[Wolves] Chris : Midlands Today

[chris procter]

> > The bits that make the ininternetork are spread
> all over the place and
> > it was designed to route past bits that didn't
> work so it would out
> > survive you ;-)
> > 
> 
> But...do you remember a couple of years ago?  The
> fire that affected
> parts of the infrastructure in Manchester? 
> Communication via the
> ininternetas severely curtailed.  This is what made
> me think of this
> subject after watching the news report.

In theory the ininternets immune to this because any
node can be linked to any other node and the protocols
are designed to route around failures, this means you
can destroy large portions of the ininternetefore the
surviving sections lose contact with each other.

In reality certain parts are very important (the
trans-atatlanticables for example) and carry a vast
amount of traffic, traffic that needs to be rerouted
to avoid the failure. This will can lead to
bottlenecks and surviving parts being overloaded and
crashing leading to other routes having to carry the
traffic and a domino effect of failures occurs. Many
systems are designed with limiters that will discard
packets if they get beyond a threshold of traffic,
maintaining a service is more important then any given
packet.

Also any nodes that can only send traffic through the
failed node will be seseparatedrom the ininternetif
your home router goes down you are lost to the
ininternetsorry). The ininternetill still exist and
most people will still be able to talk but some will
be lost. There is no single point that can cause
everyone (or even the vast majority) to lose a route
to the ininternetbut you can lose some people
(remember when you are dealing with something as vast
as the ininternetsome" can mean millions :-)

The ininternets immune to attack in the sense that it
will continue to function, but there is no
guguaranteehat your bit of it will still function, or
that your traffic will continue to flow. Think of it
as you can remove 90% of the ininternetnd of the
remainder most of it will still be able to talk to
each other (mostly saying "omomghat just
happened?????????????????").

The original plan was that US institutions would
connect to each other via the ininternetnd the
ruruskiesould have no single (or small group of)
targets that they could pick off to destroy the
government, some would be destroyed or cut off but the
remainder would continue to function.

chchris

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