Slashdot Mirror
Net Traffic Shocks Mimic Earthquakes
belphegor writes "Technology Research News is running an article describing research linking the similarties between Earthquakes and Internet traffic. By pinging hosts across the network, researchers 'were able to measure frequent changes in Internet congestion...results showed that the Internet, like the earth's network of faults, exhibits criticality -- a condition of sudden and drastic change. "Sudden drastic congestion leads to a large value of the round trip time of the ping signal, which is identified with a main shock," said Abe. The researchers referred to these sudden, drastic traffic changes as Internetquakes.' They also saw 'aftershocks' that can be mathematically described in a similar manner to the seismic ones more familiar to many Californians."
maybe we'll get lucky and if we ping the .NET side enough it will fall into the ocean! :)
Insert tastelass Slashdot-effect joke here.
Is your browser retarded?
The Slashdot Effect.
I'm surprised that it isn't mentioned in the article. They are probably trying to patent it, I'm sure.
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
So what does a Slashdotting rank on the Richter Scale?
Spencer Ogden
Slashdot Effect = San Andreas Fault?
It's interesting, I'm glad to see the article ties it in with other complex systems as well.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Causing plate shift all over the internet :) :P
sorry, it was just too easy to let go by
apparently Technology Research News will be the next website to feal this 'internet earthquake'...
maybe with followup stories it can have some 'aftershocks'...
Runnin' On Empty
Our company's webmaster has managed to exactly duplicate the San Andreas fault then. That box is shakier than California... oops, here comes another tremor now. Yup, reduced to rubble one more time.
One of these days I'll find some way to get the URL posted to Slashdot and I can see if computers really do burst into flame and shoot out showers of sparks like on the old Star Trek....
This pattern of behavior (where two completelly different things show the same underlying behavior and/or explanation) is exactly one of the things that Stephen Wolfran is trying to explain in his book A New Kind of Science (see amazon link and reviews here)
Basically, everything in the universe can be explained as a huge network of nodes, where all these node do is computations following very simple rules. From such simple rules we get all the laws of physics, human behavior, chaotic behavior, and in this case the behavior of an earthquake and Internet traffic.
I like to think of the net as a non-linear resonant
circuit. The correct starting conditions give
you very large responses to "small" inputs.
It's resonant so you see "ringing" in the response.
Seems to me that you can definitely look at the
earth's crust in a similar manner.
Absolute statements are never true
already! Damn!
Don't wait for your neighbor,
Green Eggs and Ham!
Doin' the netquake!!
You know what I'm talkin' about?
... I don't think earthquakes are an entirely appropriate metaphor. I'd think of it as more like dropping flaming bombs. Then, like in Populus, a flaming dude goes running back home only to set it on fire. Then people run out of it into neighboring homes and set them on fire. And then..
Well shoot now I wanna go play Populus. I don't feel like fleshing out my point.
I've always referred to earthquakes as a "geological slashdotting". I think that this backs up my theory.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
This would, of course, make /. the san andreas fault of the internet world. Causing havoc and destruction to small, unprepared villages up along the faultline.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
I'm not surprised about this behavior: after all, the Net has been mostly created in California, so there must have been some subconscious influences on its design so that it mimics the quakes that plague the area. :)
Now all of the money the government has spent on the detection of earthquales can actually help ME. Advance knowledge of net connection would make my life much easier.
Heck, VOIP might even actually be commercially feasable.
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
Is it just me or is this crap really stretching it. I think with 10 years and a good budget, I could write a convincing enough paper describing how cow feces is similar to chocolate.
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
I just got a slow ping. I am now typing this while huddled under my keyboard drawer in order to avoid injury from the netquake.
does that mean that instead of saying:
;-P
"in 1996, kobe, japan had a terrible earthquake"
we should say:
"in 1996, kobe, japan got earth slashdotted" ?
or "for san francisco in 1906, the fire after the earth slashdot effect was more damaging than the orignal earth slashdot itself."
or "accompanying large earth slashdottings, there often follows many smaller earth afterslashdots."
are we to replace the richter scale with cowboy neal poll results as well?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I lived in SoCal from birth to age 25, I felt plenty. I lived in Northridge during the quake there. It's not exactly something I would have complained about if I had missed it.
Consider yourself lucky.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
and the obligitory Windows Joke(tm)....
I guess that means all the WinNT servers represent the fault lines?
This signature is a waste of 42 characters
When ever a new pentium 4 CPU is released Germany experiences sudden lag.
When ever new office toys are sent out for review Australia takes a hit
and when ever some idiot with a backhoe digs up a backbone line, well hell, the entire USA goes ploink.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
How much of that criticality is due to the Slashdot Effect?
.
Why? We've been calling it the Slashdot Effect for years. :-)
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
"linking the similarties between Earthquakes and Internet traffic..."
I thought that there was nothing else they could call "like a <insert something to do with technology>", but there they go one-upping me again. So our brains are like computers, our genes are like source code, and our networks are like geology. Perhaps we really are in a matrix? Or perhaps all those similies in school are finally showing their ugly far-reaching effects on society.
We should commission a study, but then, somebody probably already has and I'll read about it on slashdot next week.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
I see the /. effect more like a tornado than an earthquake. An impenetrable wall of traffic is created around the site which sit in the calm "eye" of total disconnection.
it's amazing how these scientists still have the balls to go and feed press with research results like this. You know, in certain situations you could find empirical proof to link for example your toilet visit to network congestion.
Seemingly irrelevant car fires occurringly safely off the side of the highway back up traffic for miles as traffic around the incident slows to a crawl. This behavior mimics that of seismic activity and internet traffic slowdowns.
Internet experts now warn you in the event of a car fire, to stand in a doorway or underneath another heavy structure.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
...like a lot of work to do to come up with what basically appears to be not much more than a metaphor.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
You think you has it good, but all we needs is a few WorldComs to twitch the switch and ya'll be right back there in '93. Yep.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Internet, Aug. 27, 2002 - The Technology Research News (www.trnmag.com), which recently wrote an article on how Net Traffic mimics earthquakes, experienced an earthquake that shattered their networks, and brought down their servers. The earthquake measure 8.4 on the CmdrTaco TEBCF scale (time elapsed before complete failure).
News Correspondent Kimberly Patch had this to say via her cell phone connection: "one minute we're up and working, next thing you know everything just went crazy. People were screaming and running out of the building. I tried to keep calm, but at one point, knowing the magnitude of things, I paniced and ran out of the building screaming bloody murder!"
A representative from OSDN was quoted as saying: "heh.. heh.. umm.. heh heh.. nice huh?".
Calls to slashdot.org were not immediately returned.
---
(Score: +1 Funny, +1 Interesting, +1 Too Much Time on Hands)
perhaps a large upswing in the volume of people sending out useless ICMP traffic to measure this "phenomenon"? ;^)
So now when we hit a roadblock on the Information Superhighway and have to sit through buffer to buffer traffic, it's due to an Internetquake?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
So these server items Host only web pages, and all the traffic on the internet is web traffic, which moves from link to link by a "router". This is very upsetting that college educations and many many years of research show something that could be acomplished in 20 mintues with a SDSL line, a p0rn site on a connection faster then the SDSL line, and finally root@box'#ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
I wounder if they have their MCSE?
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
I think it'd be fairly safe to say the same thing could be said about simple highway traffic or air traffic congestion. You only need one failure to make an effect ripple outward.....
Oh look, there's a cop with a speeder pulled over in the northbound lane. It only takes one rubbernecker to back up 4 lanes of traffic for a 1/2 mile, and that is in the _southbound_ lane!
Let's say a nice fog bank rolls off the Atlantic, and drops visibility in the New York area. In no time at all, flight schedules up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the US are knocked off kilter as Newark, Laguardia, and JFK either delay flights or shut down.
Earthquakes are just one thing you can relate it to, but just like some other folks replied, it still goes back to string theory.
Hmmm... I like the idea of an Internet that "rings". But isn't it the "ringing" that we would like to get rid of from the net, in the same way we might wish the earth didn't "ring" so well during earthquakes?
What is the opposite of this model? Something like a marshmallow or ball of silly putty, that deforms to store energy and allows that energy to be released over time? I know that might affect the individual round-trip times, but it might improve efficiency on a larger scale.
I'm not sure what the rules for the nodes would be, but obviously there would have to be a way to balance "slack" and "stress" at different scales simultaneously, in order to avoid criticality. Anyone know about any models that have this kind of behaviour?
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Well what about the problem in this self organizing system, that you probably change the inherent nature of the system by observing it?
"...The simple ping signals were emitted every second and traveled through 10 different routers before the signals eventually reached the destination computer. The researchers were able to measure frequent changes in Internet congestion by measuring the time it took a series of signals to complete a round trip..."
How much bandwidth will these test pings take up inorder to have enough data to construct a model of current conditions that's good enough to predict bandwidth changes far enough ahead to make smart routers that can work around the congestion prior to it's existance? It would be kinda neat to have an internet that routes around inorder to prevent predicted congestion.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
I can't help but wonder about how many of these events were due to employees in a NOC somewhere downloading all the pr0n they could eat over an OC-48? :-)
Right here
:)
Although it's pretty vague like many Wired non-technical articles.
But i find it amusing to see a person spend 10 years on such idea while running a company.
Also talks about his life, pretty interesting
I always wondered how long it would be before someone tried to give a "weather report" for the Internet. I imagined that some day the daily Internet traffic report would appear right alongside Reporter Bob up in TrafficCopter 7 reporting on the condition of Highway 69 at 8am.
/dev/null. However, I would think it'd be tough to always keep up on what everyone has for capacity unless the backbone providers regularly publish these stats, as well as the stats on current traffic.
"Well, Joan, it looks like Slashdot it at it again. You'll want to keep clear of Alter.net this morning as it appears to be having congestion problems around the Midwest. Communications to anything near a corn field is likely to be slow to smack-me-dead stupid through the 9 o'clock hour. Queue up those emails, folks."
One has to wonder if it's even possible to predict and gauge incoming traffic problems. I guess you would have to know the effective capacity of the Internet, and sub-portions of it, at all times. I can see how a router's effective capacity could be measured by its effective throughput and cache. Your "sentinal level" would occur when the cache is full and bandwidth is maxed and the packets start to get a one-way trip to
I don't know if it would be helpful or not. One one hand, it'd be handy to know that the reason I'm getting 1900ms ping time to SF this morning is because some dumbass tripped on a power cord, but on the other hand, if I really care that much, I can probably figure it out using traceroute et al.
Maybe it's a solution to keep everyone and their dog from flooding the 'net each time a router bites the big one and makes a suburb blink out of existence for a few hours. Other than that, it just sounds like a good excuse to draw pretty graphs.
Blog,Twitter
Slashdot has also been a mitigating factor to some of the most severe 'quakes', especially if you're discussing the information transmitted rather than just network traffic.
Case in point? 9-11-01.
CNN was gone. USA Today was gone. Fox News was gone. Slashdot, however, was providing first-hand accounts of the disaster/attack as well as discussion about them.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Now we all know the truth-- earthquakes are simply a manifestation of a net-quake in the matrix.
They also saw 'aftershocks' that can be mathematically described in a similar manner to the seismic ones more familiar to many Californians."
Or, more simply described as Slashbacks.
The "big one" will be caused by a site called -
"Nude Brittney Spears advocates Linux, Star Trek, over Windows, Star Wars."
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
In both the internet and the network of earth faults, there are interactions between elements on multiple scales in time and space. That analogy is not hard to guess, but these physicists seems to have contributed a systematic measurement and modeling study. Fine.
So far, just from the reading the press article, my doubts about their work are twofold:
1. their ping frequency is one ping per second. This is a poor sampling of the time series of packet delays. Specifically poor sampling could lead to a false alarm or a miss. False alarm meaning that the sudden drastic 'congestion' could very well be an isolated event suffered by the ping packet or its adjoining ones; the rest of the packet delays in the one-second interval may be small. 'Miss' meaning you didnt catch the congestion due to the poor sampling. The ping packet got through quickly but there were congestion delays suffered by the rest of the packets in its one-second interval.
In short, ping times are a poor indication of the true traffic status of an IP network. One ping per second is especially pathetic if one of the bottleneck links in your route is a high-speed OC-3 or higher link. For example, at 155 Mbps (OC-3), there can be upto 13,000 typical IP data packets through the router in one second. Only one of these is the ping packet!
2. Their flawed analogy between fault energy and congestion level. Fault energy builds up slowly over years and is then released suddenly in an earthquake. They compare to this user sessions running over hours and then suddenly contributing to short periods of drastic congestion. So are they saying that congestion builds up slowly over hours at a router or server as more and more packets are processed? Ha! I am still ROFLing on this one!
There research will vastly improve if they collaborate with internet researchers and engineers who have a working knowledge of the internet's routing and flow control protocols, instead of approaching it from a purely black-box modelling point of view.
Better yet, smear the fungus on a canvas, cover it with feces and religious symbols, and get a lifetime fellowship (read: free money) from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It was intended to be funny.
Take a note:
1) get a girlfriend
2) get laid
3) come back and try again
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
I lived in Northridge during the quake there.
Damn.
I was in Santa Barbara and it knocked our power out.
"exhibits criticality"
Is as much a mimickry of earthquakes as it is of farts, naps, and almost running into that hot chick in the hall.
--Blair
You know- I am so glad we dont have that technology- Imagine how many people get telefragged in a flash crowd.... Argggghhhh....
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
These people should be in rocketry.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)