At 18:16 07/26/2000 -0400, David Charlap wrote:
Sean Donelan wrote:
The Reuters article skips over some of the important qualifiers in the Nature letter. Read the entire letter on the Nature website. http://www.nature.com/
The conclusions are interesting, but I think missing a few pieces of data. Every major public NAP has had service affecting incidents, and so far we have not seen the partioning effect Albert et al write about.
I agree with Sean that the article itself is an interesting read. In fact, I'd say it's better than I expected based on the Reuters report. A key conclusion -- that elimination of a random 2.5% of the routers of the Internet would cause little harm, but elimination of the most central 2.5% of the routers would at least triple the diameter of the network -- is likely correct. (Although I don't think we needed fancy mathematics to tell us that. ;^) Sean, I don't think that they were arguing that EVERY failure would cause this kind of collapse. They were saying that a scale-free system might be particularly vulnerable to a systematic attempt to cripple its most critical elements. A failure of a single public NAP is probably well below that threshhold.
... and David Charlap wrote: Note also that the graph they examine is one of web pages linked to each other. Not the underlying network of fibers and routers...
Perhaps you read this too hastily? They appear to have evaluated both. Cheers, - Scott