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.
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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?