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...
no wonder i got it, everyone else's net is choked
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.
Thankfully Linux is immune to Bird viruses.
I remember you couldn't get anywhere on news sites during the 9/11 attacks on the WTC; even Google was horrendously slow. Non news sites all started relaying the news so that people could get hold of information.
:-).
Working from home in times past relied on dialling direct to a modem pool at the office. The telephone network could probably handle a fair amount of teleworking like that, particularly if the old school model of connecting, uploading and downloading email & files, and then disconnecting was adopted.
If there were a pandemic, I doubt that people would necessarily be surfing YouTube. It'd be no loss to me to not have that kind of site available anyway
Sounds a lot like scaremongering to me. In the event of a pandemic, net habits would change beyond recognition, so mentioning high bandwidth leisuretime sites seems a bit strange. It's not out of the question that certain services could be restricted though... but you can't analyse current surfing habits and apply them to bandwidth use when teleworking. If I'm working from home I'm not on YouTube, and use very little bandwidth.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
are by far a larger and more present danger than a flood caused ... it chocked a few networks.
by a human epidemic. just remember the mssql virus from a few
years ago
come on, with all the downloads and botnets running from a home PC,
will ANYONE AT ALL notice the few extra clicks from the humans?
What makes these people think that workers don't waste time on YouTube when they're at work?
Maybe because of likely recommended or enforced government quarantines or other advice for people to avoid unnecessary contact with each other in an attempt to try to stop or slow the spread of the disease, which will be airborne and spread at places where people congregate?
Just a guess.
because most epidemics are spread via work places and public area's.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Bird Flu Pandemic Could Choke the Net
None of those birds have a deadly flu. They're just pining for the fjords.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Yes, this could really be a pandemic for all those of us currently connected to the internet only by IP over Avian Carriers.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Working from home is perfectly sensible in case of an epidemic, although I'd be inclined to ditch work altogether ;) . One of the first things to do is close all the schools so kids don't share their germs around. Non-essential businesses are the next to go.
.evom ton seod gis eht
Surely very few companies are actually set up to enable any large % of their workforce to work from home? You're far more likely to be told to go home and wait.
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
Not if all the spammers die first.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
"the situation was not digitally simulated" = "we guessed"
And at that I think I'm being generous about their motives.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Wait, so they are assuming that people won't actually work from home and instead watch YouTube all day long? How exactly would it be different than 6pm when everyone really watch YouTube and download Bittorrent virtually all at once? Why does working from home suddenly equal unsustainable 'net where other peak usage times work out just fine?
If we assume that they will, for the most part, actually be, WORKING at home, how much bandwidth do people need? Copy a couple Word documents over the VPN? POP their email ever 2 minutes? These things are are NOTHING compared to things like Bittorrent during peak hours.
Worst case scenero is that ISPs are forced to throttle certain types of traffic that is labeled superfluous so as to provide accceptable service for other things. I know it isn't an ideal situation, but geez, the 'net'll survive! What is this talk about governments stepping in?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
If a pandemic flu were really to occur, I think we would have to worry about other things than the net slowing down.
Indeed, you probably picked up apostrophiti's there.
...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.
If the world shuts down because of a pandemic, there will be problems because of upkeep negligence. Obviously, non-essential business and basic cleanliness applies (which, really, is how 90% of sicknesses are prevented. And i theorize that the reason so much crap keeps coming from the east is their general lack of cleanliness - spitting in streets, etc. But, im sure ill catch heat for that.).
As always, this falls under "Don't Be An Idiot, And You'll Be Fine."
-Red
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
Wow... How's that for ironic?
A chicken is going to choke the internet...
Must... not... make... "In Soviet Russia..." joke...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Wait a minute - the network designed to be distributed in order to survive a massive nuclear attack couldn't survive a pandemic flu virus - because it is distributed?
Of course the whole thing is a fantasy in the minds of telco executives. There would be much more important things to worry about such as the direct deaths, illness and 'secondary' effects like the failure of electricity generation, water supplies, food distribution, trade etc. In fact you could pretty much see the failure of human civilisation as we know it today.
See, anybody can dream up a doomsday scenario and not being able to 'work' from home is the least of it.
"Staff" is already plural. Why would they ask their "staffs" to work from home, unless they were wizards who employed an especially large number of magical sticks?
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.
We don't know how many this is. Could be half the people who get bird-flu gets seriously ill (and 60% of those die), but it could also be that 5% of the people infected with bird-flu gets seriously ill (and 60% of *those* 5%, or 3% of the total infected die)
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.
If I can work from home during an HN51 epidemic, why can't I work from home today?
Anyone?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
... yet. The reason there's been 'only' 275 cases so far is that humans are catching it direct from birds. If (some say it's when) it mutates to the extent that human to human transmission occurs, it's an entirely different matter.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Boy, am I glad we don't keep birds in my office!
First of all, in a bird flu pandemic, my LAST concern, right after whether I have enough hairspray, is whether I can work from home! What does a country come to if its first concern is not whether its citicens survive but whether they can work 'til they croak?
Second, what bird flu? Who has been affected? People who have very close contact with infected birds. People living and working with them, having contact with the blood and droppings from infected birds. There has been no single confirmed transfer from human to human, and the only infections affected people who have almost intimate contact with those birds.
The biggest threat we're actually facing is the hype around it. Sure, a few pharmacy corps are making big bucks out of it 'cause every government on this planet is trying to rake together as much antidote as possible, generally, though, the biggest problem we could face is people going bonkers over the alleged 'danger' of the bird flu. I don't plan to kiss my parrot good night and I don't spend my weekends with the girls in the hen den, so I guess I should be fairly safe.
And so is about 99% of the population. Unless we let that hype catch up.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Same could have been said of BSE/CJD. It was mostly local to , but caused to a few humans. Because it was heavily restricted, culled, burned out of existence, it didn't spread very far.
That didn't stop it from being a fearful thing, to be avoided like the plague; just because you're more likely to die one way than another doesn't make that other condescendingly snubbable as a probability to be ignored. Death is death. Avoiding it is goooood.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
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.
Well in that case, we shouldn't invest in more teleco infrastructure or worry about government regulation, we should just quit going to work.
That's a %50 reduction in the probability of an epidemic right there.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
What they forgot to mention is that for 30% to 60% of central europeans, working from home means having sex on a webcam.
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.
The most popular compromise was selling plans that don't monitor your personal usage at all, but come with the "catch" that the network may get congested and slow down without warning.
That catch doesn't bother me as much as the providers that have fine print that says they can basically terminate you for doing anything they don't like.
If you buy into the concept of network neutrality (disclaimer: I do) then it follows that it's really none of your ISPs business what kind of traffic you are using it. Be it bittorrent, VoIP, http, ssh, irc, etc, etc. It may be their business how much bandwidth you use (because that impacts them) but not the manner in which you use that bandwidth.
IMHO, anyway.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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
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.
If you're right, then the poster was right by accident, or in the wrong way. I read his comment to mean that a flu pandemic risk isn't any worse than the "fake" Y2K risk. Check his tone, and you'll see what I mean. He didn't see any airplanes fall out of the sky on 1/1/00, so he's making it sound like there was no big deal after all. Which is complete BS.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.