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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."
Why hasn't the US government taken up some of the challenge? Surely they have the ability to set up infrastructure in a decentralized manner?
When replying to this post, keep in mind that I am not addressing this issue from a free speech/privacy of individuals point of view. This is simply a question about why the government isn't interested in taking up this challenge.
Depends. A telco has a network, which carries IP traffic (perhaps other traffic, too). That may or may not have multiple routes within it connecting any two points. And it may peer with other networks at various points. But it's not necessarily a given that a) if a big network disappears that there'll be routes *besides* that network connecting everything that was connected to it, or that if such alternatives exist, that they'll have sufficient bandwidth to cope with the loss of that network.
After all, it's notionally not economic to keep too much excess capacity around -- why bother? So it'd be a surprise if ever major route was 100% (or more) backed up by another major route.
Also, physical separation and logical separation are different. A large logical separation may, alas, boil down to two pieces of fiber in the same conduit, two wavelengths on the same piece of fiber, that sort of thing.
So yes, it *can* all be made to be redundant, but that's not neceesarily how it plays out. Other factors may act against redundancy.
I know this is off topic, but i'll say it anyhow.
The BBC is a non profit organisation. Funded by the British people to produce unbiased news.
The New York example was probably the best example to date as to how losing several hubs can break lots of network.
I remember a power cut in central Melbourne took out several internet links for me.
There is a lot of research out there being done into this stuff, scale free networks, small world networks etc. Hopefully common sense will prevail - however the whole thing will probably end up being market driven as usual. And, like British Trains (unlike the TV coverage), will be absolutely crap in a few years.
It would be interesting to see if more people started running alternate routes through friends houses and what not. A guy I work with has a p2p 802.11b link to another guy I work with's cable modem 5 miles away, despite having DSL himself. I know that when I pulled my (late) linksys router out of the box, I was surprised to see that it supported RIP.
The truth is that it is really not that hard to run multiple routes out of your bedroom. If you use *nix for your router (like I do since I burned up my linksys), it's as easy as dropping in another NIC (wireless, or ethernet, or modem, or whatever) and configing the new interface.
There's also the growing trend in community nets (particularly wireless community nets)... these could link themselves together fairly cheaply by setting up additional wireless links with directional antennae pointed at other peer community nets.
Anyway, I'd be curious to see how many new routes start springing up between these 2nd-class (and no-class) networks. The beauty of Internet Protocol is that this really works.
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
I think the point is, the number of peering points, hasn't increased porportionately to the number of users. As a result, more people rely on a less resilient architecture. I don't think they are refering to one or two ISP's going out of business as much as they are looking at the major peering points. More users all tie into the same peering points, and if one of those goes down, then a large number of users and sites go down with it. The reason we haven't established more peering points is simply the cost. A NAP (network access point) has millions of dollars in gear, not to mention the costs for line connections. The economies demand cheaper Internet access, while the demand increases costs to build in redundancy. These two points work against each other and result in monumental discoveries about "Risk of internet collapse rising."
Goals are deceptive - the unaimed arrow never misses.
And what are you going to do about it? Absolutely nothing! Here's the real problem with commercialization: despite the fact that everyone thinks it sucks, nobody wants to do anything about it.
The commercial forces are "driving the economy", providing jobs, providing tax revenues to governments, and filling pockets all over the globe. Why on EARTH would anyone EVER want to turn away from that path?
The grand success of commercialism is tying the interests of the rubes^H^H^H^H customers to the interests of the corporation. Trust me, as much as you bitch and moan about commercialization now, if it weren't there most people would be twice as pissed off at the loss of their wonderful privacy-invading, wallet-vaccuuming feature-creeping, RAM-sucking functionality that allows them to talk to hairy-backed 50 year old men posing as 14 year old school girls any time, day or night, from anywhere on the planet!
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
with a 3 14.4 kbps dialup modems (arpanet, i mean?) i have one, i know another guy with one. if the internet was in *real* jeapordy, couldn't the universities, and induviduals just 'start fresh'...i mean the rfcs' appear to give a pretty much bleuprint method of how to move..right? what is really stopping us from building supercomputers...etc...? especially with modern tech, we could just buy a regular computer, get a whole load of modems...and go back to TTY ! why not?
of course, i'm concerned about the internet as anyone, but i'm connecting currently through stolen bandwidth anyways - the 'net is too expensive for most people it seems to me...decentralization could probably help that, though...but keep in mind...no matter how bad it gets, we can always start anew, so long as we have those 3 14.4kbps...
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
This is why the American parts of the Internet backbone should be administered and maintained by the Department of Homeland Security or a division of it. We must ensure that terrorists do not take down this vital information super-highway. Who better than Tom Ridge? Corporations? I don't think so, they're part of the conspiracy!
What does commercialization have to do with the Internet backbone being in fewer hands, shouldn't the title be "Growing Backbone Consolidation threatens Net Security. The last thing we need is G.W. thinking that their are comunists on slashdot. We will all be branded as terrorists.
Much of global Internet traffic on the intercontinental level is routed through the USA, even though the origin or destination may be totally outside the USA. For instance, traffic between Asia-Europe, or South America-Australia will almost always pass through the US, because most of those "hubs" are, as the article mentions, in the USA.
I believe more work should also be done on interconteninental links that do not go through the USA as well.
I have nothing againt the USA, but the Internet is critical to more than just the USA now, and were the unthinkable to happen again in the USA, there should be redundancy. Also, it would be much more efficent in terms of latency (eg, Europe-Asia instead of Europe-USA-Asia).
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
I consider clothing with huge ads on them a form of commercialization. Before my day, clothing never had ads on them. It was simple and elegant. Now, people pay $30 for a t-shirt, for the sole reason that it has a big logo that will associate them with a brand only a certain social class can afford. That was brought about by the commercialization of society. Ads brought about a consumer culture.. I'm ok with having material posessions, and fun toys.. I just don't like being blanketed with ads.
Commercialization has done a lot for us.. but I feel we're pushing it too far. Companies are starting to blatently ignore any privacy we have so they know where to advertise. I'm not comfortable with having everyone know everything about me.
It seems to me that the commercialization of the
Internet has brought so much new capacity online
that it is more reliable than the old days, due
to the existance of competing long-haul cables
operated by different companies.
For example, back in the early 90's Australia was
served by a single 10mbps trans-pacific Internet
connection. If it went down (as frequently
happened), the whole continent was cut off!
Today there are several links to the rest of the
world, and outages of that kind are unknown.
Guess who paid for those links? That's right,
for-profit commerical corporations.
The design of TCP/IP allows for redundancy and survivability, however most if not all of the research backbones that evolved into the commercialized Internet never had a great deal of redundancy. Granted, later incarnations like the NSFNET T3 network were better, but most had single points of failure which could be felt across large parts of the Internet when those points had problems...
--zawada
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!