NEWS: The Internet is a Series of Tubes, and the Tubes are Full of Holes

GEEK: The Internet is a Series of Tubes, and the Tubes are Full of Holes

When it comes to the world of technology, I am not a natural. To me, the Internet is as vast and wondrous and fascinatingly incomprehensible as outer space; that said, it kind of makes sense that the Internet would be full of things like quasars and galaxies black holes. According to a pretty cool article a couple days ago on Wired.com, such phenomena do exist (the black holes, no word yet on the rest), and a couple of computer science PhDs—Internet astrophysicists, if you will—are busting out their own kind of Hubble to get to the bottom of it all.

This all sounds very complicated, but luckily I'm not the only one who thinks so. Katz-Bassett, and his researching partner Harsha V. Madhyastha, say that they are very surprised by the data they have collected with their Intertube-Hubble. The eventual goal of their research, however, is to construct a tool that will monitor and chart the "black holes" in real time, eventually setting in place a permanent system of sensors to send pings to various locations around the internet at constant intervals.

The question I had to ask at that point was, "why?" What service will these sensors provide in the long run?

So once they get word of a black hole, that is to say an unresponsive bit o' internet, they can send out a search to figure out what the problem is, be it a faulty router or a weird connection misconfiguration, and fix it promptly to ensure faster service and less-congested Intertubes overall.

Pretty cool stuff. I suggest they put my house on constant watch, in particular: my computer's router is made of nothing but black holes and fail, and if the Hubble of the Internet can't fix it, well, I suppose nothing can.

whoah!

but i can still get porn, right?

very neat, mildly surprised there was not some sort of probe along these lines set up already to moniter internet performance... Any way good thing there is now.
I have to assume some of the black holes deal with some of the growing restictions on international transfers. From countries with larger censureship built into the system by government restictions...i.e. China...

yeah, that happens... routers are quite interesting machines to configure... one small thing can make such a huge difference, now in terms of the internet, I suppose it'd be way complicated to figure it all out.

I was pondering that m'self.

internet black holes!
how cool is that, seriously?

Well, when you look at it realistically, internet blackholes aren't that cool. They're just places where pings get sent to die. And for all they know, those black holes could be intentional. Many firewalls on private networks or computers are designed to not respond to unknown requests on some ports and so forth.

At the worst, it's usually just something as simple as a bad IP address in a routing table somewhere causing the ping to bounce around indefinitely until it dies. (Pings die, by the way. Neato, huh?)

Personally, I'll stick to thinking that the internet is run by a bunch of wizards in funny hats with wands, living in inverted towers deep in the ground.

Which ain't so far off from reality, so bite me.

Oh yeah, this is well known. For instance Comcast can't properly configure their routers OR find their asses with both hands.

I've seen plenty of times where I traceroute somewhere to see why I can't connect, and watch the packets go round and round the same six routers until they hit TTL (time-to-live) and get dropped.

Also, a lot of the assholes now configure stuff to not respond to pings (ICMP echo-request) so stuff like traceroute and ping doesn't work. Fuggin' retards. Then they wonder why their network connections don't work right.

This is the equivalent of calling someone and not ever saying anything, if you want to know how rude that is, network-wise.

Eventually other stuff goes "guess they're not there any more, I'll stop routing 'em packets" and their intarweb toob dies. And they're totally clueless as to why.

With all the incompetent fucktards "administering" networks and cheap-ass equipment these days, I'm surprised any of it still works.

There used to be one HUGE router (MAE-EAST) that most (80%?) of the East Coast traffic went through, back just before when that web stuff started. I remember when it went down and it would even cause problems down here in Florida.

Nah, it's usually clueless idiots running misconfigured equipment. Total incompetence is more likely (and successful) at bringing down a network than preplanned maliciousness.

/dev/null

Huh?

Actually there is; it's called ECHELON.

Shouldn't you be busy making ASCII art?

Ron Paul is an internet Black Hole.

Better things to do

Black holes in space, black holes on the net... but when are they going to find all our lost socks!?

Yeah! What about the porn?

I think my computer is one of the black holes.

I can never find files I download.

The
ECHELON interception system monitored telephone, fax, email , etc communications, and had nothing to do with monitoring performance.

Unless you're talking about some other ECHELON, in which case I'd really like details because it sounds interesting.

You mean you guys aren't getting all the great porn Ive been sending you? Lousy black holes!

Thanks for the piece about my research, _DictionaryGirl_. Considering how esoteric much of the work we do seems, it's cool that people are taking an interest in Hubble.

I'd like to reply to some of the comments and questions people had about the system. We're building a system to monitor the entire Internet and find blackholes as they occur. We hope that by giving real-time notification to the ISP causing a blackhole, we can alert people who can fix the problems, improving connectivity. There are other systems that look for similar sorts of problems, but, as far as I know, none that monitor the entire Internet in real-time.

Some of the comments point out various reasons parts of the Internet might be unresponsive: repressive governments limited what citizens can access, routers configured to not respond to pings, intentional blackholing, firewalls. These are all issues, but aren't quite the problems we're looking at. We're interested in cases where an address has been responsive, then becomes unresponsive. This behavior generally indicates that something bad has happened, like a failure or misconfiguration.

I hope that clears things up a bit. Feel free to post any other questions-- I'll check while this temp account is active-- or contact me at the websites in my profile.

_DictionaryGirl_, I'm happy to point Hubble towards your house to monitor it; it's $48/year, $24/3 months, or $12/1 month. Strangely, that's the exact price of a SG membership.

--ethan k-b

Thanks. I figured there may be something more going on than the obvious.

I'm guessing that the same apparent electromangetic anomalies that seem to plague the Bermuda Triangle and the Mariana Trench area directly across the globe from it, which some believe are Eartly black holes connected by a subterranean wormhole may have a corresponding perpendicular counterpart 'above' which some mainframes may reside and be affected by tangential phenomona in its periphery.

I'll try to make a formal dissertation on my thesis available for the exact price of a SG membership and I may change my membername to skallison in honour of you and your membername.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

In all seriousness, I am truly very interested in this, so please keep us abreast of the fruits of your labour.

*<snicker snicker> . . . I said 'a breast' <snicker snicker>*

I think this rocks, A system in place to monitor internet productivity ...sweet.

Until it proves that 90% of all internet productivity is porn-connected. Can we say unintended consequences?