What is Digg?135 Comments
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+156Yes.
But the real question here is "Why would we need to restart the Internet?" During the great worm storms of 04', Internet traffic was slowed (and some places were inaccessible without proxies), but it still worked, and worked well. What the hell is a "Cyber Katrina" anyways?
Besides, these people who are writing this garbage have no idea what they are talking about, the Internet is riddled with "Trip-wires", but we call them "Honeypots". The Internet has survived attack after attack due to its design of being endlessly redundant (thanks to its Peer-to-Peer nature), and can simply route around any problems. Any significant problems and/or attacks can be dealt with by administrators (such as turning off ports or banning IP addresses or IP blocks for a period of time to stop the progression of a DOS or DDOS), and can be dealt with quickly in this mannor. Short of a natural disaster knocking out fiber across the planet (aka earth-changing event), the Internet is quite self-healing, and can absorb many impacts (hell, even data centers in Katrina weren't all that damaged, most just went without power and simply couldn't continue to operate all of their equipment for super-huge bandwidth sites [though smaller ones did stay up]). - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -12/+106Al Gore can fix it.
- mrops, on 10/12/2007, -15/+69with the help of Geek Squad from Best Buy ofcoarse ;)
- magicbouncer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+44Don't worry, a couple years ago I downloaded the internet onto a floppy.
- headzoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+31Strangely enough, isn't this why ARPANET was developed in the first place?
- steelmaverick, on 10/12/2007, -3/+28@geminitojanus
If I could digg you 100 times for being intelligent, i would. - error10, on 10/12/2007, -23/+47Don't get me started on Geek Squad. They aren't geeks, for starters...
- NetJoe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18only a politician could come up with something this moronic.
The northeastern US power outage created a significant blip since a large part of the end nodes in the united states lost power. The network itself however continued to run on generators and batteries. Katrina, and 9/11 didn't even register except for the clients located in the immediate areas. an event with large enough impact to take much of the Internet offline would kill most of the people that maintain the hardware in large parts of the united states. Something like detonating a nuke in each of the cities with a major peering point.
The old cold war scenario of mutually assured destruction might do that, but at that point I don't think your so concerned about getting a $20 out of the ATM, or sending an email. - error10, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18The people who own it fix it, or they're out of business. This is not an issue that the Department of Homeland Security needs to get into and start screwing up.
- error10, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16It says you performed an illegal operation and will be shut down!
- error10, on 10/12/2007, -4/+20That depends on whether the terrists have nucular weapons of mass distraction!
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16"Hm, and supposing you have major outages at more than one spot? Say, five or six major peering points?"
Well, to be explicitly honest with you, it depends on where it happened. Peering points are very distributed, and could be redistributed if neccesary throughout the remaining network to route around any damage that occured, but you're not likely to even see that kind of damage without bombing the hell out of five or six buildings simultaneously. Traffic will likely be slower during that period of time (as generally the Internet is currently load-balanced and routed so that the peering points recieve the absolute minimum amount of traffic possible for their latency condition), but essential business would continue to happen (and you'd just get a lot of pissed off people who's favorite websites take a few seconds to a minute longer to load than usual).
What people have forgot is that we've seen it happen before, with worms like Sasser, Blaster and Code Red; each time the entire Internet slowed (yay Microsoft security blunders), but on the overall, the network stayed up. Honeypots are there to detect when it's happening and to set off alarms to warn system admins that they need to change a policy, some even can do it automatically. The Internet survives to see another day, no need to powercycle and/or restart. - Slourte, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16Start / Run
Type "cmd"
Then this line : c:the_internet.exe
Should reboot fine. - robbh66, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Everything geminitojanus says is correct. The author who posted that garbage is an idiot, as is the submitter.
ARPANET, The Internet's predecessor, was designed to withstand a countrywide nuclear strike- and that was 30 years ago- the internet has become a little more redundant now.
Frankly, if the internet goes down because of some sort of natural catastrophe, nuclear war, act of god, or whatever- people have a WHOLE LOT MORE to worry about other than when the Internet will be fixed. - r121, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15Yipes, if the internet is running Windows, we're in trouble...
- volksport, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Don't worry, if the Internet is down this page will tell us: http://internetstat.us
- zentro, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14More like a thingy, I'd say.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Sensationalist rubbish. No digg.
Why does everyone constantly think about major disasters or terrorism these days? - RandomSkratch, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15@mrops
I think they're too busy drilling holes into hard drives. - monolith, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13This is dumb. The Internet is a collection of networks. No single entity owns it. That is it's stregnth. Getting to the point where there is a reset switch might just ruin all that. No thanks. Big administration even nongovernmental isn't the answer folks.
- FireStrife, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12Its more like their too busy selling Hard Drives at the flea market.
- brownstone, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10The Internet is not a thing - It is an agreement.
www.worldofends.com - mellowsoon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Well, it was meant to survive a major "outage" at any spot in the country. Terrorist attack, nuclear bomb. Same difference.
- Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Who will restart the highways if the highway Katrina hits? Ask a dumb question, get a digg answer.
- JimXugle, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7@headzoo
Yes. And US Tax dollars paid for it, and paid Vint Cerf to develop TCP/IP. Now the monkeys in congress want to take the property of all americans and give it to corporations who are in no danger of going bankrupt.
@geminitojanus
By you, all scales of intelligence are made. Please tell us that you don't work at a McDonalds or something! - vvaduva, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6"Who restarts the Internet after a major disaster?"
Google - scaaven2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6what about a cyber earthquake or a cyber tornado?
- dclowd9901, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"Besides, these people who are writing this garbage have no idea what they are talking about, the Internet is riddled with "Trip-wires", but we call them "Honeypots". The Internet has survived attack after attack due to its design of being endlessly redundant (thanks to its Peer-to-Peer nature), and can simply route around any problems."
Yeah, and any sort of bureaucratic control would totally destroy this system of redundancy. Let's not give the government(s) another hand in how our internet works. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Interesting article. BRB. I need to restart my internet.
- dgolding, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5This article is pretty weak. People who talk about "tripwires" and "restarting the internet" have no idea how the Internet really works. They fall into two general categories - folks who want more money from the government (and plenty is being paid to folks for "tripwire"-type data), and folks who have some basic technical knowledge - just enough to be dangerous. System administrators and enteprise-class network administrators generally fall into these categories. Great effort has been applied to making the Internet infrastructure - routers, DNS servers, content - tough to take down. Seperate Internet networks can go down and come up independantly with no centralized control. The smart network engineers and architects have been working at the carrier networks - they don't work for the government or government contractors. In short, I can't say there is nothing to worry about, but I can say that a tremendous amount of collective effort and intelligence has been applied to the problem, and the government can not help - at best, they won't hurt the situation.
- sammyc53, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7There are actually 13 main DNS servers, if brought down, the net would halt. Now, tell me where the redundancy is in that? Sometime ago, four where knocked down, and the net REALLY sufferered.
- emanon2, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Is that a 3 1/2 or 5 1/4?
- Pharmboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5This is pretty stupid, actually. There is no single switching system. if you wiped out 75% of the populated areas on the entire planet, the internet would still work, albeit only in the places not wiped out.
That isn't an accident, that was a design decision made by the original engineers (the US military), and maintained today as the #1 consideration.
Even under extreme stress (Blaster, Code Red, etc) the net result is a temporary slowing down or limited areas being cut off for a while. What makes it get back to normal isn't any switch, it is the average of the actions of ALL the routing points and users combined.
Move along, nothing to see here.... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I thought AT&T owned the whole damn thing . . . errr . . .
Or maybe it is Al Gore. - egbert, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Well I have this big red button in my closet that is an emergency internet shutdown. Right next to it is a pull coord like a gas powered lawnmower that I can use to start it. I hope I do not flood it like the last time I mowed the lawn.
- beandip, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6The Internet and its protocols are designed for self-healing. Even while the affected areas are down the rest of the US will still have access. If a major distribution point is taken out then backup routes will come into play.
- Angostura, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Well, yes and no. The attacks that you mention were attacks on the end nodes. Imagine instead someone found a couple of zero-day exploits that could turn all Cisco routers and all Juniper routers into bricks, and which could be swiftly distributed.
Now THAT's the kind of threat that could effectively take the while net down. (And most other IP-based communication) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Ah, looks like the internet has been doing preety good during the last five years :)
- leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I have a version 1 aol diskette.
- Dissy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4> Is that a 3 1/2 or 5 1/4?
8 inch floppy of course! - williamdyer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"What is a cyber Katrina?"
It's nice handle for the plan to panic the sheeple into giving a several billion dollar contract to GeneralBoeingAtomics to come up with a plan to reboot the Internet.
Gotta do something with that h0m3Lam3rz "security' money now that the sheeple know we don't need cops on overtime watching bridges in Outer Bumfunk. - antron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The Architect, duh!
- Snuffkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The internet is not some centrally-administered network with single points of failure. It does not involve absurdly obscure metaphorical circuit breakers ala Jurassic Park.
Specifically, the internet is a load of privately owned branchy backbone networks that are mashed together with access networks hung on the edge. Meaning that small but significant segments of the internet are maintained by private entities (this is the whole problem with net neutrality, even). This means that if a segment of the internet goes down, perhaps at the same time as others, there is actually someone employed and responsible for getting it back up. These same people are not doing their jobs very well if they don't have some sort of scheme to get notified automatically when their connections to the rest of the internet goes down the plughole. That is -- this "lack of tripwires" stuff is nonsense. Of course there are tripwires, just not "internet-wide" ones. Implementing that would probably require widescale cooperation from the backbone operators.
If, and when, a load of links from one carrier to another goes down, the people at that carrier are going to start calling the other carrier and working together to get the links back up. It might involve repair of the physical links, running new links if they're too damaged, etc... but the concept that the internet might "go down", and everyone would be sitting around saying "What the hell just happened? You fix it." "No, you!" is ridiculous. Specific groups people have responsibility for specific segments of the internet and obviously they're going to be working to keep them up. In one specific backbone segment. Simultaneously, the same will be happening in every other affected backbone segment.
I'm not even sure what the hell a "cyber katrina" is supposed to be. The closest I can think of to something like that is that Cisco router vulnerability scare a while back involving that guy from ISS or something, but that's long passed. Other than that, it's almost implausible that the entire internet would just go down. There is no "off switch", you know? If God or whoever decides to drop a 500,000,000 tonne weight on a building housing Mr. Internet Backbone Organization A, this doesn't affect Mr. Internet Backbone Organization B, and Mr. IBO B can immediately start working to setup alternative links that don't go through Mr. IBO A.
Also, I believe there is at least one datacentre that was around the Katrina area, that actually remained fully operational - just it's Internet links didn't, and the people working in the datacentre could then work to get those links back up in cooperation from the ISPs that those links connect to.
I've not factored in DNS to this post. That's possibly the closest thing there is to a single point of failure. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4The world did not need to restart after Katrina so why would the internet?
- burke, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Tell that to the telcos.
- cemstar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3yeah, well they probably meant they could bring down THEIR internet in half an hour..
probably by pulling the network cable out the back of their PC.
..come to think of it, they could probably do it in like 1 second ! - purpleax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This article is a waste of space. It makes a mockery of this so called "geek" audience.
- cmm25, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3im pretty sure the private corporations that own the internet would fix it.
- TekGuru, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Sure it's not McGuyver?
- Jugalator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Btw, here's a list of the root name servers and also where they're located:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nameserver
Hmm, I didn't know there's a technical limitation that causes the current limition of 13 name servers!
They've worked around that by using anycast though, so it's not really just 13 physical ones, and many mirroring each other. -
Show 51 - 100 of 132 discussions
Browsing Digg on your phone just got easier with our enhancements to the 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is