Slashdot Mirror
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.
Oh, you were using O'Hare as an example? Nevermind.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
Now, now, give the Editors a break. If that particular filter worked there'd be no need for "-1 Redundant."
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
It would have ripple effects throughout the internet..."
Veni, vidi, vici.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
--
Sex Gateway
Sex - Find It
In what was considered a shocking move today, members of the Mouse Movement known as You moved my Cheese, you Rat Bastard, or YMMC,YRB for short, have declared war on the ever popular internet.
Speaking from his private "nest" in the foothills of Santa Barbara, General Carlissimo P Rodentia had this to say:
"You have bombarded my people for years with your unwanted peecees and aol ceedees. No longer. Your precious internet cannot stand the assault of 100 billion of my brother's and sister's teeth. Consider yourselves warned."
A truly ominous sign of the times.
Signing off, this is Reginald Rattus, reporting.
Sent from your iPad.
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.
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"
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/tele
You'll see "View their sample issue." Click on that, then click on the link for Volume 20, Issue 1. Go there. Then you'll see "A geographic perspective on commercial Internet survivability", and you can download the PDF there.
Looks like it's meant to give you only one chance at the free issue, so I think giving the direct link would be pretty useless. Whatever; you're only three clicks away from greatness. :-)
Carousel is a lie!
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
Shouldn't that be: mediocracies
:-)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
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.
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.
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!
If you look at network diagrams of the Bell System, when AT&T still ran everything, you will see a system that was designed to cope with disasters and excessive loads. It provided a great deal of flexibility in how calls were routed through the network. Each central office had multiple links to peer central offices and parent central offices. A call could be routed in many different ways. If a link to a peer central office was out, the call could be "kicked upstairs" to a parent central office, which would route it over a different link to the destination central office. The only single points of failure were the local central office and the wires in between the local central office and the subscriber.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.