BGP is to be stable yet allow you to route around things. True, BGP does not take into consideration pipe size, saturation, etc like some IGP's do. Of course most network operators have a vested intrest is making such this doesn't happen. This why we have nice knobs and switches in BGP like AS padding, localpref, compare MED, etc.
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If a router is returning no packets it can't very well maintain a BGP session which is TCP based. Session goes down, routes drop. Convergence is on the order of less than 60 secs unless you set something like no bgp-fast-exteral-failover.
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Of course your ISP could be doing something monumentally stupid like running RIPv2 across their core. In which case, yes what you summarized might happen, if the operators were retarded or something.
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Read "Where the Wizards Stay up Late". The Internet was NOT created to survive a snuclear war.
Kashani -router guy
Re:A few facts, if you can handle them: (Score:2)
Fact: In America you are allowed to own guns. In Australia, for the most part, you aren't. Why, if this is the case, is Australia's homicide rate only *8%* of America's?
Backhoe experience needed (Score:4)
Nothing would be funnier, however, than seeing some 6'2", 90 pound guy with long, greasy black hair, dressed in black and wearing a Magic robe trying to work a backhoe. :-)
Re:US as an Internet hub (Score:2)
You missed this [slashdot.org] /. article about the Internet's dependancy on the US as a back-bone.
If you look at UUNET's map [uunet.com] of thier pipes, you'll see that there are a pair of OC192's (10Gbps each) from London directly to Hong Kong, and many, many, many times that bandwidth between London and Hong Kong via the US->Japan or US->Austrailia. So, if the US got baked, UUNET would have a VERY busy pair of wires running through the Indian Ocean...
Of course, this is just UUNET, but it gives you an idea of the what the networks probably look like.
Sill missing the point, I'm afraid (Score:4)
The article, IMHO, was about the tendency for networks in nature to become scale-free. Imagine if your brain cells were arranged in an exponential network... each time you bumped your head or chugged a beer you might loose a percentage of your total intellectual capacity! That would suck. Since your brain is a scale-free network, such activities lead to a much less dramatic loss... the brain is neat, too, because the network can rewire itself in case of damage or even practice. For example, cab drivers have, on average, more connections in the part of their brain responsible for navigation and spatial abilities than do non-cab drivers.
A Link (Score:5)
Physical attacks? (Score:3)
Well, Duh! (Score:2)
Do you want all the computers to act as backbones?
4% is about the size of all the backbones anyway. Unless you have planet-sized wireless comunications, this is to be expected.
Besides, do you know how many computers 4% nodes are???
Taking them down would take work, and it is not just 4%. You have to take down the correct 4% (which would be hard as you start making islands)
It's probably only a matter of time... (Score:3)
An emergency plan needs to be developed in case the USians ever try to take down the Internet. Who will become the primary nameservers? Who will register domain names? What will the central backbones be? I don't see any of this discussion, and I'm getting worried that there simply aren't any contigency plans -- the Web (and, consequently, the Internet) really could be taken out with a few simple attacks. Why isn't someone doing something about this? I think this is a great chance for the 'net community to ban together and forge a grassroots, international solution.
Don't just sit back and complain. Take action. Now.
Re:Oh look, it's the boy who can't read again. (Score:2)
US Center for Disease Control.
AUSTRA LIA UNITED STATES
Population18,173,600 254,250,000
Annual Gun Deaths 596 38,317
Gun Homicides85 17,971
Or is that not solid enough a "fact" for you?
this was discussed on a freenet listserve (Score:2)
The conclusion we drew (or at least I did) was that as long as the there ditributed net was sufficiently large enough and old enough so that enough replication had occured, a distributed system could survive temporary outages of this sort....
Yeah, but it'd take quite a bit of doing. (Score:2)
There's how many millions of nodes on the net?
What percent of them are considered busy? Maybe 1%?
And taking out 4% of those (either through physical damage or (less likely since they're more or less equipped for high throughput) would take down the net.
Let's say there's a million nodes.
1% of 1,000,000=10,000 'busy' nodes.
4% of 10,000=400.
So you'd have to take out roughly 400 nodes. All of whom are probably quite widely distributed (in the geographic sense).
Yeah. Looks feasible to me!
Let's just say it's going to take a LOT of damage to take out that many connections.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Re:Fact: Get your facts straight. (Score:2)
And it's not recent. It was four years ago. I actually live in Austraila. I know when the gun laws were enacted.
Re:Insightful? my ass. (Score:4)
Have you heard of BGP? Border Gateway Protocol? That's what runs routing on the backbone, and it is the dynamic routing protocol. It's the duct tape that holds this thing together, and it's quite dynamic. It would probably take any backbone ISP (C&W, UUNet, Qwest, etc.) a week to statically configure that routes that work for one day. Never mind that the only way you would figure out how to configure the routes would be to use a dynamic routing protocol. The Internet is far too big and complex to ever manually configure it.
While it's true that BGP will still sometimes black-hole traffic by sending it down a broken link, that doesn't change the fact that it's dynamic. The problem stems from the fact that BGP can't always tell that a given route doesn't work. Usually it can, but not in all circumstances.
Re:Correct. Australia mostly has fewer gun laws. (Score:2)
Specifically, fully automatic weapons are banned. Completely.
Semi-automatic weapons were also nearly totally banned.
Pistols require strict licencing.
Even rifles are very tightly controlled.
Is this what you meant by fewer laws? The kind that mean in America you are almost TWENTY times more likely to die as a result of gun homicide than Australia? Thanks, I think I prefer fewer gun laws.
OMG! The Internet is not what it used to be! (Score:2)
Back in the good old days, we used to route packets BY HAND! And the Internet what so much freer when the only hosts were in Stanford and random Ivy League universities. We had really a sense of community, just like when I go to the Lion's Club.
Today, this sense of community is gone, and we have to find substitutes for it ... such as Karma, BTW mine is at 64 currently, but I guess Estasinus's must be much higher.
This is a real problem, and it is only getting worse every day. The "geek"'s image of a "free" Internet is vanishing fast with the massification and profitability of the net.
The "free" Internet may seem to vanish, but FEAR NTO!!! Profitability is still a distant blip on most startups!! THERE IS STILL HOPE!! Let's all unite and work for a profit-less Internet! Not that there's much to do though.
A few U.S. scientists probed the net's weakness... (Score:3)
But they don't go into the more disturbing side. (Score:4)
This is a real problem, and it is only getting worse every day. The "geek"'s image of a "free" Internet is vanishing fast with the massification and profitability of the net.
Re:Yeah, but it'd take quite a bit of doing. (Score:2)
The problems with any kind of coordinated military style attack is that it can be very easily detected by counterintelligence agencies. And after the attack, the perps have to go somewhere, they don't just disappear into thin air. If there was any kind of coordinated attack on the US, every border crossing and airport would be stitched up tight, and then it would just be a matter of time as the FBI and local LE did their good old fashioned police work and rounded up a majority of the force. They might not get all of them, but even 50% capture rate would make for some good headlines.
The result of any such attack, even if only against a few main nodes like MAE-east/west, would tighten up the whole system.
the AC
Visibile net versus actual net.. (Score:2)
So 4% quickly turns into a much bigger number.
Re:OMG! The Internet is not what it used to be! (Score:2)
The guy has a point. The whole idea of the internet is robustness by redundant links.
Of course, the us government got sick and tired of paying for everyone, so they made companies take over. Of course, the last thing a company wants to be is redundant. This is a real problem. As more and more of the world's economy is channeled down these pipes, we are also seeing the pipes getting fewer and fewer.
Of course, the realistic concern isn't whether the companies that own the pipes will start blocking our pr0n, nor is it that malicious crackers will try to take down the net (this wouldn't really serve their purposes now, would it? They rely on the net more than most).
Rather, a very modest and easy to come by amount of explosives can soon disrupt a large part of the world economy.
Previously, you (as a hypothetical terrorist, not a sarcarsic hand routing old timer) would have to take out most of downtown new york to do that (or frankfurt, more likely). Logistics nightmare, I'd imagine, and probably requiring a nuke lite.
Taking out MAE east, tho, is pretty much shooting fish in a barrel in comparison.
Ok, so satelite links are still in place. There is no way they could take up the slack. That's the point of the article. There is no slack.
This is what is dangerous about the commercialisation of the internet.
This is normal!! (Score:3)
Hell, even knocking out the top 1% of anything would mess up a lot. If the US and Japan were wiped off the face of this planet, well there would be quite a bit of trouble.
Just a thought...
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My God! (Score:2)