What Happens When 99% of the Net Crashes?

Sara Chan writes "The Internet remains connected on a global scale even if a randomly chosen 99% of its connection points break down. It is, however, in danger if its most highly connected points are selectively knocked out. Recent computer simulations have shown that the Internet is fairly resilient because it is scale free. The latest work, published in Physical Review Letters strengthens this conclusion. Two independent groups of researchers applied percolation theory. Percolation theory deals with systems containing points ("sites") and connections between them, and it analyzes the behavior of the system when some of the sites or connections are removed (it was developed by geophysicists for estimating how much oil could be extracted from reservoirs in a porous medium). Abstracts of the papers are available here and here."

Comments

1% of the internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then, by my calculations, we'd all party like it's 1989...

Something like this?

[ca1v1n]

Slashdot would post stories like "Ping returned in West-Coast dial-up pool, human involvement suspected." and then everyone on Slashdot would try to ping that IP, and the router would go down, and the story would be updated with "False Alarm, probably just an automated hourly windows update."

Lather, rinse, repeat...

One suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

In crisis cases, it would help immensely if packet prioritization/QoS were applied. If a pipe is so full that it is losing packets, the ones to kill off are the expendable ones -- web traffic, random high-port stuff, etc. If the gigaswitches are able to make apropriate sacrifices under duress, leaving routing messages, ICMP, etc, to survive where port-80 does not, the ability to be self-repairing is likely much improved.

Isn't this inconsequential?

[Valdez]

To give any weight to the statement "if 99% of the node go down", you'd have to assume that internet traffic is evenly spread across all nodes at all times. Of course this isn't the case... the node for an ISP which provides access to about 200 ppl in a rural Texas town isn't going to carry the same traffic as one of Qwest's core routers

An anogolgy: You could probably destroy lots of surface streets in a large city without affecting the entire city much, but if you knock out a freeway you're fucked. Same with the internet.

Besides, if 99% of the nodes go down, surfing out to read slashdot probably isn't going to be at the top of my priority list... I'll most likely have my hands full fighting off alien invaders or trying to find shelter from the massive meteor storms that are destroying the world...

Then you're SOL...

[SvnLyrBrto]

>What happens when Cali slides into the
>ocean after a 9.99 quake?

A few months ago there was an article, an "Ask Slashdot" I beleive, that asked the question: "what would happen to the net if the US dissappeared?".

The results were somewhat supprising (once you got past a lot of the crap)....

Now, by and large, we got a lot of the standard, "good riddance to the lazy fucking arrogant "USians"" trolls. But SOME people had enough clairity of mind, and desire to contribute to actually post trace routes. And I found the results quite astounding.

Austrailian packets tracerouted through San Jose to get to New Zealand. Packets from London were going througn Boston to get to France (!!!). Vancouver packets went through San Francisco and Boston to get to Toronto. Hell, one Australian, IIRC, had a traceroute go through San Jose just to get his packets from one Sydney ISP to another!!!

So to answer your question, if California crumbles into the Pacific, I think that much of the rest of the world goes into the shitter with us.

Now, much of the REST of the US, I doubt would be missed, or, indeed, it's absence noticed. (I, for one, am still hoping for a bigass comet to take out texas... (before January 20, please)). But the Bay Area and New England ARE rathar critical.

So, as long as San Francisco, Boston, and the appendage cities that surround each, survive whatever apocolypse that wipes out 99% of the world, I think we'll be just fine. Take out either or both, and the results will NOT be pretty.

john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!

Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if

Answers

[cybercuzco]

How many people would survive nuclear winter?

You and that hot chick from high school, she still wont go out with you.

How many nukes would a missile defence umbrella stop and at what efficiency?

0, the defense department has no nuclear missle defense umrella. Give it 500 billion dollars and it will be happy to build you one with 100% efficiency right away.

If I was cleanly severed in half and survived, how long before my body dies from being unable to relieve itself?

About a week

What quantity of LSD (insert any other drug) would be needed to get an elephant high?

It is unknown wether elephants experience highs the same way humans do, but if they do, a dose of approximately 10 times the normal human dose would do it

If Microsoft finally developed the perfect OS, what would it's next killer app be?

.NET

Lovely Idea, but...

[Clownburner]

The problem with prioritization is that it works great in theory, then you put the scheme in user-space and it falls apart. What's to stop users from applying a high-priority to their web traffic?

If the users control it, the best you can hope for is "Geeks who know how to set IP Precedence fields get to go first!"

On second thought, maybe that's not a bad thing, after all. :)

Seriously though, unless you're policing the priorities, it's impossible to make this work in the real world; and if you *ARE* policing the priorities, you're more likely to introduce latency that will degrade performance when there isn't a crisis.

*sigh*
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