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Internet Probably Couldn't Handle a Flu Pandemic
Several readers including mikael and gclef noted a report from the General Accountability Office suggesting that it should be Homeland Security's job to make sure the nation's business can flow during a pandemic. In particular, if H1N1 sends workers and schoolchildren home in large numbers, GAO thinks it might be a good idea for ISPs to prioritize traffic (favoring commerce over games, say), to reduce network speeds, and possibly to shut down high-traffic Web sites. DHS retorts that not only isn't it their job to control the Internet in this way, but the GAO is naive to believe it's even possible: "An expectation of unlimited Internet access during a pandemic is not realistic." "[DHS] does not even have a plan to start work on the issue, the General Accountability Office said. But the Homeland Security Department accused the GAO of having unrealistic expectations of how the Internet could be managed if millions began to telework from home at the same time as bored or sick schoolchildren were playing online, sucking up valuable bandwidth. Experts have for years pointed to the potential problem of Internet access during a severe pandemic, which would be a unique kind of emergency. It would be global, affecting many areas at once, and would last for weeks or months... Many companies and government offices hope to keep operations going as much as possible with teleworking using the Internet. Among the many problems posed by this idea, however, is the issue of bandwidth..."
They're already jerking around on the internet while at work anyway, what difference will it make?
In event of contagious diseases, we will quarantine everyone to their houses. Then we will shut off all your ability to play online games.
God spoke to me.
Can't we get rid of the DHS yet? I don't think there's one government organization I like less.
But my entire "Survive the Pandemic" strategy involves HOOAH bars and downloading a lot of HD pr0n!
The internet will work just fine when everyone is home sick: It'll be sunday for a few weeks in a row. Big deal. This is just an excuse to try and tack demands for government control onto the latest media-sponsored thing to fear, and once they have it, "prioritization of traffic" will become code for "override the FCC's mandate on network neutrality". Fortunately, the deluge of flu pandemic stories already out there has desensitized people to the point that this will fizzle and go nowhere because it can't get above the noise of a thousand other demands for government control and funding for other things.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Maybe I'm just selfish, but I can't think of any event that should restrict my internet access. I fail to see why this is any different from other emergencies that have benefited from the free flow of information concerning problems, rescue efforts, etc.
Isn't traffic usually higher during business days than during the weekends? If so, during a pandemic I'd expect lower traffic, not higher. Especially since people, you know, being sick don't really feel like browsing...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
This country is losing itself to a series of crisis expedited statutes and/or policies. Will H1N1 be the end of the net neutrality debate? I can hear it now. "We can't afford NOT to institute traffic shaping in light of this impending crisis!"
Really, I do. Between flash games, surfing blogs, spamming "random page" on Wikipedia, and actual honest-to-goodness work, I use far more bandwidth at work than I do at home, where I mostly just play WoW and read a few blogs.
Unless the wife isn't home. Then I burn a hole in my wall downloading porn.
I can see the fnords!
Raise your hand if this sounds like something you WANT the department of homeland security to be worrying about.
[crickets]
That's what I thought.
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
In other news, Comcast has effectively convinced the GAO that traffic shaping is now a good thing.
We gave Congress the power to regulate trade between the States. If you want to find the guilty party, look in a mirror.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"make sure the nation's business can flow during a pandemic" to the company that wrote the report on Chinese cyberspying:
Northrup Grumman.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
Yours In Yaznogorsk,
Kilgore T.
The actual report from the GAO is available here: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d108.pdf
.. on the Internet IS commerce. Those telecommuting could very well be employee of game companies. Games is a multi-billion dollar industry that is moving more and more toward the Internet infra-structure.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
That is such an idiotic idea that whoever came up with it at the GAO should be fired. The idea of what should and should not be allowed would be very arbitrary. Take sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. They make money from traffic to their site. If they shut down/slowed access to such sites nationwide it would financially cripple them. Companies will have to have their own contingencies for such incidents, it is not the government's responsibility to ensure they can keep operating the way they prefer, it is the companies responsibility to ensure they can continue to operate however necessary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Now the flu is going to kill network neutrality? Fuck you. I'm going to build my own Internet and you're not invited.
Is it just me or have people totally lost their sense of the internet truly is?!
I am sure there would be negative implications as well, but I think there is a lot to be said for encouraging an environment where there are more people working from home.
The CB App. What's your 20?
I thought everyone learned their lesson about the "tubes" already.
There is some other bullshit afoot and it has fuck all to do with games, pandemics or teleworking.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
The tubes will become clogged with mucus.
We just need an army of robots to implement all the traffic shaping rules and clear up the messes the inevitably follows.
Or implement secure remote management, maybe through a safety clearing house of some sort.
What about companies whose "commerce" is games? I'm sure Blizzard would love to hear that the vast majority of their revenue is specifically targeted for termination should a pandemic occur.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
Is this how it starts, or is this just another bad, never to materialize idea that somehow got press?
Limit all traffic for the sake of national security or at least national commerce? At what point do you give up said power once you have it? At what point do you drop all filters and say a situation is no longer present?
Once you grab power and control, there is no reason to _want_ to give it up.
Then again, this is probably nothing more than a bad idea written on paper. Hopefully.
The "Internet" still works remarkably well under load, and there is a self limiting factor: So much of the traffic is youtube etc by volume that if you DID get slowdowns, once those drop below real time people will just turn off anyway.
Test your net with Netalyzr
So much for net neutrality... Every time something like the Swine flu comes around they'll use it as an excuse to intervene. Perhaps even use it as an excuse to buy a few billion $$ of equipment to facilitate their meddling.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
High-traffic Web sites, online games, and anything that these people apparently don't think are "real" commerce are actually commerce and involve dollars being moved around, usually in advertising. How is it fair to steamroll over certain businesses' sites and reduce their ad revenue to make room for other, apparently more important sites? If the goal is preserving commerce, how do they decide which businesses get choked and which get the bandwidth?
Maybe they should look at how telecommunications companies are connecting people as the problem instead of how people are using the Internet.
Anyway, to my mind, there are a clear set of traffic shaping policies that satisfy net neutrality and make sure the network is still usable by everyone. And that's to shape by physical connection, not application. I have an 8 megabit DSL line, but I think my ISP has about 450-600 mbits of bandwidth to the Internet. The aggregate bandwidth of all of their DSL customers is likely at least 10 times their available bandwidth to the Internet, and that's a perfectly normal and reasonable situation.
If ever any given connection they have to the Internet becomes saturated, they should prioritize traffic in such a way as to make sure everybody trying to use that connection gets their fair share. That means customers that only burst traffic and aren't using their max for hours get priority over the people who are using as much bandwidth as they can for hours. As the bandwidth becomes more constrained, the criteria for what counts as a burst should become shorter and the max burst bandwidth should be lowered.
Trying to kill off all your bittorrent customers, especially since you think they're competing with your more profitable centralized video distribution business sure seems attractive, but it's evil and all the wrong approach. Just allocate bandwidth fairly to your customers and the bittorrent people will be punished for using all their bandwidth by having molasses web surfing compared to everybody else.
If bittorrent customers don't like this, they can agree to start marking the traffic they want to have as low priority and then that traffic will be the first to go when there's a bandwidth crunch.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Internet probably couldn't handle a flu pandemic?
Swine flu is a pandemic by definition (a quick, global outburst of a disease that can spread from human to human) and it's pretty safe to say it is a flu pandemic at that.
So, we have a flu pandemic going on. Is the headline trying to imply that internet will collapse any day now, then?
I think that this is the first time ever that the actual headline has been so stupid that I have chosen not to RTFS.
So H1N1 is really a genetically-engineered virus made by Lucent Technologies at the behest of the big telecom/cable cabal to be not quite deadly, but bad enough to send everyone at home for a couple weeks. When everyone fires up their connections for torrents, MMOs, and "internet research" (porn), it gives the bought-and-paid-for congress the perfect excuse to shoot down FCC network neutrality rules and allow telcom/cable to throttle connections and shape traffic, thus ensuring people can order their fleshlights and Sex and the City box sets at the expense of WOW players and pirates looking for movies to watch while they're laying in bed for days at a time. It's so simple it's brilliant!
I'll be too sick to do much more than email my boss, email my family, and go to my doctor's and medical insurer's web sites to get their phone numbers and fill out paperwork.
I certainly won't have the energy to be playing the latest online game or reading Slashdot.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Shutting down specific high-traffic web sites would IMO not be a good idea; people would simply surf elsewhere. In fact, when those heavily loaded sites start lagging, many people will wait for them to load rather than jump elsewhere, reducing the total load.
Lets hope the GAO's nightmare pandemic does not happen, and this is just a bureaucratic CYA report. But if it does happen, we will see Congress and the FCC crack the monopoly positions of phone and cable companies and unleash a torrent of competition that will deliver 100 gig bandwidth to users for a few bucks a month. The rest of the developed world has this already. It would be truly tragic if it takes a pandemic to get the US over the brain freeze it has about protecting monopolies in the telecom industry.
Itz teh guvmint! Teh POTUS shutz down teh slashdot! Our code iz setz up teh bomb!
And then the following day when they go back to the (better, but not really fully) working previous version we might even consider believing them...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I think the problem will work itself out when local ISP IT staff get the flu as well.
To, me the answer is it depends.
It depends on what the subscribes want to use it for. When I pay for Internet I do so because it provides some functionality that I value.
If the functionality that I value the most is playing games then there should be no restrictions on me doing that. This goes for whatever you value. If masses of people get sick and go home and start playing WOW (also Internet commerce, just ask Blizzard) so much so that others cannot log into their banks website then the majority has spoken.
If I ever find out that my ISP is filtering content like this then that's the day I switch to another ISP. If I wanted my Internet filtered then I might as well move to China.
The Internet is not a utility and therefore there should not have any governmental control in place whatsoever. It seems like more and more since 911 that people are willing to hand over their rights to the government in hopes that this false sense of security will help them sleep better at night. Many people forget that the Internet is a no man's land, as it was designed to be, its only function is to move bits around regardless of the nature of those bits.
If any government, specifically the US government, wants a data network that is treated like a utility which they can control / police then they should build it. The Internet is not a single network that anyone owns. Every ISP that connects to the Internet or specifically adds to it, such as tier-1 Internet providers, owns a piece of the Internet. As a former ISP I would never provide any information to any 3rd party without a court order to do so nor would I provide any kind of filtering or bandwidth shaping.
How dare someone think they can control the Internet it is owned by the people!
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
For one thing, games don't consume very much bandwidth compared to streaming or downloading media. For another, High lag gaming sucks, it would essentially stop once network latencies went much above the norm. Youtube might see an increase, but an increase large enough to threaten the internet would surely take out even the mighty Youtube servers.
If such an enormous demand on file and streaming servers were made, surely the concentrated data requests would take down those servers before ISPs started to have problems. I doubt that Youtube, Ninjavideo and a few other large scale media servers can't pump out sufficient data to bring down the internet. Torrents may in fact decrease as people actually want to use their bandwidth while at home rather than let their Torrent client hog it all.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
they're dropping like flies out there, sure hope it doesn't interfere with the 'business' of the greed/fear/ego based illuminati billionerror glowbull warmongers et al. their disempowerment is at hand, the 'hand' of the creators' newclear powered planet/population rescue initiative/mandate. there's no where left to hide.
the lights are coming up all over now. can you not feel it? tell 'em robbIE? 0, we forgot, never mind.
Block the porn, all internet bandwidth will be yours.
The most this will do is alter people's behavior. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the bandwidth needs of the new applications being developed (Torrent, Skype, video services, etc.) and malware -- and those will happen independently of H1N1.
Of those, malware is the most worrisome to me. Imagine a network-clogging virus spreading through Windows Update servers, using Skype-like techniques to effectively mask its packets from firewalls and traffic shaping systems. Even if you're running Linux or Mac OS, you'll be affected if you're trying to get any bits through them tubes...
The definition of traffic to give priority to is usually - mine is important. The other guys is not.
--
What about a large bunch of coders working at home who all need to download the latest build. To be nice they have set up a torrent site. Opps that gets downgrade so they decide to ship it all as email attachements because that has higher priority.
--
What about people that play games for a living. Yes the gold farmers. Who says there work is less work than the executive who remote desktops in to read email rather than using a remote email client.
--
What about the movie reviewer who needs to download and review the latest movie.
--
Yes some of these are stretching it but defining work/play and priority vs not priority needs to read the minds of the end user not look at the traffic type.
read article: check
have flu: check
blow load: check
The people trying to push anti-net-neutrality agendas will use whatever scare tactic is currently in the media. In 2001 it would have been "we need to prioritize traffic to aid rescue workers," during Katrina it would have been "We don't have bandwidth to reliably allow everyone free access while still being able to coordinate aid in Lousiana," now it's this, and tomorrow it will be "we can't reliably fight aliens/robot armies unless people are taxed for visiting sites that we don't approve of."
or else!
If there aren't enough tubes, then build more tubes! That wasn't hard.
Dear Internet,
Be neutral. Except when we don't want you to be neutral.
Love,
Congress
...triumphing over the rights of citizens. I don't see any reason why business' commerce should supersede the leisure activities of people who are home sick. Obviously this recommendation is asinine in the extreme and completely impossible to implement, but I don't think its the government's business to implement it anyway. If you want to talk about emergency services then, OK, maybe there is an argument there.
...Besides...everyone already surfs the web all day at work. I don't see where there is any difference.
I also agree with the comment saying...well what about game companies' commerce? It's just another case of big business having the money to bribe politicians into prioritizing their interests over citizens'.
My employer really should allow me to set up a wireless link to my house. Dedicated link=no internet traffic=no competition=no congestion. Oh, and 20mbit symmetrical access to the internet from home means that my employer won't be the sole beneficiary of such an arrangement.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
It seems to me this would be much less of a problem if ISPs didn't massively oversell their networks and cheap out on upgrades. I hear complaints about cost and questions of who will pay for the upgrades, then I go look at profit reports...
The Internet won't die. Internet sites will die. AT&T's 3G network will certainly die. For instance, on 9/11, CNN had to drop to a text only site. They survived that way when their graphical version died like a slashdotted site. But, on 9/11, sites unrelated to news were still readily available. Amazon was still up, TV Guide was up, Travelocity was up. Yes, the bureaucrats at GAO are 1d10ts. They need to crawl back into their hole. This sounds like some document pre-written by AT&T.
cabg x3 is a life changing event...
What will happen is this:
1. They prioritize "commerce and health" traffic over gaming and file sharing to "work though the flu pandemic".
2. After the pandemic is over, they will keep the system in place.
What we really need to do to prevent this sort of government imposition on the flow of information in a way we don't like is to pass net neutrality legislation that allows the government to impose regulations on the flow of information in a way we do like.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
By high traffic they mean sites that could inform people of the outbreak potential.
When I first read the title "Internet Probably Couldn't Handle a Flu Pandemic" I thought yikes, I have heard of viruses crossing from animals to humans, but now they can cross from humans to the Internet ? :-) And should I disinfect my hands after using that Windows PC ? (although I already do sometimes get that urge anyway :-)
Does that mean I can catch the flu from my Internet connected work PC running Windows ? (I think I am safe at home: *NIX PCs would be still be virus free and so safe to use
A rhetorical question. The telecoms have accepted billions in government subsidies to build out the internet infrastructure, but now when we, the people, need it, it isn't there. This isn't a game; it's fraud when people take the money from the government for infrastructure and don't provide the it.
While on the surface, this article seems very Orwellian indeed, there is a strong argument to be made in favor of planning for the effects that a pandemic would have on all forms of infrastructure. In a pandemic involving a disease with a mortality rate approaching that of the Spanish Flu of 1918 (ONLY 2.5%) or of avian flu, which is a staggering 60%, people would rapidly confine themselves to their homes. It is perfectly reasonable to expect that, in this situation, the number of people telecommuting would increase drastically, which, coupled with the large increase in bandwidth caused by huge numbers of bored children and adults who are all at home, would a great deal of strain on our current internet infrastructure, especially in the last mile. Vital government and business functions would absolutely depend on their employee's ability to telecommute in such a situation. It the ability to respond to an emergency depends on the availability of infrastructure then it is prudent to have a plan in place to preserve the critical function of that infrastructure during an emergency. The internet would certainly be a vital part of the response to a pandemic, and it would be vital to the continued functioning of society during the the pandemic. Therefore, it seems profoundly important for the DHS, whose responsibility is, ostensibly, the preservation and protection of our society, to develop plans to preserve the critical functions of the internet. The ability of an engineer to monitor critical systems at a power plant remotely, or the communications of medical professionals dealing with the emergency would absolutely deserve priority over a connection to an online game or the ability to read the latest headlines.
Doesn't anyone remember that during the nineties(and later) the federal government gave these infrastructure companies lots of money to expand their networks and they didn't. Why aren't these bastards in prison with the largest sodomizer we can find for defrauding the public? Oh yea, this is the USA. The same question could asked about last years economic debacle and Obama's top two financial advisors part in creating it, let alone banks and congress. I know OT.
"Note that this is not meant to imply that SS is a bad thing. It's certainly better than letting the elderly starve, but it's arguably the worst way to avoid letting the elderly starve...."
We could make them into Soylent Green and make certain WE don't starve.
So.. Because lots of people are going to die, they're going to make that better by giving a life for WoW players?
IT departments used to maintain an array of modems. Employees would dial in from home, using their own modem. No internet required, just plain old telephone service.
This could work again.
Network applications, web applications, and server applications would rediscover frugality. Folks might rediscover Opera and its Show/Cached/No Images popup menu. Or lynx.
People with VoIP lines would be out of luck.
How much traffic is generated by Bittorent again? E-Mail spam?
And they say, that telecommuting will bring down the internet?
Yeah, right.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Multiple times every year, a big percentage of the people get some strain of the flu. The normal flu had way bigger "pandemics" than any H1N1. Nothing happened. It's just the flu. We know it. We can handle it. Done.
What this is really about, is the media, blowing stuff up, creating "contoversies", until any communications medium bursts, shutting themselves off.
Well, there's a simple solution for that one: Stop being such greedy bastards! Which means: Stop creating so much drama, just to get more viewers and make more money. Or in other words: Stop stuffing youself over what the mechanism can hold.
On the other hand, seeing the "traditional" (money4drama) media break completely down, would be a really cool thing to happen.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
If one tenth of the money was spent on upgrading the Internet bandwidth capabilities of the U.S. as was spent on invading Iraq, even the plastic-tarp homeless camps in every major U.S. city would have 100 Mbit connections. Why the fuck do I have to pay some shitty for-profit corporation $60 a month for laggy, intermittent, capped and limited and filtered connections? Why is the U.S. stilla third-world country when it comes to Internet infrastructure?
BAAAA! BAAAA! My TV says I must get the pig flu shot or I will die. BAAAA!
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/21/cbsnews_investigates/main5404829.shtml
So if states have been asked to stop counting individual cases of the pig flu, how the hell do we know we have a pig flu pandemic? This is an experiment to determine if years of public education and pop culture shit have dulled your will and your wits enough to view the government as your supreme authority and savior. I'd say we're just about there, but not quite. The vaccine is mandatory - for now...
Wasn't this a story from 6 months ago?
We already have several "mini-pandemic" exercises every year.... they are called "Holidays".
For the whole day millions of people stay at home and have the potential to play games over the Internet etc. (while feeling a whole lot better than if they had H1N1)
From what I have seen.... the Internet seems to be coping pretty good when millions of people take off from work all at the same time...
"Never underestimate the power of the Slashdot!"
Obpolitics: Of course it's "propaganda, disinfo, lies, and bullshit". That's what the DHS was created to *do*. And just because the Bush Administration set it up to do a better job of scaring the children than the Clinton Administration or anybody since the Cuban Missile Crisis and Joe McCarthy had done, and just because Obama was elected to "Not Be Bush", that doesn't mean that the Obama Administration is ready to turn around and become pro-freedom or anti-scary any time soon.
ObTechnoPolitics: And ever since the SARS and Bird Flu scares didn't turn into pandemics, there's been a whole industry of computing/telecom/business consultants trying to get people to buy pandemic-planning consulting services, and they'd be halfway out of a job if the DHS stopped scaring people to drum up business. And if the EFF/Cypherpunks/Banks/HiTech people hadn't spent the 90s arguing that encryption was critical for business as well as civil liberties, you wouldn't be using VPNs to commute to work, and those consultants would still be selling you Analog Modem Pools and ISDN (bwah-hah-ha!)
Having said that, though, there are some serious problems with organizations that aren't prepared to have lots of their employees telecommuting. In some cases (including government agencies as well as financial and other businesses) their employees don't have work laptops, or don't have their home computers set up to run VPNs, or don't have big enough pipes at the office to handle 99% of the people working from home instead of 5-10%. Those organizations need to be convinced to upgrade their infrastructure. And there are probably some lame ISPs that still try to block VPNs except for people who pay extra for "business" broadband packages, though there's a lot less of that these days, and telling them to Just Stop That is a good thing. (And of course there are businesses whose employees actually do Real Physical Stuff all day instead of working on computers, but even most of those people use computers to keep track of the Stuff, or have managers or clerks who do that for them.)
From a technology standpoint, most ISPs these days can support IPv4 prioritization using either TOS or DSCP, though most ISPs don't support it across peering links, and some of them charge different amounts for it. There never was a really clear business plan for it. The Network Neutrality debate didn't help any of that - it was focused on some bonehead telecom execs wanting to charge more money for Google and YouTube (even before they merged), but from my perspective I'd really like it if my ISP prioritized my downlink to prefer UDP and VPN traffic over web and YouTube, and especially if they prioritized everything-else over BitTorrent, so I could be talking on VOIP while browsing the web and downloading totally-legal music. But even without prioritization, if you've got enough bandwidth on the home-user end to run YouTube, there's enough bandwidth for people to do real work (at least if they can get their kids to stop watching YouTube), and the business ends of the connections really do load-balance fairly well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If the pandemic is really bad, the resulting deaths will lower network utilization.
Sad, scary, and perverse, but true.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The problem they're trying to address (well, other than organizational self-preservation by looking useful, and helping out their friends and accomplices in the drama-creation business) isn't that lots of sick people will be staying home. It's that if the Pandemic gets bad enough, schools and businesses will tell healthy people to stay home and work from home to avoid getting sick, and maybe even the government will tell people to stay home. They're concerned about the load that those people will put on the network.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah, yeah, you can bitch about the price, and bitch about carriers that think bandwidth-capping is a cool idea they should adopt, and if you've only got regular DSL instead of cable modem or fiber or VHDSL, then you can bitch about how you're only getting a megabit or two and can't watch HDTV in real time over it, but that's not where the problems are here. The problems are the connections businesses (and government agencies) have at their ends, which affect whether they can handle having 99% of their employees telecommuting. If you've got a culture that thinks F2F meetings are the only way to get things done, and wants 25Mbps Telepresence(tm) at everybody's house, then maybe there's a network problem, or at least wants Skype Video and $29 webcams, but basically it's a question of whether the business has enough bandwidth at their headquarters/datacenters to handle their workers, and whether the business-oriented ISPs have resources deployed to handle them. (For the most part, they do, and if they don't, then they'll upgrade if they start seeing actual orders from pandemic-panicked businesses.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It was a better story when SARS and the Bird Flu were going to Kill Us ALL! ! and when the Bush Administration was telling us that there were Terrorists Under Our Beds, and when there were businesses and government agencies that weren't set up to handle large fractions of their users telecommuting. But enough of those businesses were out there that there's an entrenched consulting market for Pro-Active Pandemic Preparation, and it's flu season and there aren't enough flu shots, so We're All Gonna Die! yet again.
You'll keep seeing that story until the Obama Administration either gets off its ass and stops being the Leftover-Bush Administration, or until it redeploys those people into some other politically useful job, like moving them from the Department of Homeland Security to the Department of Health and Human Services were they can tell us that If We Don't Get National HealthCare, We're All Gonna Die.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It is the UNNECESSARY quarantining and locking down of the nation that it wont handle. They claim their "swine flu" has killed roughly a 1000 people since
last April when they started the hyping it,
well did you know that according to "CDC" own statistics, in 2006 648 people died from Tuberculosis and 13,000 people were diagnosed with the disease
IN THE UNITED STATES.
http://www.cdc.gov/tb/statistics/reports/2008/pdf/2008report.pdf turn to page 15, table 1.
Myobacter Tuberculosis gives rise to tuberculosis, a deadly disease and what a painful way to die once it has found it's way into your bones.
Related to Myobacter Tuberculosis is another all time favorite Myobacter Leprae which gives rise to: Hansen's disease aka Leprosy. These little bastards
chew up your nerves, very painful until you lose all sensation.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00044418.htm#00001076.gif
Look at table 20, each year in average a 100+ people get it here in the United States with a peak in the 80s of 400+ cases again HERE IN THE UNITED STATES.
There are other Myobacter of course a whole slew of them but they are for the most part very rare thankfully.
I WOULD NOT WANT TO BE AROUND ANYONE who has an open tuberculosis and is coughing. I would NOT want any physical contact with someone who has
untreated leprosy. -> These diseases freak me out
So think about it,
-----> Tens of thousands of people contract major league plague diseases every year here in the United State and not a word of it on the mainstream media, -----
http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index.php?lang=eng
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Since "P2P generates most traffic in all regions", we could always work with the international community to make software, movies, music, etc. freely available so it is accessible on demand without charge or penalty. Then people won't have to waste huge amounts of Internet bandwidth and productive hours of their lives redundantly hoarding everything in sight. Next, block China or other countries where the majority of the population speak in spam. Lastly, ban all pornography. Unfortunately, there wouldn't be much remaining interest left in the Internet.
Idiots.. This is already a pandemic! H1N1 (or "hini" as I like to call it.. (c) 2009) is ALREADY a PANDEMIC. There has been cases of the H1N1 on every contentent except for Antartica...
"A pandemic (from Greek pan "all" + demos "people") is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance a continent, or even worldwide"
HIV is a pandemic, the internet didn't crash because of that. Hini won't crash it either... people get sick all the time and some will die, an equal # will get well and have to go back to work.
This whole hini thing reminds me more of chicken little than anything else. Life happens and people die. sometimes the people that die are not just old people. Get over it and move on with your life, stop feeling guilty for being alive in a country that even during a depression is richer than most 3rd world countries that are ruled by dictators and theocrats.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
I mean when your keyboard starts sneezing, and your mouse has the runs, it won't be long until your modem(cable or DSL) is all congested and the packets just won't flow. Finally, a virus for my Linux box!
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
this article is supposed to be taken as a joke right? yea america may have some bad networks but relize only reason is greed. and if your money was actually used for your benifit every single house would have fibre. now yes some slower networks may suffer the backbones CERTAINLY DO NOT!
HS was designed as a huge boondoggle by the Bush administration. A place to stuff cronies to give them jobs, and then absorb many other agencies to spend a lot of money and not get things done. Can anyone point to real Homeland Security success -- what exactly do the DO besides come up with more ways to insert their asses into our lives?
If they think THEY should protect the Internet -- then I recommend everyone cache IP addresses for places they like to visit, because I can bet an INCIDENT that needs fixing is only a few Oops away.
How many times do we fall for this crap? There is no enemy. Just a bunch of businesses creating astro-turf movements and the Media freaking out over the phobia of the week so that they can keep eyeballs glued to the TV.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
While working from home, update OS on you spouse's and kids' computers, install an anti-virus software and scan disks, update browser, Adobe reader and voila traffic generated by the household becomes much less.
Because a lot of traffic is generated by bot-nets spreading spam. And that is where bot-nets live.
If the Internet is still congested - do the same things on your parents' PCs then the difference will be visible for sure, because the advanced age generation treat computers as if it were a TV: "switch on and switch off; only the government is authorized to change the machinations inside the box". And that is why these PCs are often the soft target for bot-nets.
Do I/they really feel like surfing the internet... How does business operate the day before/after Christmas/Thanksgiving when everyone is at home using the net... this is a non issue.
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
while teleworking, its not like they will be using bandwidth. just like you work in your office - you work on your local document or whatever, and THEN send it through email to the recipient party anyway. your instant messenger will be still online, regardless of you are teleworking, or in the office. so there is no goddamn difference in between teleworking and being in the office.
another hilarious part is 'kids playing online games'. the network demand of the online games are pathetically low compared to many other applications.
all these concerns seem to be bullshit.
Read radical news here
So there is only a little internet to go around? We will have to line up and everyone gets 30 seconds of internet? I think I'm going to click a popup
This who;e episode is another red herring put up by the telecom companies who want to wring the last dollar out of their existing networks. Why are we even having this conversation? Why do we have to wait around to get adequate bandwidth, when the technology is there to give us what we need, and has been for several years? We used be first and best in applying new technology, why not now?
How does schoolchildren and workers being home from school and work generate a worrysome amount of traffic as compared to summer vacation, holidays, weekends, etc? Working remotely from home generates at most marginally more traffic on average than those same people at their place of work (on average, if you consider that enough sick people at home will be actually sick, not working remotely).
I just don't see where the scare in this is. There are plenty of events and days/weeks/months that occur normally that I can only imagine would far exceed the stress averaged by [mostly-sick] people being at home and "bored".
Funny, kids at home have a tendency to make 3-hour phone calls to friends. And telecommuters do a lot more phone-calling from home as well. But notice nobody is claiming that "the telephone network will be unable to handle H1N1"?
Two reasons: 1) the network actually is better, built to be an essential service; the last 10 miles of Internet - whether cable or DSL - is built on a previous network with duct tape to save money, and has never been treated as essential.
2) Even so, it probably isn't true. What's so different about half the kids being home from school and half the office workers who can telecommute, from ALL of them being at home on every Saturday, playing games and watching YouTube? Not much. "The Internet is Falling" thing stopped being funny after we'd all had good laughs and John Dvorak and Bob Metcalfe, respectively. (At least Metcalfe had the class to put his column in a blender with some water and literally eat his words, as promised.)
It's not funny any more, especially when used as a power play. The right answer even if this WERE true is to tell them to get to work on building fiber-to-the-home... like they were supposed to with all the money they've been making and gargantuan tax breaks they were handed.