Re: Risk of Internet collapse grows
Sean makes a good point about the importance of the quality of data, but the question is how can good data be made available for research. We've covered this ground before, that firms are not going to make data available. There are better data sets that have become recently available from a few sources, and hopefully improved analysis will result. That said a few things should be kept in mind with academic work. The time from when work is done until it appears in publication is quite legthy, especially when peer reviewed (the Grubesic et al article was peer reviewed). I saw his paper presented in the Fall of 2001, which means he probably did the research in the spring of 2001, and the latest data available was Boardwatch 2000. so, you end with a lag in Internet time that seems horrendous. One of the problems with academia. I do think it is important to think about the best contributions from academia providing tools (algorithm's etc.) to analyze data and view issues from a different perspective. We will never have the quality of data the operations community has. That said I think it is vital to get good feedback from the operations communtiy on our assumptiopns and something this forum has been great with helping with from my experience. I was curious if we put some recent research online if folks would be interested in providing feedback. Happy holidays, sean ----- Original Message ----- From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> Date: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 3:49 pm Subject: Re: Risk of Internet collapse grows
The full paper is available at:
http://whopper.sbs.ohio-state.edu/grads/tgrubesi/survive.pdf
password: grubesic
It was posted on the www.cybergeography.org website with the
On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 sgorman1@gmu.edu wrote: password,> plus I'm sure Tony would like the feedback.
Was this paper peer reviewed ?
I'm interested in the problem, but this is not the paper.
AT&T's network is the most vulnerable? While Onyx is among the least vulnerable? Onyx is bankrupt, and their network is no longer in operation. I guess you could argue Onyx not vulnerable any more.
This
paper starts out with some bad assumptions, such as there is one NAP in a city, one path between cities or the marketing maps in Boardwatch are meaningful.
Until we figure out how to collect some meaningful starting data, we can't draw these types of conclusions.
On Thu, 28 Nov 2002 sgorman1@gmu.edu wrote:
That said a few things should be kept in mind with academic work. The time from when work is done until it appears in publication is quite legthy, especially when peer reviewed (the Grubesic et al article was peer reviewed). I saw his paper presented in the Fall of 2001, which means he probably did the research in the spring of 2001, and the latest data available was Boardwatch 2000. so, you end with a lag in Internet time that seems horrendous. One of the problems with
The paper would have the same problems in 2000. It starts with bad assumptions. Age doesn't improve bad assumptions. Suppose I wrote an academic paper about the design of the Federal Reserve Banking System. After carefull analysis of the map at http://www.federalreserve.gov/otherfrb.htm (street addresses available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/fraddress.htm) I write a fully footnoted paper that the Federal Reserve system is vulnerable to the destruction of the board in Washington DC and twelve banks in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas and San Francisco. The US banking system would collapse, ATMs would stop, paychecks wouldn't get cashed, checks couldn't be cleared, etc. I would miss Alan Greenspan, but that's not how the US banking system works. The Federal Reserve system does have vulnerabilities. So does the Internet (and the post office, and the telephone network, and ...) But misunderstanding the risks and vulnerabilities is worse because it diverts resources away from the real ones.
On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Sean Donelan wrote: > ...The US banking system would collapse, ATMs would stop, paychecks > wouldn't get cashed, checks couldn't be cleared, etc. > The Federal Reserve system does have vulnerabilities. So does the > Internet (and the post office, and the telephone network, and ...) > But misunderstanding the risks and vulnerabilities is worse because > it diverts resources away from the real ones. Another interesting footnote, as long as we're on the subject of footnotes... You remember when Bob Metcalfe came and preached doom and gloom at the D.C. NANOG? Specifically, he was predicting a "gigalapse," his neologism for a billion person-hours offline, before the end of 1996, and he was basically saying that no more of this engineers-without-ties foolishness would be permitted after a debacle of _that_ scale occurred. Of course, nothing happened, and we all got T-shirts to commemorate the non-event. _However_, the footnote is that I went and dug that up a few years later and ran the numbers on a few of the bigger subsequent fiber cuts and (more to the point) ATM switching failures, and he was off by about two years, but the actual big cuts were _an order of magnitude_ larger than he predicted, and they _still barely even made the mainstream press_. So catastrophic failure doesn't appear to actually interest folks much, even when it does happen. -Bill
The problem isn't so much the latency - although that is a problem. Any researcher approaching this problem must understand that their result are only as good as their data. In this case, assuming that Boardwatch network maps are correct or, in fact, anything other than a marketing fantasy, is a big problem. Use of theses sort of data sources are extremely attractive to researchers because they are straight-forward and lack the "well, but"'s of the operational community. Trying to model real-life networks is much more difficult because of the plethora of designs and exceptions involved - very messy. Richer industry/researcher partnerships could help with this. I suspect the research community will have to become more aggresive in this area to succeed. - Dan On Thu, 28 Nov 2002 sgorman1@gmu.edu wrote:
Sean makes a good point about the importance of the quality of data, but the question is how can good data be made available for research. We've covered this ground before, that firms are not going to make data available. There are better data sets that have become recently available from a few sources, and hopefully improved analysis will result.
That said a few things should be kept in mind with academic work. The time from when work is done until it appears in publication is quite legthy, especially when peer reviewed (the Grubesic et al article was peer reviewed). I saw his paper presented in the Fall of 2001, which means he probably did the research in the spring of 2001, and the latest data available was Boardwatch 2000. so, you end with a lag in Internet time that seems horrendous. One of the problems with academia. I do think it is important to think about the best contributions from academia providing tools (algorithm's etc.) to analyze data and view issues from a different perspective. We will never have the quality of data the operations community has.
That said I think it is vital to get good feedback from the operations communtiy on our assumptiopns and something this forum has been great with helping with from my experience. I was curious if we put some recent research online if folks would be interested in providing feedback.
Happy holidays,
sean
----- Original Message ----- From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> Date: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 3:49 pm Subject: Re: Risk of Internet collapse grows
The full paper is available at:
http://whopper.sbs.ohio-state.edu/grads/tgrubesi/survive.pdf
password: grubesic
It was posted on the www.cybergeography.org website with the
On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 sgorman1@gmu.edu wrote: password,> plus I'm sure Tony would like the feedback.
Was this paper peer reviewed ?
I'm interested in the problem, but this is not the paper.
AT&T's network is the most vulnerable? While Onyx is among the least vulnerable? Onyx is bankrupt, and their network is no longer in operation. I guess you could argue Onyx not vulnerable any more.
This
paper starts out with some bad assumptions, such as there is one NAP in a city, one path between cities or the marketing maps in Boardwatch are meaningful.
Until we figure out how to collect some meaningful starting data, we can't draw these types of conclusions.
with helping with from my experience. I was curious if we put some recent research online if folks would be interested in providing feedback.
Sure - and think about doing it in person, too, at the February NANOG. We're trying a new presentation format, where researchers will have 10-minute slots to present their work for operator feedback. More here: http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0302/call27.html
participants (6)
-
Bill Woodcock -
Daniel Golding -
Sean Donelan -
sgorman1＠gmu.edu -
Stephen Stuart -
Susan Harris