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Net Sees Earthquake Damage, Routes Around It
davidwr writes "Japanese internet outages mostly healed themselves within hours. While some cables remain out, most computers that lost connectivity have it again. From James Cowie's blog: 'The engineers who built Japan's Internet created a dense web of domestic and international connectivity that is among the richest and most diverse on earth, as befits a critical gateway for global connectivity in and out of East Asia. At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.' Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning."
Reader Spy Handler points out another article about how redundancy and good planning are preventing disaster at Japan's troubled nuclear reactors, despite media-fueled speculation and panic to the contrary.
These are two characteristics America is not known for.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I didn't RTFA, I think it's mostly redundant.
Good job as always, /. editors. If you wanted another nuke article, why not just post one? :/
There is one thing we're known for: narcissism. Your post was a case on point.
Before it was commercialized, the whole point of the internet was to create a communications system that could survive a nuclear war. Now, for whatever reasons, most countries have singular backbones and connection, and when that one is taken out, the com system designed to survive a nuclear war can disconnect an entire country because of a single boat anchor.
Looks like another thing that Japan took from the US, and maintains it to higher standards.
Even though the Japanese reactors did their job to contain against a meltdown, it looks like nuclear power progress will be set back another 20-30 years due to the fearmongers pointing to this.
The loss of life can't be ignored. For people that were not affected by loved ones killed by it, the rest of the world will also be feeling this disaster in Japan for generations to come. Especially the fact that the anti-nuke crowd now possesses another "kill point" to keep nuclear power dead. This essentially clinches the fact that our kids and grandkids will still be having their lights powered by coal, and their cars by oil.
"Net Sees Earthquake Damage"; "[internet] routes around it"; "outages mostly healed themselves"
Why do we insist on speaking of the internet as some mythical being with the ability to observe, act and heal? It's true that there is a remarkable robustness to the network, as shown in this case, but why do we need to attribute it to anything beyond simple 'redundancy and good planning'? It's a network of electronics and fiber-optics, maintained by people --- infrastructure and connections.
The internet doesn't 'see' anything, and information doesn't 'want' anything.
Network traffic has moved 8 feet to the east.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I don't know about Mostly. Getting to websites outside of Korea has been a very slow and arduous process since the quake hit. It's 3 days in and a good number of sites are still crawling.
Does anyone know how other countries compare in this regards? I imagine certain countries have certain clear points of failure.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The network architecture isn't the only reason why we are still able to *mostly* communicate(I live about 60 km north of Tokyo, still no water though they haven't implemented the rolling blackouts....yet...), the advances in distributed systems also have made a huge impact. Simply put the amount of information to is essentially automatically mirrored(it's not really mirrored, but its easier to think of it like that) in Japan has really cut down on the amount of bandwidth necessary to communicate with the outside world.
I have noticed that for things that almost certainly aren't mirrored and require a direct connection to the US the bandwidth is probably 1/10 of what it usually is. While some of that may be due to increased traffic, I cannot help but think given the location of the quake that some of the cables between the US and Japan have been damaged. However services like Facebook and Google are as fast as they ever were. The reason for this is simple, both Google and Facebook have data centers in Japan that are designed to be eventually consistent. Instead of each individual request being routed to the states and back almost all the requests are routed to local data centers with only the updates coming from elsewhere being pushed through the cables. This obviously saves tons of bandwidth and allows for much better communication with the outside world. Now if you'll excuse me I gotta throw out most of my stuff and get the hell out of here. Tata!
Monstar L
hype
hype?
HYPE???
WHENEVER YOU HAVE PEOPLE COVERING THEIR FACES WITH WET TOWELS AT THE withholding GOVERNMENTS REQUEST, THERE IS A huge DISASTER.
3 PLANTS MELT DOWN?
THEY HAVE TO HOSE DOWN HELICOPTERS 60 MILES OFFSHORE.... IT IS GOING TO GO EVERYWHERE...
the HYPE comes from those sociopathic sucicide cult nuclear power supporters.
I was afraid I'd lost all hope of seeing tentacle pr0n again in my lifetime!
http://www.albionmonitor.com/9703a/3milecancer.html
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning.
I don't watch the more hyperbolic networks but from what I've seen and read so far, all the statements seem to be along the lines that the threat of a dangerous radioactive leak is fairly small. However it ain't what you say it's the way that you say it. The tone of some headlines would make you think the world was about to blow up. Channel 4 News (UK) which is renowned for good quality reporting even succumbed to it in their headlines at the weekend, referring to a "nuclear emergency" which has a nice dramatically terrifying ring to it, but vague enough to be almost meaningless.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
My heart sunk when I clicked on the second link ... it lead to a junk engineering article in the Wall Street Journal. Where would I go for an unbiased engineering assessment of "redundancy and good planning"? Technology Review, New Scientist, even Wired ... anywhere but the homepage of Rupert Murdoch's cadre of shills for corporate interests. He makes such brilliant observations as "water doesn't burn." No, it evaportates. Next, it dissociates in the presence of heat and certain catalysts like the zirconium cladding of fuel rods ... and then it EXPLODES.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
Dammit !! Eject The Core !!
There is a very clear, well-written article explaining about why we shouldn't be worried about the Fukushima Reactors. I live about 150km from the plant and have grown tired of the fear-mongering I see in most of the media back home. The article can be found here.
Well, despite optimism about how the Japan officials are handling the failures at the reactors, it seems a 3rd and more serious blast occurred in reactor II less than an hour from now... It seems melting down is ongoing. The issue here is that many things were overlooked, even if we take into account the huge magnitude of the event. For instance, the massive anti-tsunami barriers in Japan coast were no effective at all. Also, it seems many people didn't took the tsunami warning seriously and didn't go to high places. That is one explanation for the probably serious death toll. More problems for engineers tackle in the next few years... Google aggregation of news about the 3rd blast in this link: http://www.google.com/#q=3rd+blast+fukushima&hl=en&prmd=ivnsu&source=univ&tbs=nws:1&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=W7N-TfbJIMGEOorbzesK&sqi=2&ved=0CDIQqAI&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=9856b7f95556a9fa
Nuclear will still be around in Japan for the same reasons it started to begin with. As for nuclear the main thing about it is that a major failure has a much bigger scope and scale than any other power source say except large scale hydro. A wind farm goes down. A coal or oil plant burns up. My grandchildren will read about it, not be living it, like nuclear.
Reading how well the Japanesse infrastructure reacted to the earthquake, I have to wonder how such an event would play out in the US, and whether Net Neutrality, implemented or not, would effect such a situation.
Yes this is an intellectual exercise, but say every connection crossing the Mississippi River, buried or microwave, was severered due to earthquake, hurricane, or $something else. Would all the telcos bring it all back up a.s.a.p? All of this comes down to line-sharing, right? In the face of massive tragedy and wide-scale infrastructure damage, has anyone really asked how the 'Net Neutrality' fiasco would effect our infrastructure? I'd like to think that everyone would play fair, but this is American telcos we're talking about here. They'd file the insurance claims first, toss the existing infrastructure, working or not, in the bin and start over, or declare bankruptcy and get outta dodge.
I'm not asking this to detract from the present state and emergencies going on in Japan, but I have to wonder just how we'd fare given an equivalent event against our information infrastructure. Does the extent of Corporate greed extend into unimaginable scenarios, when information communication and dissemenation will literally save or costs lives?
The optimist in me thinks, even at our worst, those who have nothing to gain will still lend a helping hand. The cynic in me knows the truth, and remembers Katrina quite vividly.
We have a customer in Japan operating a data center in Tochigi Prefecture, only about 200 km or so from Sendai. They lost power after the earthquake, and were running off UPS until their data center gensets kicked in, so their servers did not experience any outage immediately after the earthquake. Our people on the scene reported that television and radio were out, and their only source of news was from the Internet: their connectivity seemed almost entirely unaffected. However, their generators only had enough gas for six hours of operation, so we still had to shut everything down before the juice ran out, and there was no power for eight more hours after that... I was surprised that there was no serious network service interruption: no major undersea cables were damaged like what happened after the earthquake in Taiwan in 2006, and their network performance seems just as it normally is: they still seem to be getting their advertised gigabit speed, at least to other sites also in Japan, so it seems that their net backbone was scarcely affected.
We'll have problems maintaining service uptime in the face of the rolling blackouts that they're experiencing, but those are the breaks...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Disclaimer: I work for a VoIP carrier, I was the the process of an eat-our-own-dogfood trial.
On friday the voice/text network was pretty much unusable, but the 3G data network was pretty much business as usual. Between Skype for sending out international SMS on my iphone (Skype, please get going and add this to the android client) and a SIP VoIP client on my android phone I had no problem notifying all my loved ones that I was safe.
I don't know whether I should feel good that VoIP worked so well or that the conventional telephony systems fared so poorly.
Well I hope things work out but I just read a headline about workers abandoning the plant. But thats just probably media fueled "speculation". Perhaps the workers were "paniced" by the media into leaving, not because of increasing radiation levels.
And I support nuclear power, but the designs need to be re-examined. I am hoping pebble-bed reactors work out myself.
"At this point, it looks like their work may have allowed the Internet to do what it does best: route around catastrophic damage and keep the packets flowing, despite terrible chaos and uncertainty.' Let's hear it for redundancy and good planning"
Yes, let's hear it for the guys that designed ARPANet...for *specifically* this kind of catastrophic, multi-node failure.
After all, that's precisely the sort of thing the internet was, in fact, designed to cope with. So yes, let's applaud Japan for building a robust network. However I'll save my main praise for the original system architects and planners that set up the internet as it is.
-Styopa
Let's hear it for redundancy!
Have you looked?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydrides
"Metal hydrides, such as MgH2, NaAlH4, LiAlH4, LiH, LaNi5H6, and TiFeH2, with varying degrees of efficiency, can be used as a storage medium for hydrogen, often reversibly.[8] Some are easy-to-fuel liquids at ambient temperature and pressure, others are solids which could be turned into pellets. These materials have good energy density by volume, although their energy density by weight is often worse than the leading hydrocarbon fuels."
http://web.ead.anl.gov/saltcaverns/uses/compair/index.htm
"Salt caverns or mines have been used to store air under high pressure.
* Compressors use off-peak electricity to fill the cavern with compressed air.
* For peaking demand, the compressed air is withdrawn from the cavern, blended with natural gas, and used to drive a gas turbine to generate electricity.
* CAES Plants of 110 â" 290 MW exist."
http://www.saltcavernstorage.com/caes.html
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2000/alert14 ... This climate-stabilizing initiative would require the installation of 1.5 million wind turbines of 2 megawatts each. Manufacturing such a huge number of wind turbines over the next 11 years sounds intimidating until it is compared with the 70 million automobiles the world produces each year. At $3 million per installed turbine, this would mean investing $4.5 trillion by 2020, or $409 billion per year. This compares with world oil and gas capital expenditures that are projected to reach $1 trillion per year by 2016. 29 Wind turbines can be mass-produced on assembly lines, much as B-24 bombers were in World War II at Fordâ(TM)s massive Willow Run assembly plant in Michigan. Indeed, the idled capacity in the U.S. automobile industry is sufficient to produce all the wind turbines the world needs to reach the Plan B global goal. Not only do the idle plants exist, but there are skilled workers in these communities eager to return to work. The state of Michigan, for example, in the heart of the wind-rich Great Lakes region, has more than its share of idled auto assembly plants. 30"
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/plan_b_updates/2003/update24
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/pb4/PB4ch5_ss2
"Europe is already tapping its off-shore wind. An assessment by the Garrad Hassan wind energy consulting group concluded that if governments aggressively develop their vast off-shore resources, wind could supply all of Europeâ(TM)s residential electricity by 2020. 13
http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2010/08/24/plan-seeks-100-pct-renewable-energy-australia-ten-years
"The report, entitled Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan, "outlines a technically feasible and economically attractive way for Australia to transition to 100 percent renewable energy within ten years." The plan specifies that the 100 percent renewable grid be "based on proven technologies that are already commercially available and that have already been demonstrated in large industries.""
Recent:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-scientists-breakthrough-nanocomposite-high-capacity-hydrogen.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
does that not mean healing was done by humans by setting up new routes? I would expect a self healing net to do it in minutes and perhaps also even much less abrupt.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The internet doesn't heal itself. It's healed by on call engineers who get woken by a phone call at 3am. The automagical healing is human technical support performing heroic emergency fixes 24/7. I sure wish it could all just fix itself ...
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
A question. Why would they even build nuclear plants in EARTHQUAKE ZONES ?! WHY ?!
This stuff is dangerous if not properly handled. BUILDING IN NATURAL DISASTER DANGER ZONE IS NOT PROPER HANDLING !!!
Even though the Japanese reactors did their job to contain against a meltdown, it looks like nuclear power progress will be set back another 20-30 years due to the fearmongers pointing to this. The loss of life can't be ignored. For people that were not affected by loved ones killed by it, the rest of the world will also be feeling this disaster in Japan for generations to come. Especially the fact that the anti-nuke crowd now possesses another "kill point" to keep nuclear power dead.
I don't think you really care about the people who died, do you? I live in Tokyo, my elderly mother is missing presumed dead. Don't let that stop you making disparaging remarks about the "anti-nuke crowd" though.
Since everybody who posts here are suddenly experts in Japanese nuclear technology, perhaps somebody could find me a post about Japanese reactors being dangerous - a post made before the disaster? No, out of the millions of slashdot posts nobody ever mentioned that Japanese reactors might be dangerous.
But don't let that stop you from promoting nuclear energy - I'm sure all the new designs are perfectly safe in any given scenario.
Truly you scientists are gods amongst men - it must be nice to be able to think of my mother's death as mere collateral damage. I can't.
Hear hear! All ye who believes in the cleanliness and profitability of nuclear power heed this call!
We are now over hundrer people who are showing our support to the Japanese by travelling there and showing the world there is no harm in these "so called" radioactive clouds. We will be educating people not to wear masks, and to go out for a picnic, instead of all this fear-mongering.
Sincerely Yours,
The /. Crows
The linked article about the nuclear plant problems in Japan is chock full of technical errors and omissions. He skips the primary danger of exposed fuel rods, the danger Japan is facing: thermal damage to the fuel rods themselves, prior to the total meltdown stage, means your steam pressure releases now contain primary radionuclides! He states that the melted fuel rods aren't hot enough to melt steel and concrete, when they most certainly are! (They melted sizeable chunks of the containment vessels at TMI and Chernobyl.) He fails to correctly describe what emergency core cooling systems do and how. He miss-states the actual danger of graphite-moderated reactors: it isn't that graphite is flammable, it's that you're using it as a moderator (as thus, water as some of the neutron absorption) and that makes the system inherently unstable. Once you reach the point of worrying about the graphite burning, you're way past the tremendous explosion/meltdown phase.