Discovering the Internet's "black holes"
The Hubble Internet audit is a project to discover "black holes in the Internet" where traffic won't route:
Link (via Futurismic)
Katz-Bassett has been working on a project called Hubble, a system that apparently is able to track what he refers to as information black holes. These are situations where a path between two computers does exist, but messages - a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing e-mail - get lost along the way. Katz-Bassett has published a Hubble map that enables users to monitor such black holes worldwide or simply type in a network address to check its status.To determine a network status, Hubble sends test messages “around the world” to look for computers that can be reached from some but not the entire Internet, a situation that is described as “partial reachability”. Katz-Bassett said that short communication blips are ignored. However, if a problem surfaces in two consecutive 15-minute trials, it is listed as a “problem”. The research team found that more than 7% of computers worldwide experienced this type of error at least once during a three-week period in fall of 2007.
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Am I the only one who's worried about all the red on the map right now? I checked this the other day when it was on Slashdot, and and I had trouble finding red (pink, yes, but no red.)
Could it be just because they're being hammered, or is the Internet breaking down before our eyes?
Are they like usual black holes?
Is there, somewhere in the universe, a pile of unmatched socks, ballpoint pens, coat hangers and now, the overly verbose emails of African dignitaries desperate to share their wealth with complete strangers?
OK - I'm not sure I understand the exact thrust of the study correctly... but...
BUT … I do know that when I used my Irish/European roaming mobile to send txt messages to friends & family on my tri-band mobile phone to and from Seattle, San Fran, & LA three years ago the people I txted in Ireland received my messages, and were able to reply much more quickly than anyone I was trying to txt anywhere in the US.
After I had flown back from the west coast of the US, I found that my tri-band mobile was linked to specific US providers only, which, clearly made these connections more difficult.
It appeared a lot of info (attempted calls, txts,) got 'lost'.
BUT ... It was so much easier to txt my friends/family in Ireland than to search for an address I'd forgotten to include in my info,etc, than to look it up on my WAP/internet connection or to phone a service in the US.
'Black holes'?
The Katz-Bassett/Hubble experiment ignored that, and/or did not to include, or define, this type of data, relating to the computers they specifically used for this experiment? It seems not.