Slashdot Mirror
Bird Flu Pandemic Could Choke the Net
PetManimal writes "If a pandemic were to occur, many companies and organizations would ask their staffs to work from home. The impact of millions of additional people using the Internet from home might require individuals and companies to voluntarily restrain themselves from surfing to high-bandwidth sites, such as YouTube. If people didn't comply, the government might step in and limit Net usage. The scenario is not far-fetched: last year at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, a group of telecom and government officials conducted a pandemic exercise based on a hypothetical breakout of bird flu in central Europe. The results weren't pretty." From the latter article: "'We assumed total absentees of 30% to 60% trying to work from home, which would have overwhelmed the Internet,' said [one] participant. 'We did not assume that the backbone would be gone, but that the edge of the network... would be overwhelmed... The conclusion [of imminent collapse] was not absolute, and the situation was not digitally simulated, but the idea of everyone working from home appears untenable,' [he] said."
Seriously, I think we need a "speculation" tag...
A bunch of telco management consultants, playing a "war game" (yeesh) to drum up business (Oh wow, lets recommend investments in Telco infrastructure!)
In fact, the second page of the second article even states the obvious:Better to bury it on the second page hey? Might spoil the sensationalist headlines a little.
What the hell is this doing in slashdot's science section?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
ISPs are already well able to throttle usage so as to manage demand in excess of capacity. In the listed scenario all that would be needed would be management to limit the use of p2p, usenet and certain kinds of streaming and the problem.
The real problem in such a scenario is that most workers would simply not be able to work from home - they and their employers wont be ready or equiped to do so.
This sort of experience could have a lot to do with where you are in the world, and your ISP.
I was in at my place of work in Toronto on 9/11, and remember rather vividly how hard it was to get to CNN's website. The CBC's website was fairly slow as well (we have to recall, not only were there attacks on the WTC, the Pentagon, and the plane that crashed, but thousands of inbound US flights were redirected to Canada, and people world-wide were trying to track down loved-ones who had flights re-routed here). Being the smart sort of guy I am, I was one of the few in the office to be able to get reliable, up-to-date information, because I reasoned that the BBC's website probably wouldn't be heavily flooded with North American traffic, and that it would be the middle of the night on that side of the pond. Sure, enough, I was correct -- while it was difficult to get to many news websites inside North America, several very respectable European sites were no problem to bring up in those very early hours after the first jet hit the WTC. It wasn't traffic on the Internet that was a problem -- it was specific websites being very heavily congested. There was still a lot of bandwidth available to go around -- just not for specific popular North American news websites (many of which have hopefully learned a lesson from that day, and have done some upgrading of their services to better handle traffic during serious emergencies).
Yaz.
If the H5N1 strain of avian flu was to jump species and become highly contagious in humans to the point where a pandemic was reached, then internet traffic will be the least of our worries.
I think we'd collectively be more concerned with, you know, people dropping like flies in huge numbers than we would about telecommuting or browsing YouTube, or at least I like to think that we would.
Seriously, the health and safety of my loved ones and society as a whole would be paramount in my mind, and everything else would be a distant second. This story reminds me of those Starbucks managers selling water to injured and shocked people and the idiots quoting SLAs while the World Trade Center's twin towers were falling.
What next? People posting articles about how a human H5N1 pandemic would mean more server queues for WOW players as the servers would be swamped by people skipping work for the safety of home and looking to get a few more quests done while they were off?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
> If there were a pandemic, I doubt that people would necessarily be surfing YouTube.
course you would, it would be the only way to get non-censored information, you know, cell phone footage of food riots or nuclear plants melting down due to lack of workers, people dying in their beds, zombies at the shopping mall, that kind of thing, the next pandemic will be live on YouTube.
...And we're worried about the state of the Internet. Welcome to Slashdot.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
Bird flu is the new Y2K. 275 cases of it out of 8 billion people does not a pandemic make. You're far more likely to be struck and killed by frozen turds dropped from a Boeing 747 than contract bird flu.
Just consider stuff like hosepipe-bans, rolling black-outs and travelleing advisories.
Is internet access/trafic just another resource with an ultimately finite supply that may at times to be to limited so its distribution would have to be regulated?
We know this is true for other resources. In areas with droughts and insufficient reserves the goverment will regulate what you can and cannot do with the available water. Sure, sometimes the lack of water is because off extremely poor management often by that same goverment BUT that doesn't change the fact that when the reservoirs are low and there is no sign of rain the goverment first ASKS people not to waste water and finally orders them too.
You would have to be a liberal to an extremely silly degree to object to that.
Same with say electricity. Thanks to the believe that private companies run things better we in holland now get problems as well as private companies don't invest enough to cope with extreme situations and foila, nature always throws up extreme situations, often with a general helping of unfortunate coincedences. Who would have thought that in a hot summer, the temperature would be hot, water supplies would be reduced and demand for electricity would go up.
The goverment then first asks people to reduce their electricity consumption and finally just plain orders the consumption to stop, although over here by shutting down industrial users. In the US rolling blackouts seem to be favored.
Bad weather? Well, over he we get advice not to travel because of 5 centimeter snowfall. But that is because nothing ever happens here and we need an excuse to have a nice crisis now and then. "And NOW we go LIVE to our reporter on the street, what is happening Dave?" "Well Alan I can honestly report that right now, LIVE from an average street in Holland, absolutly NOTHING is happening BUT it might and I will here to report it, the MOMENT it happens, LIVE!"
So why is it so silly to presume that internet access through a combination of mismanagement and high demand could also find itself either having to deal with the results of extreme use (blackouts) or restrictions.
In fact, we have already seen this. Ever been in an office were the main pipe has gone down and now 1000 people are on a ISDN link? You bet your ass there is going to be some restrictions on the kind of sites visited.
For that matter have you seen the effects on the net during high profile events like the various terrorist attacks of the last decade? I do know that during the london bombings the dutch 3G (mobile phone) network had troubles dealing with all the demands for live video. So did newswebsites.
BUT is FLU likely to do this?
Ah, well that is the question. You see, the during the 9/11 attack at least the world I was in grinded to a halt. I worked at an ISP at the time (we hosted several of the newswebsites that saw their demand soar) and we didn't get any regular work done that day. We watched the news. So while one demand on the network increased it also lowered and in any case was of to short a duration.
But now imagine a prolonged sudden increase in the demand on traffic. Could it be delivered or would you find that working from home has become impossible. Well, I have my doubts but then, so did those people who thought our various other infra structures would be able to deal with extreme situations.
Is working from home really such a gigantic demand on the work? Especially if you consider that a person like me would for instance first shutdown his constantly running P2P program if the network was to slow. I already do so now.
I suppose it also greatly depends on the type of work. Say a creator like a programmer/writer could just literally work at home and only need the net to send his finished work to the office and get new instructions. A bit of code up and loads of gibberish emails down. More important, no immidiate demand. So an email takes an hour to get through. *sorry email junkies, t
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I, like I imagine most people on here (and anyone who has the ability to "work from home"), am connected to the Internet all day at work as well.
Why would people using the web at home cause it to go down faster than people using it at work?
If anything, some people's crappy ISPs that over-allocate their bandwidth would be clogged - not "the Internet", whatever that is supposed to mean.
The main pipes would not be seeing much more traffic than usual. Sure, people's VPN would use a bit more, but do you really think most VPN traffic uses more bandwidth than bittorrent/WOW/etc, all of which would have to be turned off since the traffic would be booted off of their VPN?
Bird flu is the new Y2K
Ah, here we go. Look, what do you suppose would have happened to the economy if no one had done any Y2K remediation? I was very busy in advance of that roll-over, and a good number of the clients I worked with would have been out of business without substantial system upgrades. Not just BIOS patches, but extensive code reviews and fixes to giant, sprawling, interdependent systems. For companies that operate (as so many do) on a just-in-time basis for goods and materials, even a week's downtime could mean bankruptcy. Multiply that times thousands of businesses, and you've got a major hit. Some of those are companies that supply medical materials, or deal with food processing, or deal with fuel. You surely aren't one of those people who thought it all could have been simply left well enough alone, are you? I directly experienced work that, left undone, would have resulted in financial ruin for organizations employing thousands of people and delivering important products and services to millions of people.
275 cases of it out of 8 billion people does not a pandemic make
And right up until the flu pandemic of 1918 killed millions of people, it wasn't a pandemic either. Do you approach everything in life with a "we'll deal with it after it happens" strategy? Sometimes that's not as effective. Like, when you can't pay your employees after 1/1/2000, or you're dead from a highly contagious virus and whatnot.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That is part of the problem, people thinking they know what they are talking about, but that know squat about the topic.
1.-A responsible government does multitasking. It will have to worry about the citizens' health, but also about the economy keep moving. The amount of people dying would not justify a complete shutdown of all productive activities.
2.- Bird flu is dangerous because it has proben to infect humans, generally with high index of mortality. This by itself is not a problem. The problem is that virus mutate (don't believe idiotic creationists and the like), and eventually one will find a mutation that will allow infection from human to human. I hope you have not forgotten that this virus is highly lethal.
3.- Your cavalier attitude parades your ignorance. You will not need your parrot to get infected, any person infected could infect you in case a pandemic takes place.
4.- If you think all is hype you clearly need to broaden your education, it is sorely lacking.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
No, the poster is exactly right. The bird flu is the new Y2K. That is, lots of people who know what they are doing are working hard at mitigating the risks while the press jabbers on blindly with scare stores.
The thing that people don't seem to realize about "bird flu" is that its really just one part of a larger issue. No one really knows if it will make the jump to human-to-human transmission. The people who know what the hell they are doing are doing their best to reduce that chance. (By preventing bird-to-human infections.) But the larger issue is that an entirely different disease that is currently neither known nor tracked could do the same thing. The chance of some other unknown disease becoming a pandemic is probably more likely than that of "bird flu" becoming a pandemic.
If "bird flu" never comes to anything, it may well be precisely because a lot of doctors and biologists worked very hard to prevent it. And if "bird flu" never comes to anything, the press will probably ignorantly blather on about how maybe the original fears were overblown just like today they are blathering on with panic and scare stories. Just like Y2K.
The cake is a pie