Internet Black Holes

An anonymous reader writes "Hubble is a system that operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur. Hubble has operated continuously since September 17, 2007. During that time, it identified 881,090 black holes and reachability problems. In the most recent quarter-hourly round, completed at 04:40 PDT, 04/09/2008, Hubble issued 46,846 traceroutes to 1,815 prefixes it identified as likely to be experiencing problems (of 78,772 total prefixes monitored by the system). Of these, it found 195 prefixes to be unreachable from all its vantage points and 139 to be reachable from some vantage points and not others." No relationship to that other Hubble which also tries to find black holes ;)

Comments

take note that

[OrochimaruVoldemort]

a large majority of them are in manhattan, followed by dc area, then france.

Does it matter?

[flyingfsck]

Since traffic cannot go to these black holes, I don't think it matters. A white hole, constantly spewing out crap (spammer) is a real problem, but a dead machine doesn't matter.

Re:Does it matter?

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

I was under the impression that traffic to legitimate hosts was being lost into these black holes. Its not a dead machine, but rather bad routes being advertised for live machines. Thats general not supposed to happen, although I suppose it would be sweet if all the gunk the white holes spewed out is sucked into the black hole.

Re:Does it matter?

[JustinOpinion]

I suppose it doesn't matter, but it's nice to know about it.

I've often wondered why we don't have some kind of system that when I try to go to a web-page, and it is unreachable (host down? internet down? slashdotted?), I instead am given the "last known good copy" of the site. If you combined this black-hole detector with the "automatic archives" that exist (e.g. Google's cache, or the Wayback machine), then instead of getting an error page, you could get a banner that says "host not available for reason X; here is what the site looked like on datetime Y".

Seems like this could be built into a Firefox plugin perhaps, with it automatically delivering the cached version if the host is on the black-hole list or doesn't respond after a set wait time.

(Of course, typically when I have an idea like this, I then discover that people have already implemented it. So, if anyone knows of a browser-level or system-level utility that does this, please let me know!)

Re:Does it matter?

[Riachu_11]

ErrorZilla mods the firefox error page to give options for the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, and Coral Cache.

Re:Does it matter?

[ledow]

Obligatory Red Dwarf quote:

A white hole?

But what is it?

Re:obligatory

[somersault]

Hopefully nobody tried to finger the host first.

Re:Map?

[Chrisq]

Population density? Not unless you think Pakistan and Afganistan are deserted. Not yet, but they're working on it.

Let's get these all out of the way now

[Sgt_Jake]

1) The Large Hadron Collider is causing it.
2) The government(s) is capturing your traffic because it thinks your a terrorist, and it's losing packets due to the [Republican created] bureaucracy.
        (a) And your packets are being water boarded
        (b) AT&T helped
        (c) The EFF wants to know
3) The RIAA is capturing your traffic because it thinks your a pirate, and doesn't know how to get them back to you at a reasonable price.
        (a) Your packets are being sued
        (b) Congress is helping
        (c) The EFF still wants to know
4) It's a setup for the next Matrix movie. Neo's abilities are causing corruption in the matrix, creating failures in command nodes and putting millions of people to sleep. Like most of his movies.
5) The two Hubble's are tied together, and the internet is an existential manifestation of our physical universe as we discover it.
6) Global warming / El Nino's internet revenge.
7) Tubes are clogged.