Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the tipping-the-dominoes dept.
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."
Re:It's probably only a matter of time...
by
Claudius
·
· Score: 4
It's probably only a matter of time before the NSA and the FBI (Carnivore, anyone?) decides to knock out these backbones to stop those awful, awful criminals from trafficking in "pirated music" and "child pornography". And then what will happen to our web?
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.
This is about links, not routers.
by
ajdavis
·
· Score: 4
The reason the web appears so much more vulnerable in this study than in previous studies and general opinion is that they focus on something different from the usual. They're looking at the web, not the internet.
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
by
kwhilden
·
· Score: 3
Yeah, the Nature article is cool. There's also a Nature Science Update that explians the article in plain(er) english. The key thing is that the net is an example of a scale-free complex system, which means that there is no way to put an average number on the number of connections each node has. Being scale-free, it is vulnerable to a coordinated attack, if that attack gets one of the major nodes.
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 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.
-- Kevin Whilden
www.solarhifi.com
Re:Moron spouts about routing, moderators clueless
by
kashani
·
· Score: 3
Unfortunely you dick about routing. So do obviously the moderators. - 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. - 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. - 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. - Read "Where the Wizards Stay up Late". The Internet was NOT created to survive a snuclear war.
I wonder how many computer science folks (professors, professionals, script kiddies, etc.) know how to operate a backhoe.
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.:-)
--
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Sill missing the point, I'm afraid
by
Skim123
·
· Score: 4
The article is about how networks naturally become scale-free. Take out the "top" 4% of nodes in an exponential network and you've accomplished nothing... the network still operates at 96% efficiency.
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.
--
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
The BBC article talks about how hackers [sic] are starting to target routers and switches in order to bring things down. Just a small point to make, though: wouldn't it cause more damage to physically take out some of these links? Instead of trying to crack a box, take a backhoe and sever the cables outside the building. This has happened before, when some unwitting backhoe operator severed some cables and caused network routes to go all over hell's half-acre. Wouldn't a physical attack be easier and just as effective? I guess it's not nearly 1337 enough, though.
It's probably only a matter of time...
by
vertical-limit
·
· Score: 3
...before the NSA and the FBI (Carnivore, anyone?) decides to knock out these backbones to stop those awful, awful criminals from trafficking in "pirated music" and "child pornography". And then what will happen to our web?
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.
Where did you get the idea that the Internet is run off of static routes? Sure, a lot of ISP's on the edge use statics. Primarily because they only need one default route to their upstream provider. But the backbone?
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.
A few U.S. scientists probed the net's weakness...
by
qbasicprogrammer
·
· Score: 3
U.S. scientists have collaborated to describe why it is that the net is resilient to random failures but highly vulnerable to deliberate attacks. As the net has sprawled in many directions, its growth path has not led to a random or exponential network. Rather, the pattern that has taken shape resembles the ordered hierarchy of a tree whereby a few nodes are highly connected and lead to scores of less connected nodes. While this design allows the net to chug its way through random hiccups, it makes an attack on one of the key nodes particularly damaging.
But they don't go into the more disturbing side.
by
Estanislao+Mart�nez
·
· Score: 4
The people who run that 4% of the nodes are expanding their power and concentrating it into fewer and fewer hands. Then they will have an unprecendented amount of control over the net. They will be able to monitor our communications, and impose their rules on the rest of the net ("You host non-political-maintream sites? You can't connect to us.")
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.
Knock out the most important 4% of anything and something will go wrong. A few examples include countries, people, world leaders, country defenses (planes, tanks, etc.). Now destroying the top 4% of countries will get the top 8 countries destroyed. That's maybe the USA, England, France, Japan, Australia, Canada, China, and India? Well then you lose a good deal of the population, not to mention the services and products they provide, as well as the money they pay to have goods imported.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
...if one of their first target was AOL.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
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.
Fight Spammers!
It's probably only a matter of time before the NSA and the FBI (Carnivore, anyone?) decides to knock out these backbones to stop those awful, awful criminals from trafficking in "pirated music" and "child pornography". And then what will happen to our web?
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.
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.
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 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.
Kevin Whilden www.solarhifi.com
Unfortunely you dick about routing. So do obviously the moderators.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Read "Where the Wizards Stay up Late". The Internet was NOT created to survive a snuclear war.
Kashani -router guy
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
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. :-)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
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.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Maybe this one will work
News for UW students
The BBC article talks about how hackers [sic] are starting to target routers and switches in order to bring things down. Just a small point to make, though: wouldn't it cause more damage to physically take out some of these links? Instead of trying to crack a box, take a backhoe and sever the cables outside the building. This has happened before, when some unwitting backhoe operator severed some cables and caused network routes to go all over hell's half-acre. Wouldn't a physical attack be easier and just as effective? I guess it's not nearly 1337 enough, though.
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.
Where did you get the idea that the Internet is run off of static routes? Sure, a lot of ISP's on the edge use statics. Primarily because they only need one default route to their upstream provider. But the backbone?
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.
10 LIST : REM MER : TSIL 01
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.
Are you adequate?
Knock out the most important 4% of anything and something will go wrong. A few examples include countries, people, world leaders, country defenses (planes, tanks, etc.). Now destroying the top 4% of countries will get the top 8 countries destroyed. That's maybe the USA, England, France, Japan, Australia, Canada, China, and India? Well then you lose a good deal of the population, not to mention the services and products they provide, as well as the money they pay to have goods imported.
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...
-- Simple domain, awesome content
-----
------------
Tonight on Fox: Deadliest Executions Part XVII