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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."
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.
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
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
The Internet was developed under the watchful guidance, and using the money, of none other than Uncle Sam -- the U.S. government. Way back in the early days of the ARPAnet, it was deliberately made decentralized, and designed to treat any blockage to the free flow of information as damage, to survive a nuclear attack.
Perhaps the government won't be willing to pay the bills to keep today's Internet from becoming overly centralized, but it knows how.
Catherine
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.
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 problem of centralized control is different from the problem of centralized points of failure.
Sure, if the government decides to break the infrastructure, it only has to make that choice once. That is the problem of centralized control.
They are perfectly capable of putting connex between every police station in the nation, though, and providing incredibly decentralized points of failure. In fact, that's what they've done. There was some federal bill for emergency communications centers, so now many new police buildings take federal money. The feds pay for the whole building in exchange for using the basement as a communications center.
The question is, are you more worried about a backhoe taking out an essential backbone, or are you more worried about our government turning into communist China. I'd say the backhoe is more likely, just because it already happened.
Of course, the reason you're opposed to this isn't because the government can't do it properly. It's because you think the government would spend too much money doing it. And of course, you're right. Don't mean to bait, but when you start acting like you have some other set of reasons... you sound like a liar.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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!