The internet is held together with spit and baling wire • Hacker News Board

kingcharles wrote: post #94

toast0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

This is why I always pre-download pr0n well-ahead of jack0ff time.

Call it BBP Protocol... "Blue Ball Prevention"

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

#163

Post by tatersolid » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 12:12 PM UTC

genewitch wrote: post #154

rdp36 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, you think 1.4 billion people without the freedom to search is ok? LOL.

I wouldn't say Google is search, per se. I haven't used Google for search in a few years.

If Google search went away for more than 24 hours, Bing/DDG/others would quickly get overwhelmed as people learned about alternatives and switched.

Bing might be able to auto-scale using Azure infrastructure but there might not be enough hardware even there.

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

#164

Post by ezconnect » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 12:53 PM UTC

h2odragon wrote: post #99

kingcharles wrote: post #94

Earlier 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

They will never experience buying bootleg disk for gif porn.

edit: disk is for diskette

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

#165

Post by cainxinth » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

So is society. When you’re a kid, it seems like everything is incredibly well organized and orchestrated.

As an adult, you realize the world is a patchwork of semi-functioning systems and it’s a miracle the whole thing works as well as it does.

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

#166

Post by h2odragon » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

Stampo00 wrote: post #106

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…

This has big "can you call it broken if it never actually worked in the first place?" energy. EDIT: I have a soft spot for the person who is so over it that they sit around pontificating the meaning of the word broken instead of actually getting up and helping in the midst of an emergency. Because half the time that's me. When prod is on fire every day, eventually that becomes the norm.

It's much worse than that: it becomes philosophy.

Beyond some level of complexity a system isn't one, anymore, it is an emergent phenomenon that has many of the aspects we ascribe to "life." Our inputs affect the systems, surely, but not in a predictable or even repeatable way.

A cow is an "inefficient means" of turning grass into tasty beef, by some accounting. But the cow is, as far as it is concerned, fully efficient at being alive. our notion of "what is the internet" fell out of sync with the realities sometime around '94 i think.

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

#167

Post by thenthenthen » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

rswail wrote: post #156

thenthenthen wrote: post #120

'spit'...nice way to put it I guess, Krebs still living with his mom init?

The term "spit and baling wire" is a well known (US/AU rural at least) expression to mean something that is working well enough but is fragile.

I never knew! Excuses for the terrible joke

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

#168

Post by tim333 » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

ronnier wrote: post #118

Ekaros wrote: post #108

I have kinda wondered how robust Internet would truly be if the proverbial stuff really hit a fan. I mean proper nuclear wars or economies including large ISP going down with admins dying or being fired on left and right. Specially with all of the talk of global crypto and so on... As I understand it is continuously almost hand-tuned machine and enough misconfiguration or entities simply stopping to exist much of the…

It wouldn’t work. Just look at what happens during bad storms.

I've never know the internet to go down in a storm. Does that happen? I mean I've had the wifi router stop if there's a power cut and had to use cell data but that's about as bad as it's got for me.

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

#169

Post by toast0 » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #126

toast0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 diffi…

> Never mind the latency, that pipe isn't big enough for all of that traffic, so it'll effectively be a netsplit.

We've seen this one before... BGP doesn't (usually) look at link utilization, just link status and maybe that the BGP connection doesn't time out, but even a massively overloaded connection tends to have room for BGP pings, so it's less netsplit and more blackhole.

I don't think BGP hijacks is really the way to acheive this one.

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

#170

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

inopinatus wrote: post #148

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…

These are not ideologies, but compatible principles from separate concerns. One relates to protocol errors, the other to information validation & verification.

[deleted]