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Growing Commercialization Threatens Net Security
dr3vil writes "The BBC is reporting that the concentration of the net's backbone in fewer hands has made it more vulnerable to attack. The report compares an attack to travel problems when traffic is disrupted at O'Hare. Hopefully someone in a position to act will pay attention."
Surely you mean increased centralization, however.
Can someone please explain WTF does that have to do with anything? Do they just throw that kind of stuff in as an onbligatery 9/11 reference?
Join the elite! Post at score:2! Ghostwheel is online.
Finally, someone other than a corporate Paki is commenting on the health of the internet. It is no longer an internet, but rather interconnected proprietary WAN's.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
Internet access and bandwidth are very vulnerable, but remember there are lots of copies of the DNS server records, and the actual content is extremely widespread and can easily be put online again given some time - in a genuine emergency situation internet access would only be a priority to those on the periphery anyway. Fine, we need more hubs and greater decentralisation, but lets not get carried away.
The Internet really isn't alone. Ads have really taken over society. Everywhere you look, from people's clothing to the garbage on the ground, to blatently all over every layer of packaging on the goods you buy at the local Safeway.
I've gotten so sick of it. The reason I switched to Linux (probably the dumbest reason in a lot of people's opinions) was to escape the fact that every program I installed had huge logos and ads plastered all over.
I remember when you were mocked and considered weird if you sold out. Now, if you don't sell out, you're considered stupid for not making money while you can.
I get the feeling this blatent lack of ethics will be part of the downfall of our economy. You can only have so many people leeching at one time before it runs out of blood.
They do have a point here.
:-)
The fewer centralized points the traffic has to go through the higher the risk of failure. And with failure, the lack of service to millions of people.
I can't validate the correctness of the story, but my impression has always been that the backbones are designed to failover if they hit a problem and that there are several routes between multiple backbones that is serving the same strecth of net. I may be wrong on this, but at least that was the goal back in the 80's when I first started using the net.
The article needs to be taken serious, as more and more business depends on the net. If it fails one one or more backbone stretches, it will have enormous consequences for business, meaning your's and my paycheck may be endangered. Oh, and the answee is not to get rid of Microsoft in this case
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
It would have ripple effects throughout the internet..."
Veni, vidi, vici.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
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Sex - Find It
This isn't the government's job. Surely you wouldn't recommend that the government start dabbling in long-distance voice networks, as well, would you?
Besides, the internet isn't a "US-only" thing. While you can improve things on your home soil, the companies that operate the backbones extend beyond just one country; there's only so much the US government could do.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
Think for a minute, what country has about the most centralized internet backbone? That would be China, or, The Great Firewall of China. Look at it this way, in order to Do Something Really Bad in China, they have to implement it on one set of backbones with one central authority.
Now that the backbone is mostly owned by big business in the United States, it centralizes control of the Internet toward big businesses. Which yeah, could really pretty much suck.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
In its early days the net was as decentralised, as possible with multiple links between many of the nodes forming it. If one node disappeared, traffic could easily flow to other links and route traffic to all parts.
.edu's, .gov's and .mil's, there was no need for centralization. However, suddenly, one day everyone wanted to be on the net! And out of that chaos, logical central points developed.
I would not give this article a lot of serious thought. It describes how simulated attacks show vulnerable spots in the internet, and seeks to lay blame for it. However, comparing the current state of the Internet to it's own beginnings is obviously going to show differences (DUH!). I mean, back in the pre-web days (you remember those, folks? ah, sweet gopher. R.I.P.), if you didn't know exactly where or what you were looking for... well... none of this fancy googlin' stuff, that's all I gotta say.
If you consider the growth of the internet from that point, which was basically a loose, random interconnection of
I like to explain the internet to non-techie people as something like the Interstate highways in the United States. And using that metpahor... if you take out a central location... well, it'll be a lot slower and harder to get to where you need to go, but it's not like you've isolated an entire region for all eternity.
My point is, there are centralized locations because it was efficient to do so. Eventually, as more and more high speed wire is laid out across the world, these will slowly become less important. It's just that the growth has been too fast for the present time!
I moderate "-1, Fool"
Obviously there were good reasons to introduce CIDR (Classless Inter Domain Routing) and concentrate the ability to route around problems to the 'core' of the internet, but this is the price you pay.
The only way real redundancy and fault-tolerance will be restored is to introduce IPV6 - or some other means to widen the availablity of routable IPV4 space, and remove the barriers currently in place for people to partipate in the 'routable' internet.
Of course with this comes lack of control for MPAA/RIAA/Governments, increased freedom for independent operators, and also increased complexity and route-table storage requirements for all.
However, if the internet is to withstand prolonged and/or distributed attack, then the ability to route effectively will have to be extended further toward the edge of the net than it currently is.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
The government is the absolute antithesis of decentralization. Look at the heirarchy - if there's anything that public servants and the government structure as a whole is known for, it's a pecking order. Government doesn't understand decentralization, because ultimately that tends to make things harder to control and administer, and governments are all about controlling and administering. That's their core goal.
The government's primary self-chosen mission in most countries of the world today is to promote economic growth, which often is interpreted as doing whatever the industrialists ask of them. And guess where the industrialists stand on the commercialization of the internet....
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I don't see why centralization would come up though, regardless of who owns the fiber, it's still in the same place. The routers are also still in the same place most likely, which basically means what's getting centralized are the servers, and we already know that. Imagine how many fewer webservers there would be if San Jose were to lose connectivity, or New York for that matter. It's also possible that with fewer providers we have fewer routers which means there are fewer places BGP is routing with. This decreases fault tolerance, of course, and to some degree performance. It's like how when you're in Iowa you see most of your traffic going through Kansas City, even if it's going to Chicago.
*shrug*
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Yes, Virginia, the health of the Internet *does* depend on decentralized technologies such as multiple backbones, gegraphically distributed root name servers, and standards committees not answerable to any single political entity or product vendor.
It's no different from a business monopoly, (or cartel, or oligopoly) which tends to create artificially high prices, poor quality of goods and services, and in the case of computing and networks a fertile breeding ground for viruses, worms and other nasty exploits.
And the analogue these worlds share with real live ecosystems is uncanny: Plant an entire state in one strain of corn for a few seasons in a row and watch the fun.
Didn't we already learn this crap? Why do the FCC, FTC, SEC and other god-forsaken, nutless bend-over wastes of acronyms keep rubber-stamping all the mergers?
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
You're absolutely right! Can you even imagine some part of the government trying to think about decentralization? Ha! Their brains would probably explode! Stupid governments.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I'm puzzled why this was rated as ``off-topic''. Guess there wasn't enough anti-Microsoft content.
:)
He should have linked to this picture.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
One of the biggest problems in the backbone is that attempting to support arbitrary routing policies driven by a myriad of different customers overconstrains the problem of global internet routing. This leads to configurations in which either many solutions exist or no solutions exist to the routing problem and causes routing instability. Couple this with the fact that router configuration is a black art that is extremely error-prone and you get WorldCom-like outages. Such problems will actually IMPROVE with more consolidation. If you're interested, check this paper out.
It could be useful to point out once again that multiple interconnections and multiple routes was an important part of the original Arpanet that led to the Internet. It was (as the commercial people keep forgetting) a project funded 100% by the US Defense Department, and they wanted a network that would survive in battle conditions. Fact is, this is also a good design principle for design in a world where many of the components have a MTBF of days or weeks.
Problem is, commercial folks invariably see reduncancy as a needless expense. Their natural tendency is to reduce everything to the bare minimum (while selling the maximum, of course). Then when anything breaks, big chunks of the system are down.
The World Trade Center attack is an excellent example that woke up a lot of people. There was far too much infrastructure passing under those buildings, and as a result, a lot of the communication systems in Manhattan collapsed along with the buildings. This stupidity was pointed out by people before the attacks, but the commercial interests in charge of the comm lines saw no profit in decentralizing. Even now, they're resisting the idea and merely rebuilding a lot of the destroyed capacity, because a better system would be more expensive.
Governments have stepped in and forced things like the phone, electricity and highway systems to have alternate routes that can be used in disasters and emergencies. The Net is becoming an important part of the world's infrastructure, and eventually those evil old governments are going to step in and force the commercial crowd to supply redundancy in the same way.
--
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
This is far better than the pre-1993 days when there was a single backbone, operating on non-redundant private lines.
I guess this guy wanted some publicity. He got it.
I'm amazed to see comments like yours on a tech forum. Civilization has put its eggs in the internet basket. Basically, because it's cheaper.
Most data traffic having to do with operating the supply chain that gets those grapes to your grocery store in terms of wine and that cattle rancher's product to your store in terms of steak goes through the Internet. Even in the cases where this isn't so, you can bet that at least a few critical links in the supply chain are via Internet.
Could workarounds be found? For the short term, maybe. However, perhaps you'd notice if the price of milk in your grocery store went up 50% or average prices at WalMart went up 100%.
The only people who wouldn't notice the effects of a long-term loss of the Net are so remote from civilization that the international market economy doesn't touch them much, and that doesn't even describe most of the Third World. They might not know why they suddenly can't make a living or the price of anything imported doubled or worse, but they would notice.
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