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Election-Day's Effect on the Net
eastMike writes "ABC News has an article that tells of how "a good chunk of the Internet crashed ? spectacularly" during the election in 1996. I wouldn't have thought this would be much of a concern, but if it had that much of an effect in '96, then who knows. The internet has come a long way since then, but there are also a lot more people using it now." Sort of like
the old Victoria's Secret/Super Bowl problem, over the whole net. I
doubt we'll see much this year, but it still will be interesting.
In fact, election night turns out to be anti-climactic in most cases. I designed and built the election returns system for Washingtonpost.com in 1998. I busted my ass for a month prior to the elections. On election night, I ate pizza and watched returns. There was simply nothing for me to do.
...
Considering how many of us in the West have Cable modems and DSL and T1 (I've got all three), you might be in for a bumpy ride, since we're going to watch your returns to figure out whether we can risk voting Green or not.
You might want to make sure you have some good cache in San Fran
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Hey, I like Bush as much as the next guy
Hey! I am the next guy and I don't like Bush at all.
I'm not voting for Gore, I'm voting against Bush.
Cross-country pipes in 1996 tended to be skinny things, T3 at best, and you really needed them. Today, most of the big sites use caching services such as Akamai (used by Slashdot, though not its victims :-) and AT&T (handled the Democratic National Convention just fine) which spread the data out to geographically diverse caches, so Easterners get their copies from servers on the East Coast and Westerners get theirs from the West. Plus those T3 backbones are now OC48 backbones (with occasional OC192, but most of it will really be OC48 or smaller until the routers mature a bit more) - that's 48 times as large,
plus there are a lot more OC48s than there used to be T3s.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This article is really aimed at the lowest common denominator. The metaphors are lame!
My favorite quote, what a mental image is creates:
"The immediate culprit was a busted cross-country Internet pipe which was spewing out bad data."
So they've got this side street in Ames, Iowa blocked off - big hole in the ground, data spewing everywhere, the data pumps can't handle the flow!
There's a bunch of DPW sewer guys standing around in hard hats drinking coffee... those sawhorses with the flashing lights... a backhoe... and all that bad data 'spewing' into the storm drains. Do you have to call the EPA on a bad data spill?
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Way off-topic for a "news site traffice on election day" thread ... but hey. I can burn some karma.
The common criticism of the Electoral College is that "the founders didn't trust the people", so they devised the college to thwart populist movements. If that were so they would have kept King George. In fact, the Electoral College was designed because of States' Rights. When the Constitution was written, there was still a strong sense that we were Thirteen United (and somewhat separate) States. The Electoral College is designed to ensure that the winner is approved of by a majority of the states, or something closer to it than a simple population majority. A population majority would have favored Yankees from Philadelphia, New York, and Boston for President; instead, the first three Presidents were all from rural, agrarian Virginia.
Today, this Federal method of electing the President still has merit. Instead of campaigning simply in the largest states, a candidate must campaign by region. Individual voters' power is increased, on average, fifty times over a national election, because there are fifty times more opportunities for a single voter to influence the outcome. And smaller states that might be ignored have outsized electoral votes (one Representative by population, but three Electors), compared with the big prizes like California and Texas.
Even so, it's no surprise that an outsized number of presidents are from large states than simple chance would imply.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Bush was in Florida yesterday (sunday), and was attacking Gore. From what I remember on NPR, his speech was something like this. "Take Gore, he claims to have invented the Internet! If so, then why does every internet address start with 'dubya'?!? 'Dubya, dubya, dubya!'". Oy, and people want to trust him with the presidency??
(For those not following the campaigh, Bush Jr is advocating that those following him go around with his middle initial 'W', either with fingers on the hand, or on t-shirts, or chanting it, as a rally cry.)
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The Internet was never designed to survive a nuclear war. Nuclear war was never a design consideration. Please let this UL die?
Vote for me and only the right people get hurt.
http://www.armory.com/~crisper/Scorch/
Besides, most people will probably check in only once or twice while their at work (as only the exit poll results will be available), and traffic will only be heavy once people get home, and since few people have dedicated connections at home, it will not be that heavy as if it was happening during the day. You also will have all major stations covering this, so it won't be that hard to find info.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
BTW - that link was nice (like most Straight Dope columns), but didn't have anything to do with the internet. Try again?
Hey, if there are two Victoria's Secret / Super Bowl incidents, and he doesn't distinguish between them, then I'm free to infer whatever I want. :-) He shouldn't assume that I surf lingerie shops while watching football...
Still, this is interesting to read. This is the first I've heard of the web site crash. (Gah, I hate it when /. authors simply assume that their readers know about every little server downtime. Misunderstandings like this are what results. Ah well.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I am sick of these stupid, scare tactic headlines.
"Doomsday, Tuesday" is the title of the ABCnews.com article...when in the second paragraph it states, "The good news is, experts say that's unlikely to happen again."
Also at the end it states,
"Odds are good that we'll still see some sub-optimal performance numbers on election night, but it will be far from catastrophic,"
Sounds REALLY doomsdayish to me....
Originally Senators were selected by their states' legislatures, not by popular vote. The idea is that the Representatives would represent the people, but the Senators--an older and wiser group--would represent the states themselves. The reason for the electoral college is that it enabled the states, not the people, to select the president.
And electoral votes are allocated on the basis of population--they more-or-less reflect the distribution of the popular vote. Only once in more than 200 years have they disagreed. And those who think the the college keeps third parties down are more than stupid. What keeps third parties down is the fundamentally dual nature of almost every issue, and the fact that single-issue voting is incorrect. An official will decide many issues--one votes for the cadidate who most nearly matches one's own opinion. All parties try to maximise the number of people willing to vote for them--if there is a party A with 40% of the vote, then party B will be its polar opposite, in order to get that other 60%. When the majority of the people agree on an issue, then so too will the parties, for the most part.
This is why the two big parties--as well as Nader's Greens--are flip sides of the same authoritarian coin: the populace likes telling others what to do, and is willing ot be told what to do. It's who does the telling they care about. Most people are stupid, selfish sheep. They will vote to kill their neighbour if it enriches them (= voting socialist; rob the rich and give to the poor!), to pry in their neighbour's bedroom (= voting far-right; husbands and wives cannot do as they consent), to placing their security in the hands of an unworkable bureaucracy (= voting far-left). They care little for their own liberties and not a bit for anyone else's.
The situation is really quite hopeless. Rule of one fails because the one is selfish. Rule of the few fails because the few are selfish. Rule of many fails because many are selfish. Rule of all fails because all are selfish.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I suggest the election will have a similar amount of interest. And be duller.
Mind you, it costs more that way, but what does a catastrophic failure cost ???
I can just imagine it now... One last chance to exchange barbs between Gore and Bush...
Gore: Well, I 'invented' the Internet
Bush(not knowing his mic is on):Yeah, and you also crashed it.
Information is the catalyst for revolution
This could be good news for second-teir news sites. If the major news sites get swamped, many people will hit Yahoo to find other news sites.
Personally, I expect to do a lot of searching to find full results (ballot issues, local candidates, sixth-party results [let alone third-party results], and such).
You guys remember the Victoria's Secret crash?
That was my LAN party =)
http://siokaos.org/
Al Gore's got a fix for it already.
Perhaps the phone lines will be flooded with both internet traffic, and emergency calls for repetive stress to their pointer fingers.
Maybe my cable modem light will start blinking ;)
Quite possibly a rush of news-station office types trying to get some quick little tidbit off the net will have reprocussions through their local LAN, and the scheduling computers will crash, 'causing the whole TV network to go down...
Perhaps nothing will happen. *Yawn* but apocolyptic stories are always good slashdot traffic generators.
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This has been most evident during a couple of fatal train crashes. When these occurred, the BBC website would be effectivly slashdotted, not serving pages, or even serving older pages than before.
Pour saps, having to catch up on the sly with the internet while your boss isn't looking.
dnnrly
I haven't got a clue what your article has to do with Victoria Secret and or the net. Can you help?
IF there are two different Victoria's Secret / Super Bowl incidents, you ARE free to infer whatever you want. But your article isn't an example of such an "incident" (Victoria Secret != violence against women) so as far as we're concerned you haven't had your coffee yet today.
Well, it sound like the entire net is going to get slashdotted. I wonder if this needs a new name? The AOL effect(tm)? when everyone from AOL clicks on a comment board link to say ME TOO?
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
(Off-topic, I know. Go ahead, take away a karma point ...)
As someone working for one of the major political websites in 1996, I can tell you two things:
1) There were more than "localized" outages in 1996.
2) It is not going to happen to the major news sites this year.
Now for some explanation:
1) On Election Day 1996, about 6:30pm, UUNet had a major outage. What caused it, I don't remember. This caused a cascade effect, with everyone trying to route around the UUNet outage clogging the peering points (particularly the MAEs) causing widespread congestion.
The outage only lasted for about an hour. But once traffic started to flow, an hours worth of queued updates and requests flooded the servers causing additional congestion and/or failures.
Combine the above with the fact that no one had any idea how many people were going to look to the net for election coverage and we basically underestimated the impact that this would have.
2) I know most of the people that designed the systems used by the major news sites (WashingtonPost.com, NYTimes.com, CNN.com, ABCNews.com, USAToday.com) and they will not make those mistakes this year.
Clearly, the last four years has allowed us to gather a great deal more information about traffic patterns and ways to improve throughput (CDNs, lightweight pages, proxy caches, etc.). In addition, bandwidth is cheaper and more reliable than ever.
In fact, election night turns out to be anti-climactic in most cases. I designed and built the election returns system for Washingtonpost.com in 1998. I busted my ass for a month prior to the elections. On election night, I ate pizza and watched returns. There was simply nothing for me to do.
When considering the events of 1996 as compared to 2000, you have to remember that we were all flying by the seat of our pants in 1996 and had no idea what to expect both in terms of traffic and problems. We have learned a great deal since then and I would be incredibly surprised to hear of problems of this sort at any of the mainstream news sites on the net.
That may be the best euphemism for the WonderBra that I've ever seen :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
There are plenty of available airline seats from DC to Nashville, as well as plenty of hotel rooms, whereas Austin-bound airline seats are virtually non-existent (the last ones in the middle of the night are going for $1600). Plus, Austin hotels are full. This tells me the press and assorted hangers-on know that Bush will win, and want to be there for his acceptance speech
Hey, I like Bush as much as the next guy and am voting for him, but I'd like to point out that Austin is quite a bit smaller than Nashville, which may skew your "leading indicator" here.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
What difference does it make? It's not like we can vote online anyway.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
As I type (9:45 easter), cnn's realaudio feed is down . . .
Heh, and I voted against *both* of em ;)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The real reason we have never gotten rid of the electoral college is that for the last 100 years at least it has elected the person who got the most votes and thus has never pissed the nation off enough to warnent trying to change it.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
the Vickie's problem was localized - it wasn't an internet problem at all. The load balancers they were using were doing two-way traffic management for the intial site, and fell over. They were later replaced with front-end-only load balancing.
signed,
A Former Victoria's Secret Admin.
Here are a few links for those that wish to monitor Internet Usage durring the election.
Intenet Health Report
Internet Traffic Report
Internet Weather Report
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
the phrase "the Internet crashed" just makes no sense I very much doubt that a network designed to withstand nuclear war went down because too many people were on it. Most likely they mean that a large number of servers on which sites reporting news about the election were ,in effect, /.ed. But of course in 1996 it did not take alot to bring a site down with too many people a bit harder these days in particular for a big news site. Also most ISPs are much better today then they were at that point. Kind of silly but it does bring up the fact that most people out there do not understand at all what is going on in the tech world. Stories like this on /. make me sad come on people at least use the right terms and don't spread the ignorance of those who think that "the Internet crashed".
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
As someone trying to get results from the 1996 election online, I remember that.
What happened is a major link/core router/something really important like that died unexpectidly, and then people trying to get the election results had to be redirected around it, which made a huge mess. It wasn't a result of the election.
Kind of like if you have a hockey game in Toronto, it generates more traffic downtown around that time. If the Subway unexpectidly closes for another reason, the traffic will get worse as people find other ways to the game. But the Subway closing may be the result of construction or a terrorist, and not because of the hockey game. Its just that you see the results of the closure get magnified during the time of the hockey game, when the Subway is more needed.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Since then, four years have passed, and the amount of capacity and computing power on the net is orders of magnitude more. ISPs that used to run at 45Mbps now run at 5Gbps and more - a hundredfold increase in capacity (and at least 10x more if you count the increase in the number of national backbones). Meanwhile, political news is still mainly statistics, photos, and the occasional video clip - and nobody has shown that there's been a huge increase in interest in politics via the web. So this time the election-driven traffic is very unlikely to have an impact at all.
sulli
RTFJ.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Metcalfe predicted collapse and 1 year later ate his column.
sulli
RTFJ.
Here's your Internet IP forecast for the West Coast. Expect Net brownouts and timeouts all along the West Coast, especially since we're waiting on Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois, and other swing states to declare victors in the Presidential races to see if we can vote Green or not.
...
We have DSL and Cable modems, and we're not afraid to use them, especially at Election Night Ballot Stuffing parties where we plan to drop our absentee ballots off at 11 pm PST based on the votes already cast. It's legal, it's fun, and it really upsets those East Coast voters, cause they realize we get to find out who they voted for and then swing the vote back.
Prediction: Win, Win, Win - Bush will win the popular vote (by a minority), Gore will win the Electoral College and the presidency (due to nice people like me), and Nader will win national recognition for the Green Party, especially in Texas, with more than 5 percent of the vote.
If you don't believe me, I'll buy you a hard lemonade (or a beer, if you're one of those old fogies) if I'm wrong - collectable in person, just come up to me and say the magic words: "Will in Seattle, you owe me a drink or your karma will suffer." If you're not sure who I am, it's not like there's tons of Afflecks in the phone book, right? Especially ones involved in politics
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
What happens to third parties in a winner-take-all system is plainly obvious, as most people are not willing to help their least favorite party win the election just to support a losing cause.
When you have a proportional system, however, the opportunity for coalitions and partnerships between parties is created. For example, you could have a coalition government consisting of 3 small parties win over a single party that is larger than the other three.
The problem with this, however, is that the situation inevitably arises where a small party gains a disproportionate amount of political influence due to their capacity as a swing vote. For example, imagine a situation where there are 2 parties each with 45% of the vote, and a third with 10%. In this case, the small 10% party is catered to by each of the others, so that while the third party's representation may be a small fraction of the whole, they still gather a large amount of the attention.
Alexander Hamilton was aware of this fact, and mentioned it as one of his reasons why the Electoral system was created (to prevent "cabal, intrigue, and corruption", in his words), and I think that in all, it has done a fairly admirable job.
But while third parties are rarely successful in the American electoral system, this doesn't mean that they are ignored. For what happens is that the larger parties, in order to avoid the sapping of their numbers by a 3rd party, tend to absorb the ideas of the smaller parties. What results is a more moderate version of a (typically radical) agenda that helps bring more people into the fold of the larger party.
A book that goes contains a good discussion of this phenomenon, in the context of the apparent failure of socialism in america is the book It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States.
Um, I believe he was reffering to when the Victoria's Secret ad ran during the superbowl and resulted in a crashed website.
Although your link made interesting reading.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
That's not what they were referring to. They were referring to th is ad campaign during the Superbowl.
kc.
kc.
"You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel." - Homer J. Simpson
In the early 80s (as far as I go back on large scale networks like telenet and others that became the internet), they were already talking about how the net was about to be overloaded. The common phrase: "Death of the Net Predicted, Film at 11" was used to show how that common "Next month is it! The net is dead!" kept being said, but never happened.
When Delphi first gave their subscribers net access (followed by AOL, then Prodigy), many people screamed the same thing. There was a Urban Legend that said the internet was deserted, all the irc channels closed due to lack of users, and no usenet posts were made during the finale of Star Trek: Next Generation. I've got a feeling this "the internet died during the election of '96" is similar. Hey, Ozzies... how were your connections? Anybody in the UK care to comment?
The net's always "about to die!!!", but it hasn't happened yet, and it won't. Bandwidth may change, and people who think that not getting their http request fullfilled in less than 2 seconds counts as the "death of the net" may be correct for a time... but even then, I doubt it. From (where I started) promptless tty connects at 60 baud in 1979 to today, it's been a steady stride up, and the net has always been "about to die". Someone always figures out another neat thing to do with it, and make it even more valuable (and thus protected).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
GAH!!! One of the fabricators of the made up figure is Janet Katz. Coincidence? Relative? Female pen name?
BTW - that link was nice (like most Straight Dope columns), but didn't have anything to do with the internet. Try again?
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien