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14 Apr 08 - 02:18 PM (#2315374) Subject: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: JohnInKansas Sort of a long article, but worth having here for when the link dies. (There is an interesting graphic at the link.) 'Black holes' charted on the Internet Messages throughout the world are constantly lost to cyber black holes By Clara Moskowitz LiveScience updated 10:59 a.m. CT, Fri., April. 11, 2008 You're pounding the keyboard, double-clicking away, sighing and grumbling, but to no avail: That devilish little hourglass icon refuses to give way to the Web site you're trying to reach. Most Internet users have encountered trouble reaching online destinations, but they often attribute the problem to their wireless network cutting out or a server momentarily going down. Sometimes, though, the problem is more mysterious. At any given moment, messages throughout the world are lost to cyber black holes, according to new computer science research. Ethan Katz-Bassett, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington, and his advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy, designed a program to continuously search for these strange Internet gaps, when a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing e-mail gets lost along a pathway that was known to be working before. To make sure the black holes they detect are not simply due to a problem with the end user or the host server, they look for computers that can be reached from some, but not all, of the Internet, meaning the issue must be occurring en route. "We were astounded when we did an initial four-month study and we saw how many problems there were," Katz-Bassett said. "It seemed infeasible that this could be happening so often. They're definitely more common than we thought." Now the team constantly monitors the Web for black holes and posts a map of where the problems are around the world at any given moment. They hope their data will help Internet service providers track down the route of problems experienced on their networks. "Network administers are definitely interested in it," Katz-Bassett said. "I think we need to do more analysis of the data and see where exactly these problems are occurring. It would be interesting to come up with predictions about where problems were most likely to occur." The scientists named their monitoring system Hubble after the Hubble Space Telescope, which can also detect black holes, albeit the astrophysical kind. They hope their data will help improve the consistency of the Internet, where we increasingly entrust vital information. "I think we would like it to be more reliable," Katz-Bassett said. "It's orders of magnitude less reliable than the telephone network right now. I think it should be pretty possible to get it closer." The researchers will present their findings at the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation being held next week in San Francisco. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation. /quote So now we know where those vaporized posts went! (Or maybe not.) John |
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14 Apr 08 - 02:41 PM (#2315398) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: katlaughing And here I thought it was probably the CIA or FBI intercepting them! Interesting, though. Thanks, John. |
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14 Apr 08 - 02:52 PM (#2315410) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: JohnInKansas kat - You doubt the ability of the CIA and FBI to create black holes? Some believe that both these agencies exist only inside them. John |
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14 Apr 08 - 03:46 PM (#2315475) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: Donuel The NSA program DARLA routes everything in a given region through the "recorder" and everything gets copied. Another secret program (XXXXXX) is designed for web forums and interactive chat sites. The days they monitor and download them are obvious in how slow the sites become. John Does it say anything about people losing entire websites? |
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14 Apr 08 - 04:00 PM (#2315489) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: JohnInKansas Donuel - Check the link. The info is pretty sketchy (including a total failure to identify where the data is "available to internet operators" but is on a reasonably "safe" site at MSNBC. The report indicates that the main interest is in sites that are accessible by some routes/users but not by others, if that's a clue that may help your thinking(?). They've tried to rule out mechanical/system failures, which presumedly would include whole sites/servers "removed" from the internet. John |
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14 Apr 08 - 04:36 PM (#2315525) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: Bill D It is little known that many 'connections' run thru 3rd world countries, where poor folk are hired for minuscule wages to hold some of the more flimsy wires together. If one of these guys scratches his nose and lets go for a second..(or worse, collapses from hunger).. many bits of data can fall out the end of the wire before the ends can be reconnected! (I thought I'd spare you the technical explanation, John....no, no...don't bother to thank me..) |
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14 Apr 08 - 04:51 PM (#2315543) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: GUEST,lox I thought that the information superhighway ran through a pieline that runs across the caspian sea, through Azerbaijan and down into kurdish Turkey and Iraq. The current political troubles in the region result in sabotage and other terrorist attacks, and there has been massive ecological damage because of millions of Gigabytes of binary code pouring out into the surrounding countryside and poisoning the local fauna and flora! What's more, kurdish espionage experts have been seen scooping up vast quantities of machine code and feeding it into giant calculators where they reassemble all the bits to create a picture of life in the west in the hope of discovering military secrets. So far they have only managed to download vast amiunts of Hhardcore pornography which, when questioned, they said they had never seen before and didn't know whhat it was let alone how it had got there. Some have even been found singing Irish folk ditties to the accompaniment of what sounds like a birthday card melody in between arguing about whetther more contemporary Kurdish music can truly be classified as folk. This wanton pollution of the planet with inane drivel must be stopped! |
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14 Apr 08 - 05:03 PM (#2315555) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: Donuel Lox, It sounds like you are indeed familiar with the Heroin Highway. Bill, Your sketch is a great opening to a suspense thriller. |
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14 Apr 08 - 06:09 PM (#2315610) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: JohnInKansas Bill D - Your explanation doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Every good (digital) system since the first days of ENIAC includes a "bit bucket" where the lost bits are caught. This prevents the floor being messed up with lots of the loose extra bits. When the guy gets done scratching his .... or when his replacement arrives, the bit bucket would obviously be dumped back into the wire, with only a slight delay. Maybe third world countries can't afford those tiny funnels though ... John |
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14 Apr 08 - 06:18 PM (#2315624) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: Bill D ♫There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.♫ and not only that, but bits which form words from places like Hawaii won't always fit thru the little funnels in places like Czechoslovakia & Germany, due to entirely different letter shapes. (those umlauts get caught) |
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14 Apr 08 - 06:35 PM (#2315639) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: Bee-dubya-ell Okay, here's my theory on those Interweb black hole thingies. All digital information amounts to nothing but strings of ones and zeroes, right? Well, if someone has figured out a way to reroute all the ones to someplace else, then only the zeroes get through to the desired destination. And, as we all know, it doesn't matter if it's one zero or a trillion of 'em, it's still nothin'. There's probably a huge cache of ones in some computer somewhere. I'd look for a ransom demand some time in the near future. |
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14 Apr 08 - 06:45 PM (#2315646) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: Cllr the world is divided into 10 kinds of people those who understand binary and those who don't. Cllr |
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14 Apr 08 - 07:09 PM (#2315673) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: Amos By know those ones have added up to billions and billions, but a little bit more since they have to be an odd number whose ending values are 1*1, plus 1*2, plus 1*4, +1*8, and so on... like 31, 0r 17, or such like. A |
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14 Apr 08 - 07:55 PM (#2315715) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: Rowan And there was I, thinking the answer was 42. Sigh! Cheers, Rowan |
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14 Apr 08 - 11:27 PM (#2315830) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: The Fooles Troupe Actually, it's '42 + or - some quantity'... |
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15 Apr 08 - 10:49 AM (#2316208) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: GUEST,lox The problem is that NGO's can't get the funding or the media attention to invest in "unifunnells": universal bit funnels that are capable of saving bits of information from (coincidentally) 42 different script forms including germaic, hawaiian, chines and arabic forms to name but a few ... well 4 actually ... which leaves 38 that I haven't mentioned ... There is a campaign, but we have sadly been labelled "extremist" (typical!) and so noone is taking us seriously. Perhaps you guys can help? Write to the "leave our bits alone" campaign and keep the terrorists hands off our bits! Do you want people you don't know fiddling with your bits? We're not weirdo's, we just want to share our bits openly without fear of losing them. ... that's probably enough now eh? ... ... ok ... |
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15 Apr 08 - 10:52 AM (#2316210) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: GUEST,lox As you can see, some of the letters in my last post have been lost, and in some cases jbmuled up in transit. |
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15 Apr 08 - 11:06 AM (#2316223) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: Amos I think the odds were agin ye, lox -- especially in seeking to use such odd concepts in an internet display. Are you trying to get your ASCII kicked? I can appreciate the desire to take a byte out of crime, but this Big-Endian approach is mind-toggling. A |
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15 Apr 08 - 06:30 PM (#2316733) Subject: RE: BS: The Internet Ate My Essay From: The Fooles Troupe So who is joining the LOBA campaign? |