Blog Archives for January, 2007

Network Outages Caused By Taiwan Earthquakes

The quakes that damaged seven undersea cables last month got me thinking about disasters in general and they way they look to the network routing around them. Much has already been written about the quakes and the damage that they did to telecommunications infrastructure to Asia. But two perspectives have been missing. The first is the understanding of the event from a network (Internet) perspective. Renesys data and tools are obviously good at providing that.

The second is the comparison of this event to other events of equal scale. What did this event look like compared to large-scale power outages? Compared to hurricane Katrina? Compared to global routing events (mass route leaks, high-rate network scanning, etc.)? Put another way, is there a consistent "shape" that disaster takes on the Internet and were the Taiwan quakes disaster-shaped?

Continue reading "The Shape of Disaster on the Net" »

Cringely is at it again. As I have written previously, sometimes Robert X. Cringely seems to write well beyond his knowledge-base. Unfortunately, it seems to be getting more common. The recent bizarre googanoia column is like that. And in this most recent column, he makes several boneheaded mistakes and misstatements in the process of trying to make an otherwise interesting point about bit torrent and network economics.

Cringely badly misstates a number of facts in the process of making an argument about the notional value of bit torrent (the portion of the market for distribution of media that is already controlled by peer to peer bit torrent networks). In fact, on review, he may get every single important fact wrong. Which doesn't mean that the idea that he presents is invalid or useless (although in this case it probably is). It simply means that we can't get there from here. We cannot reach the speculative world that Cringely describes from the poor, fact-inhabited world we are stuck in.

And that is the problem: when smart, creative people speculate beyond their knowledgebase, they tend to arrive at fantastical, implausible but nonetheless fascinating places. We may be tempted to give such thinkers more credence than they merit, simply because their speculation is so fantastical and therefore so interesting? It's the intellectual equivalent of a car wreck: we know it's not good but we somehow can't look away. Maybe this time we should.

In an effort to sort this out, let's review the "facts" that Cringely cites and then ask the good people at AMS-IX to help us clarify them.

Continue reading "Cringely, AMS-IX and Bit Torrent" »