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The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#71

Post by doubled112 »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #59
lotsofpulp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coaxial cable connections in the US have such meager upload bandwidth that cable ISPs do not even bother advertising or specifying a minimum upload bandwidth.

Yeah, but I’ve been able to stream music from my desktop to my phone while driving and run a web server with reasonable performance on one.

It's more than adequate for personal use. I've also been serving myself and a few friends for years.

Download being 300Mpbs but upload 20Mbps IS kind of irritating though.

When did 100Mbps become popular for home LANs even?

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#72

Post by azeirah »

HPsquared wrote: post #4

Held together with spit and baling wire as it is, the fact that it mostly works proves that the overall architecture is robust.

If Alan Kay is to be believed (which I hope he is!) then the internet was originally inspired by multicellular lifeforms.

I'd say the internet has some sort of a "biological" architecture. Robust in the sense that organisms are robust; extremely messy, sensical from a high-level view, chaotic from a low-level view.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#74

Post by [deleted] »

toast0 wrote: post #30
fredophile wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The internet routes around failure" hasn't been true for a long time. It refers to the original topography which has been replaced with a hub and spoke model. Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet.

Back in the 90s when I got on, so much of traffic was exchanged at MAE-West or MAE-East, and a backhoe in Iowa could make nearly all the cross-US traffic go through Europe and Asia instead. These days, there are lively public internet exchanges up and down both coasts, in texas and chicago and elsewhere. A well placed backhoe can still make a big mess, many 'redundant fibers' are in the same strand, and last mile is…

[deleted]

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#75

Post by SahAssar »

imchillyb wrote: post #19

Has no one here seen: https://www.reddit.com/r/cablefail/ There are 1000s of these pictures. The entire world's IT infrastructure has been held together with spaghetti-noodle-cabling and bodged patches for over three decades now. I'm even guilty of it. Most IT guys are guilty of it. Don't even get me started talking about how bodged together corporate codebases are. Banks are perhaps the worst offenders. Old hardware…

If you haven't read it https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks beautifully describes this and has both made me want to quit and start a farm and want to stay and improve things depending on the day.

If you (the collective you, everyone reading this) haven't, read it.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#76

Post by fulafel »

winternett wrote: post #65
fulafel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are absolutely not meant to do the updates manually.

On one ISP that I host sites on, they restrict cert installs and don't allow SSH access. It's done in order to sell their cert services. I have too many sites on there to move easily... It's complicated. Eventually I'll bite the bullet and move to a new host. :/

Sorry about your service provider failing at their job and squeezing you for $$ cert services! But I'm not nearly convinced this is big enough to stop encrypting the web.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#77

Post by 999900000999 »

WJW wrote: post #63
999900000999 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also break something with your dull tools. This is why you can't just drive a car until it breaks, you get it checked out. Then again, cars are a private good. When it's your property vs our property you have more of an incentive to take care of it.

Machine shops are also private goods and their owners have a lot of incentive to keep them working, so I don't think this example is very accurate. In any case the chance of breaking anything with a partially stripped screwdriver is pretty minimal.

If you don't know what you're doing you can strip a screw.

Getting it out won't be fun.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#78

Post by throw0101a »

fredophile wrote: post #7
h2odragon wrote: post #6

It's Anti-Fragile. If it breaks all the time, everybody is highly experienced at patching together new workarounds, mechanisms for fail over are in place and regularly tested, and there's whole classes of corner case bugs that get flushed out to be stomped (or nurtured as cherished pets) instead of breeding in the dark and jumping out at you all at once. How can the "Internet routes around failure" be trusted without…

"The internet routes around failure" hasn't been true for a long time. It refers to the original topography which has been replaced with a hub and spoke model. Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet.

> Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet.

"A few hubs"? Just Hurricane Electric has presence in many, many IXPs, and they're not even the largest transit provider:

* https://bgp.he.net/AS6939#_ix

AT&T, the largest transit provider, has a ridiculous number of peers:

* https://bgp.he.net/AS7018#_peers

And there are several different major global providers:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network

A lot of the Big Tech companies are also building their own private fibre networks so they don't even have to worry about sharing infrastructure with the telcos:

* https://www.submarinecablemap.com

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#79

Post by [deleted] »

shadowgovt wrote: post #51
IncRnd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> proves that the overall architecture is robust. Not really. What it shows is the stark difference between two ideologies. The first camp contains people who believe in Postel's Law, "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". The second camp has people who recognize that the current world is not a cooperative network of researchers: "all input is untrusted". Krebs is absolutely in t…

But the two philosophies aren't really in contention. Proper adherence to Postel's law also includes accepting malicious traffic (and then doing something reasonable with it, like black-holing it). The "liberal in what you accept" part is mostly honest acceptance of the reality of the network: you cannot control the information sent to your service, only how you respond to it.

[deleted]

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#80

Post by xxpor »

winternett wrote: post #49
shadowgovt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But monitoring and maintenance are things someone needs to do if they operate a site, period.

But if you're independently running, paying for, and managing multiple sites, it's a HUGE burden. It also kills innovation for independent devs and startups, and dramatically raises the cost/investment threshold for this kind of innovation. Pricing on cert services is also far too high when everyone's concern and agreement should be security as a basis for operations. It's not something that should be an upcharge or…

traefik takes care of all of this with about 5 lines of setup. it's so trivial i add it to every experimental nonsense service I setup because it's one line of nix config. i really don't understand the complaint.
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