Come on, who in 2021 actively drops routes because of an entry in the Level3 IRR? I mean, IMHO, it's not close to impacting the whole Internet.
The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
121–130 of 176 posts
Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
#122It'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…
IPFS
ENS
Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re wrong. If say One Wilshire[1] or one of the very few other carrier hotels in its class abruptly ceased existing the Internet would be wrecked and rebuilding would be a matter of months at the very best. It doesn’t matter how many peers a big telco has when the supermajority of backbone peerings are in a handful of buildings. [1] https://one-wilshire.com/
That building gives me anxiety attacks; just thinking about how vulnerable it is.
Not the whole internet, but a whole country for sure: google "Las Toninas" a beachside town in Argentina. Someone over there frequently steps over the wire and good bye rest of the world
Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
#124It'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.
Bob Metcalfe repeatedly predicted a "gigalapse" which he defined as a loss of one billion hours of Internet connectivity. Bob would say look at how fragile this all is, and his point wasn't (although at the time it would too often be portrayed this way) "the Internet will fail" because Bob isn't actually an idiot, but it also shows a substantial lack of foresight anyway. Of course ~everybody will have the Network, the Internet is the Network, and so then normal sleep is an order of magnitude worse than a "gigalapse" yet happens every day and we don't even care.
The "gigalapse" seemed like a big deal because proportionally a billion user hours in 1995 is everything doesn't work for days, or most things don't work for several weeks... but today of course it could also be everybody in the world is inconvenienced for about long enough to make breakfast. Oh no.
Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question (IT/security noob) -- why does it not provide that much more security? I like verifying that my traffic is going where I want.
With Encryption being applied to every site as a requirement is relatively new since google made it a requirement in Chrome. Previously it was only required for secured transactions like purchases and working on health care records etc... And very rightfully so. Now Google Chrome flags even simple (informational) sites for not being encrypted, and (quite possibly) rightfully so because of the potential for tracking/a…
> Security is best when it is uniform
So when web traffic is uniformly not encrypted that's more secure than if it is encrypted by varying degrees and implementations?
Tbh your complaint reads along the lines of "Perfect is the enemy of good enough". SSL may not be perfect, but it sure as hell is better than running pretty much the whole web in the clear.
Particularly as pretty much all of your complaints do not really have anything to do with SSL itself, but rather in how Chrome surfaces a lack of SSL a certificate and how your hoster handles installing certificates.
Both of which are things you can personally change something about.
Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
#126Earlier 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…
I wonder if I can nerdsnipe anyone into figuring out the fewest BGP hijacks it would take to force traffic on the Internet from the West Coast of the US to take the long way around to the East Coast of the US. Never mind the latency, that pipe isn't big enough for all of that traffic, so it'll effectively be a netsplit.
I bet it's a lower number than anyone's actually comfortable with, though it would be rather difficult to pull of.
Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
#127Earlier 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.
Bob Metcalfe repeatedly predicted a "gigalapse" which he defined as a loss of one billion hours of Internet connectivity. Bob would say look at how fragile this all is, and his point wasn't (although at the time it would too often be portrayed this way) "the Internet will fail" because Bob isn't actually an idiot, but it also shows a substantial lack of foresight anyway. Of course ~everybody will have the Network, th…
If a Gigalapse is about 12 minutes these days (given 4.66 billion people on the Internet), a Teralapse would be about 9 days of no Internet for all of us.
Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
#128Every complex system - including the human body, the global economy, the ecosystem, and large software systems - grew one functional hack at a time
Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
God, this would happen all the time in the mid-90s. You joke about a backhoe in Iowa, but I'm pretty certain it was a backhoe in Iowa one time. Then the whole of the UK's traffic to the USA West Coast would be routed through an ISDN connection in Korea for three days. Your goat porn downloads from Usenet would drop from their high of 0.5Kb/sec and you'd be left with your dick in your hand. Or something.
Kids today will never know how we suffered in the Before Times
boobs.jpg loading one line at a time and then greying out completely before reaching the bottom
Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't RTFM but I could see the argument that the SPOFs of the Internet are AWS, Cloudflare and Google, not the cables and routers in an IXP.
You alread listed 3 single points of failure. I get what you mean: the entry point search engine, the global cache and the global backend/storage/compute. But look I live in Hong Kong, I dont feel that way: there are other backends, we could survive without the caching for a while and Google is forbidden for 1.4bn people who get on with it very well... Depends what you call the internet. Yes, facebook and whatsapp ar…
OK, you think 1.4 billion people without the freedom to search is ok? LOL.