Who wants to be in charge of the Internet today?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115102893799688389.html In Event of Big Web Disruption, U.S. Is Ill-Prepared, Study Says By VAUHINI VARA June 23, 2006; Page B2 The U.S. is poorly prepared for a major disruption of the Internet, according to a study that an influential group of chief executives will publish today. The Business Roundtable, composed of the CEOs of 160 large U.S. companies, said neither the government nor the private sector has a coordinated plan to respond to an attack, natural disaster or other disruption of the Internet. While individual government agencies and companies have their own emergency plans in place, little coordination exists between the groups, according to the study. "It's a matter of more clearly defining who has responsibility," said Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., who leads the Roundtable's Internet-security effort. [...]
On Jun 23, 2006, at 12:45 AM, Sean Donelan wrote:
The U.S. is poorly prepared for a major disruption of the Internet, according to a study that an influential group of chief executives will publish today.
The Business Roundtable, composed of the CEOs of 160 large U.S. companies, said neither the government nor the private sector has a coordinated plan to respond to an attack, natural disaster or other disruption of the Internet. While individual government agencies and companies have their own emergency plans in place, little coordination exists between the groups, according to the study.
"It's a matter of more clearly defining who has responsibility," said Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., who leads the Roundtable's Internet-security effort.
Isn't the point of the Internet that no one is in charge? I shudder to think what would happen under large scale attack if one of the CEOs in that room had "responsibility" for the correct functioning of the "Internet". This definitely falls into the "Just Doesn't Get It" category. -- TTFN, patrick
At one of my old jobs, my boss honestly believed that we had a 'switch' that turned the entire internet off or on. When she was having problems accessing her shopping sites, she'd storm in the office and say something like 'did you guys turn the the internet off again?' <sigh> Then again, this is the same person that tried to tell me that 768 OC-192s are carried on a single DS1.. - Peter On Fri, 23 Jun 2006, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
On Jun 23, 2006, at 12:45 AM, Sean Donelan wrote:
I shudder to think what would happen under large scale attack if one of the CEOs in that room had "responsibility" for the correct functioning of the "Internet".
This definitely falls into the "Just Doesn't Get It" category.
-- TTFN, patrick
At 10:04 AM 6/23/2006, you wrote:
Then again, this is the same person that tried to tell me that 768 OC-192s are carried on a single DS1.
Now THAT is impressive compression! I don't know what your former company did, but they should focus on selling that compression technology. ;) The buffers must be enormous! -Robert Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211 "Well done is better than well said." - Benjamin Franklin
On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:33:43 EDT, Robert Boyle said:
Now THAT is impressive compression! I don't know what your former company did, but they should focus on selling that compression technology. ;) The buffers must be enormous!
Infinite compression is easy, if you use a sufficiently lossy compression algorithm. Ask anybody who's talked to a journalist for an hour, and ends up as a one-sentence misquote.....
RB> Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:33:43 -0400 RB> From: Robert Boyle RB> Now THAT is impressive compression! I don't know what your former company RB> did, but they should focus on selling that compression technology. ;) Irrational numbers can be described in finite space, yet extend indefinitely with no discernable pattern. Perhaps said company has found a way to map arbitrary infinite-length data streams to short, simple representations a la "digits 'x' through 'y' of pi". ;-) (Note smiley. This is tongue-in-cheek commentary on entropy.) Eddy -- Everquick Internet - http://www.everquick.net/ A division of Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - http://www.brotsman.com/ Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 785 865 5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 316 794 8922 Wichita ________________________________________________________________________ DO NOT send mail to the following addresses: davidc@brics.com -*- jfconmaapaq@intc.net -*- sam@everquick.net Sending mail to spambait addresses is a great way to get blocked. Ditto for broken OOO autoresponders and foolish AV software backscatter.
Now we are all allowed the occasional fun at the management lacking a clue - but come on. The users have an expectation that their "access to the Internet" works like a utility. When you say the "power is shut off" you don't expect to expand on whether the power grid in your state had a cascading failure but people on the other coast still have power and when your "water supply is shut off" does not mean that all the people in the world can't get a drop. It just means that her "Internet is off" and as far as she is concerned the whole Internet/Power/Water supply might as well be "off" p.s 768 OC-192s worth of Internet traffic can indeed be carried on a single DS1 if the "Internet is off " :-) ----- Original Message ---- From: Peter Ferrigan <peter.ferrigan@petenet.com> To: nanog@merit.edu Sent: Friday, June 23, 2006 7:04:18 AM Subject: Re: Who wants to be in charge of the Internet today? At one of my old jobs, my boss honestly believed that we had a 'switch' that turned the entire internet off or on. When she was having problems accessing her shopping sites, she'd storm in the office and say something like 'did you guys turn the the internet off again?' <sigh> Then again, this is the same person that tried to tell me that 768 OC-192s are carried on a single DS1.. - Peter On Fri, 23 Jun 2006, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
On Jun 23, 2006, at 12:45 AM, Sean Donelan wrote:
I shudder to think what would happen under large scale attack if one of the CEOs in that room had "responsibility" for the correct functioning of the "Internet".
This definitely falls into the "Just Doesn't Get It" category.
-- TTFN, patrick
on Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 11:23:44AM -0700, ennova2005-nanog@yahoo.com wrote:
The users have an expectation that their "access to the Internet" works like a utility. When you say the "power is shut off" you don't expect to expand on whether the power grid in your state had a cascading failure but people on the other coast still have power and when your "water supply is shut off" does not mean that all the people in the world can't get a drop.
It just means that her "Internet is off" and as far as she is concerned the whole Internet/Power/Water supply might as well be "off"
Yep. I eventually just trained myself into hearing "my Internet access" when I heard "the Internet" from someone who doesn't know what the Internet is. e.g., s/Is the Internet down?/Is my Internet access down?/ YMMV, Steve -- hesketh.com/inc. v: +1(919)834-2552 f: +1(919)834-2553 w: http://hesketh.com/ antispam news, solutions for sendmail, exim, postfix: http://enemieslist.com/ rambling, amusements, edifications and suchlike: http://interrupt-driven.com/
Sean Donelan wrote:
The Business Roundtable, composed of the CEOs of 160 large U.S. companies, said neither the government nor the private sector has a coordinated plan to respond to an attack, natural disaster or other disruption of the Internet. While individual government agencies and companies have their own emergency plans in place, little coordination exists between the groups, according to the study.
"It's a matter of more clearly defining who has responsibility," said Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., who leads the Roundtable's Internet-security effort.
[...]
Thus explainith why CEOs should not be responsible for this. I wonder if their CIOs or other techies have ever tried to explain the concept of a "CERT" to them. -- Jeff Shultz
The Business Roundtable, composed of the CEOs of 160 large U.S. companies, said neither the government nor the private sector has a coordinated
plan
to respond to an attack, natural disaster or other disruption of the Internet. While individual government agencies and companies have their own emergency plans in place, little coordination exists between the groups, according to the study.
I don't believe that this is entirely true. I think that there is a lot of coordination between companies at an industry level, for instance the automotive industry or the financial services industry. This coordination doesn't get much visibility outside of the industry concerned but that doesn't mean that it isn't there. In fact, I strongly suspect that visibility of this coordination does not often reach the CEO level in these companies because much of the coordination is between specialist groups within the companies. Does your CEO know that you participate in NANOG? One might even venture to suggest that there is no point in coordinating emergency plans between companies who have little or no direct business relationships unless it is at a metropolitan level, i.e. New York area businesses, Los Angeles area businesses. After all, why should NY businesses plan for earthquakes and why should LA plan for a hurricane? --Michael Dillon
Ya know... Personally, I think that it isn't really necessary to have an "internet disaster plan" Thats one of the nice things about the 'net. Everyone is responsible for their own piece of it and whenever there is an event (ala Katrina) multiple people work to restore their own infrastructure. The end result is that companies a) have their own disaster recovery plans with make up large parts of what people are refering to here and b) the normal processes of service restoration (most notably in the circuit providers) means that any "wound" to the internet will heal itself in relatively short order. Sure, it won't be impact free, but it doesn't really require any special planning either. Recall that there was a meeting of FAA officials after 9/11 to discuss wether a procedure (not "what" but "wether") should be put into place for grounding aircraft if such a thing became necessary again. The end result of the discussions was that it was determined that such an event is so out of the scale of ordinary that to implement a specific procedure would probably harm efforts instead of helping them; that the experience and knowledge of the individual controllers along with a little creativity was the most efficient mechanism for accomplishing such a task. I think something similar applies to a large scale disruption of the internet. Picture Kansas City disappearing one morning along with all the SONET gear and routers therein. That sort of thing is not something that can be adequately planned for but ultimately other paths will be found and it won't take altogether long to get to something like 75% service restoration. The independant efforts of individuals and individual companies will probably be the best mechanism for repairing any injury to the 'net. Just my 2.5 cents. -Wayne On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 12:45:04AM -0400, Sean Donelan wrote:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115102893799688389.html
In Event of Big Web Disruption, U.S. Is Ill-Prepared, Study Says By VAUHINI VARA June 23, 2006; Page B2
The U.S. is poorly prepared for a major disruption of the Internet, according to a study that an influential group of chief executives will publish today.
The Business Roundtable, composed of the CEOs of 160 large U.S. companies, said neither the government nor the private sector has a coordinated plan to respond to an attack, natural disaster or other disruption of the Internet. While individual government agencies and companies have their own emergency plans in place, little coordination exists between the groups, according to the study.
"It's a matter of more clearly defining who has responsibility," said Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., who leads the Roundtable's Internet-security effort.
[...]
--- Wayne Bouchard web@typo.org Network Dude http://www.typo.org/~web/
On Mon, 26 Jun 2006, Wayne E. Bouchard wrote:
something like 75% service restoration. The independant efforts of individuals and individual companies will probably be the best mechanism for repairing any injury to the 'net.
Totally agree. What needs to be in place are lines of communication between these indviduals and their management, both within and beteen companies and authorities. Much can be accomplished by information spreading regarding what equipment is lacking etc. If everybody just agrees to fix it all, and deal with the commercial issues afterwards, wonders can be achieved in very short time. But will, authority, communication and information need to exist. The biggest example I can think of was during the worst storm in the last 50 years here in sweden, there was much devistation in telecommunications and power, most of it power related (power lines torn down). In the EU there are contingency plans to handle this and countries can request help from other countries to get access to their disaster relief equipment such as generators etc. What DOES need to be in place is for someone to pay for transportation of this equipment. The head of the swedish state agency to handle these didn't have authority and budget to pay for the transportation, so he had to call and more or less beg one of the power companies to pay for this. This delayed the delivery of the equipment by some time, totally unnecessary. So a very important part of disaster planning is "how do we communicate with everybody involved?" and "what are our authorities regarding money and resources". If there is a will, there is a way :P -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
Sometimes we can't get a hold of each other's NOCs during 'peacetime', imagine in times of disaster! Frank -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Mikael Abrahamsson Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 2:43 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Who wants to be in charge of the Internet today? On Mon, 26 Jun 2006, Wayne E. Bouchard wrote:
something like 75% service restoration. The independant efforts of individuals and individual companies will probably be the best mechanism for repairing any injury to the 'net.
Totally agree. What needs to be in place are lines of communication between these indviduals and their management, both within and beteen companies and authorities. Much can be accomplished by information spreading regarding what equipment is lacking etc. If everybody just agrees to fix it all, and deal with the commercial issues afterwards, wonders can be achieved in very short time. But will, authority, communication and information need to exist. The biggest example I can think of was during the worst storm in the last 50 years here in sweden, there was much devistation in telecommunications and power, most of it power related (power lines torn down). In the EU there are contingency plans to handle this and countries can request help from other countries to get access to their disaster relief equipment such as generators etc. What DOES need to be in place is for someone to pay for transportation of this equipment. The head of the swedish state agency to handle these didn't have authority and budget to pay for the transportation, so he had to call and more or less beg one of the power companies to pay for this. This delayed the delivery of the equipment by some time, totally unnecessary. So a very important part of disaster planning is "how do we communicate with everybody involved?" and "what are our authorities regarding money and resources". If there is a will, there is a way :P -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
participants (15)
-
Edward B. DREGER -
ennova2005-nanog＠yahoo.com -
Frank Bulk -
Jeff Shultz -
Jerry Pasker -
Justin M. Streiner -
Michael.Dillon＠btradianz.com -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
Patrick W. Gilmore -
Peter Ferrigan -
Robert Boyle -
Sean Donelan -
Steven Champeon -
Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu -
Wayne E. Bouchard