Dude Tracks His Transatlantic Flight By Watching Internet Routing

We have a new candidate for geek of the year: Todd Underwood who tracked his Lufthansa flight across the Atlantic ocean, using Internet routing as his guide.I just saw my plane cross the mid-Atlantic, not by looking out the window, but by watching routing updates cascade across the Internet. I'm writing from a Lufthansa jet right now, traveling from Munich to Boston. This plane offers the (relatively) new Connexion by Boeing wifi + satellite Internet service. It's seriously cool stuff - high latency, but absolutely functional.Todd is the Chief Operations and Security Officer for Renesys Systems, so just writing about his plane's location isn't enough; he explains in great detail how he knew where he was, and why the technology is so cool.I was able to see the mid-Atlantic shift because the plane I'm on withdrew its routes from the European communications satellites and re-announced them in North America. The Boeing engineers faced some interesting challenges in designing this system. They wanted a wifi-delivered platform that was easy to use. They also wanted fully-functional connectivity. They were targeting business customers so simple web connectivity was not enough: customers would want VPNs, ssh and all manner of connections to corporate applications. And finally, if this service was going to work properly, it would have to be as low-latency as possible, not just high bandwidth.The best part of Todd's blog post is his explanation of routing protocols and how the engineers at Boeing overcame what could have been service-crippling problems, including all sorts of really cool and useful graphics that even a level 010 geek can easily understand. In fact, if you grok and get excited by his story, you're probably on your way to being a level 1010 geek. If you understand what I'm talking about and are giggling right now, you're a level 101010 geek, and we're looking forward to seeing you at the meeting tonight. Excelsior!

(via reddit)

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/geek/15506/