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5% of the Net is Unreachable
dasheiff writes "A BBC
Story says
US researchers reveal that up to 5% of the internet is completely unreachable. However the most interesting part is that they reported that many of the lost net sites flare into life briefly when being used to send spam or to launch attacks on other parts of the net."
Then again, the figure would have been more like 50% in that case...
That link appears to be unreachable from my network.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
The article also reports that approximately 13% of network admins are unreachable. These are the same people believed to be responsible for leaving Windows NT/2000 machines serving web pages without any service packs or security patches. These admins surface from time to time when they respond to said spam.
What's your damage, Heather?
If it is unreachable, is it really part of the Internet?
When I turn off my router, I don't really consider my home machines part of the Internet even though they are running and connected by a physicall wire.
Here, let me sum up for you.
Spammers hide on the 'net by playing with unsecured routers.
What worries me is that it took someone three years to figure this out...
- fader
...the article says those sites are "old" and "unlisted due to age" (not direct quotes)
Maybe they just, um, are delisted due to paranoia, perhaps justified?
Writers imply. Readers infer.
That's funny, when I try to send replies to all my spam, it seems that 100% of the net is unreachable...
I own a site which could, for all intents and purposes could be called a 'lost site'. It's a domain which is virtually inactive (mainly because, quite frankly, I'm a lazy bastard).
Most of the time, don't give genius the credit when stupidity could do.
Now, I've been atacked by these spamholes as well. There's nothing like hijacking a DNS server.. oops..
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Does this explain why www.theregister.co.uk is returning NXDOMAIN?
.au recently, and put it down to holidays being had by people who usually boot broken kit.
I've certainly noticed problems resolving various places from
5% of all internet sites unreachable?
...maybe they were slashdotted
I Heart Sorting Networks
My war on spam begins with all Spammers, but it does not end there. It will not end until every spamming group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.
These spamists spam not merely to waste bandwidth, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every piece of unsolicited mail, they hope that genuine e-mailers grow fearful, retreating from cyber space and forsaking news groups. They stand against me, because I stand in their way.
I am not deceived by their pretenses to piety. I have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the spamist ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing bandwidth to serve their advertising visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded trash cans.
My response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated replies.
I should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic e-mails to ISP's, visible to News groups, and covert operations, secret even in success. I will starve spamists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from ISP to ISP, until there is no refuge or no rest. And I will pursue ISP's that provide aid or safe haven to spammers. Every ISP, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with me, or you are with the spamists.
From this day forward, any ISP that continues to harbor or support spamists will be regarded by me as a hostile regime.
All speling, factual, tact, and/or grametical errers be the result of netwerk interpherance or# transmition ererrs.
at any given time, 5% of all the Windows servers out there are busy rebooting
I Heart Sorting Networks
I'd wager a great deal more than 5% is inaccessible if you count all the home sites locked away behind nat firewalls. Once we all start getting hundreds of IPv6 addresses at home, we'll start to see hundreds more small home/user sites popping up. This could greatly change the structure of the net, once again breaking away from the central information resources we are beggining to solely rely on and start using small independent resources much more.
a split could become a serious threat to the internet as it expands. With ISPs choosing higher capacity lines in order to keep their customers happy, the companies with the fattest pipes will get all the connections. If the routers that control the traffic on these high bandwidth lines get overloaded or hacked, there is a potential for the internet to split apart.
I've run into sites which are up or down and often they're in a small shop and they actually power down their server (or it happens with a power/service outage) Lots of broken links on images. It would be interesting to see a statistic on how many pages which are technically non-functional still exist, i.e. with parts unable to display due to broken links, from sites gone away or pages moved but links not updated (which even M$N does from time to time)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The problem with lost peering agreements between ISPs causing partial 'net outages is well-understood. So what exactly have they measured here?! Seems like a shaky story to get one's name in the news.
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
More than once, I've said "Here you are, you get an entire Class A because we think you are so great. Your adresses are 10.x.x.x"
... that much spam could be identified and stopped more easily by careful tracking of the routing information. The article (actually you have to follow the PDF link to get the real information, not just the executive summary) points out that much of the spam identified came from sites that were established and routed, then sent out the spam, and then shut down again immediately.
Seems to me that you could make some progress against the spam by simply refusing any email from a domain that hadn't been recognized on the net for at least several days or maybe weeks.
If you haven't followed the PDF link, there are some interesting time history graphs of various routing parameters. Worth checking out.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
actually,a BBC rehash of an article that was up a month ago
7 23 7&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/15/051
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
After they switched our cable modem over to AT&T's new network from Excite, I noticed that even though they were dynamically assigning the router 5 different DNS servers on widely disparate networks, I still couldn't resolve regular sites like slashdot or CNN. Just errored out.
Did Excite do some sort of large scale public service that I'm unaware of? Were they providing really top of the line DNS service and I was just too dumb to realize it?
Doesn't this sound like a country song... "Didn't know what good DNS I had, until it was gone..."
Maybe it's time I press this old windows box into service as a public DNS server. I mean, small contributions make the world go around, right? I bet I could get redhat running in an hour or less...
This just proves, an idle mind is the devil's workshop...
Who did what now?
it happened to be the 5% not worth viewing.
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
"So when they counted the census results last year, they noticed that 1.5 to 2 percent of the population went uncounted.... How do they know that?"
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
How exactly does one define any part of the net as "unreachable?" Doesn't the term "internet" imply that it is available on the network?
;)
Seems kinda silly if you ask me. Why not declare that 59.28% of the internet is unreachable? Why not 600%? They're all equally unprovable and meaningless
------
Today's Top Deals
Thats the @home Part of the Internet....
enough said.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
The only time I worry is when 127.0.0.1 becomes unreachable.
It's irritating how people don't even read the BBC quick-article, but for those who actually want to know what the researchers figured out: the paper is here; it's in Acrobat format, sigh.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Seriously, I could've told you that 5% of the net is unreachable at any given time. It's called "PPP Connections". This is some sort of breakthrough research?
- A.P.
"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?"
is an XP box that I refuse to leave powered up when I am not using it. Nothing like a patch a day security.
For those that don't have access to that disgusting PDF Adobe file format, here is a link to a plain html version.
If it's unreachable, it's not part of the net. Hence the word network. Therefore no part of the net is unreachable.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Maybe it's just the 5% of pr0n sites that they don't have passwords to?
:^)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
It's gotta be more than 5%. I generally can't connect to *any* link on the front page of this site...
This page accidentally left blank
>The Reg® carried this story about then, too..
3 7 ("Researchers Probe Dark and Murky Net")
:)
So did Slashdot, with the same byline and the same link to the same SecurityFocus article:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/15/05172
I think tomorrow we'll be hearing that the Mir is about to plummet back to earth
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
whois theregister.co.uk
Domain Name: THEREGISTER.CO.UK
Registered For: The Register
Domain Registered By: DETAGGED
Record last updated on 24-Dec-2001 by .
Domain servers listed in order:
WHOIS database last updated at 08:21:01 26-Dec-2001
The fact the the company works for, may or may not making tools used for spamming, the outcry from the community is over something for more important the anti-spamming, basic civil rights.
I's rather get 50 pieces of spam in my email, then 1 piece of junk snail mail.
The way to slowdown spamming is control, not outlaw. If you outlaw spamming, you will be outlawing anything similiar to it regardless of intentions. This will have an impact on free speech, on others beside spammers.
We also need an official definition of "spam" put before congress, before ANY laws or actions are taken.
Is it spam if it's primary use is to make money?
is sending you a joke spam?
Is sending you a political announcement spam?
IS sending you any email you didn't explicitly ask for spam?
Don't get me wrong, I don't like unsolicited email from certain groups, I just feel we need to exam and define what spam is, and consider possible unexpected consquence before we make laws.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hurt could be legal (complaints, blocking, etc), quasi-legal (nmap, ping attacks, etc) or illegal (kill the bastards and drag their guts down the block as an example of what could happen to spammers in the future). Let your rules of engagement be your guide.
If we all spent 1-2 hours on this four times in 2002, I'll guess that there would be fewer spammers in the trade by the end of the year, not more.
Thoughts? I'll stay legal for the moment.
-- Multics
MILNET uses IP addresses in the same space as the public Internet. The MILNET is normally connected to the rest of the Internet through gateways, but during crisis periods, those gateways are sometimes turned off. After September 11th, much of the MILNET was inaccessable from the public Internet for a day or two. That may be what those researchers saw.
You say "spammers hide"? They don't. I am puzzled how to fight a dedicated spam-ISP like this one who offers "safe haven" for all bulk-mail senders that were kicked out from other ISPs. Can I make THEIR portion of internet unreachable?
--
At first I though thats what this story was refering to
Even worse than the 5% that is unreachable is the 90 percent that is unusable.
Nag nag nag.
That's the "inverse" not the "contrapositive."
Statement: P implies Q
Inverse: ~P implies ~Q
Converse: Q imples P
Contrapositive: ~Q implies ~P
Statement is logically equal to its contrapositive (both true or both false), and ditto for inverse and converse.
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
The large part of social science is an oxymoron.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
We've run into numerous service providers that use RFC1918 private address space. More than one has said, when setting up a routed connection, "just route 10.0.0.0/8 to us..." when we're already using 10.0.0.0 on some wan links as well as dealing with other providers who use 10.0.0.0. We've had to deal with providers that end up NATing connections two and three times because they and their vendors are all using the same private address space. The debug time on routing and access control glitches increases logarithmically for each NAT translation.
That address space works well for the WAN side of private links, or for testing or other stub networks that can't be connected elsewhere. But if you even think you might interconnect with other providers or other organizations, get real addresses.
didn't this same topic come up just a brief while ago? I'm not going to bother looking up the link, but if I can remember it as a simple user, I should hope the editors can...
I live in a giant bucket.
Laws are definitely the wrong answer.
The right answer is a configurable e-mail filtering system. With certain pre-programmed options. And easy customization. And PERHAPS a neural net that can learn what it considered spam (or, perhaps better?, not spam).
It needs to be cross-platform. It needs to be able to work with MSIE. It may be MSIEvil, but it's the predominating e-mail recipient.
This doesn't get around the need to receive the verfluct stuff, but if the job is done well enough, it will get around the yammering for more laws. People should be able to set their own priorities. (If it were easy enough, I'd automatically reject anything that was predominately non-indoeuropean letters. I don't read Japanese, Chinese, and whatever those other languages are, so it would be nice to avoid them. But sofar I haven't bothered figuring out how to reject them before reading.)
I can't even imagine any way to reject the garbage without receiving it, except rejecting based on ISP, sender, addressee (e.g., list suppressed), subject, or date. And that's not usually enough to go on. But sometimes it is, and it would be nice to delete those before downloading them.
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Whenever I use 10.x addresses, I never use 10.1.*.* - 10.10.*.*, and usually pick a random number to subnet under (10.RAND.*.*) so that if I have to merge it with another numbering system, there's less chance of collisions, renumbering, NAT, etc.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You've got to admit that it's quite difficult to write and exploit for hosts table!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Sites blocked by realtime black list may be unreachable by much of the net because a backbone provider is dropping all the packets from that site. This would make the site invisible past the backbone provider subscribing to the blacklist. Thank goodness someone has the gumption to prevent network degradation from sites that spew massive junk and bandwidth on the net.
The truth shall set you free!
First of all, I thinkk you misread my jank mail comment.
So it would be illegal for me to send my mother an email with the subject re:Work From Home ?
just say Spam is illegal with out a clear definition that anybody, even a non-techie, can understand what you mean by spam, would be both foolish and stupid.
If having a medum where somebody could make dubious offers was outlaw there would be no way to sell anything at all.
I just don't want some knee jerl legislation to bite us in the butt later, which almost always happens with legislation that isn't clearly defined.
personally I think anyemail thats makes an offer, and is sent to sell you something should conatain a number in the subject that indicates what it is for. That way spam filters would be much more helpfull.
The only way to stop it all is to make every email tracable to the sender by law. That would have serious consequence on free speech. Plus the abuser would find some way around it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on