Bird Flu Pandemic Could Choke the Net 364
PetManimal writes "If a pandemic were to occur, many companies and organizations would ask their staffs to work from home. The impact of millions of additional people using the Internet from home might require individuals and companies to voluntarily restrain themselves from surfing to high-bandwidth sites, such as YouTube. If people didn't comply, the government might step in and limit Net usage. The scenario is not far-fetched: last year at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, a group of telecom and government officials conducted a pandemic exercise based on a hypothetical breakout of bird flu in central Europe. The results weren't pretty." From the latter article: "'We assumed total absentees of 30% to 60% trying to work from home, which would have overwhelmed the Internet,' said [one] participant. 'We did not assume that the backbone would be gone, but that the edge of the network... would be overwhelmed... The conclusion [of imminent collapse] was not absolute, and the situation was not digitally simulated, but the idea of everyone working from home appears untenable,' [he] said."
And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
A bunch of telco management consultants, playing a "war game" (yeesh) to drum up business (Oh wow, lets recommend investments in Telco infrastructure!)
In fact, the second page of the second article even states the obvious:Better to bury it on the second page hey? Might spoil the sensationalist headlines a little.
What the hell is this doing in slashdot's science section?
Absolute nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem in such a scenario is that most workers would simply not be able to work from home - they and their employers wont be ready or equiped to do so.
What's more likely... (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple solution: Ban Windows (Score:2, Insightful)
I suggest we go the whole way and return to VT-100 terminals... they only need 9.6K baud rate to work. No Youtube. Problem solved.
Re:9/11 caused net stoppage (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of experience could have a lot to do with where you are in the world, and your ISP.
I was in at my place of work in Toronto on 9/11, and remember rather vividly how hard it was to get to CNN's website. The CBC's website was fairly slow as well (we have to recall, not only were there attacks on the WTC, the Pentagon, and the plane that crashed, but thousands of inbound US flights were redirected to Canada, and people world-wide were trying to track down loved-ones who had flights re-routed here). Being the smart sort of guy I am, I was one of the few in the office to be able to get reliable, up-to-date information, because I reasoned that the BBC's website probably wouldn't be heavily flooded with North American traffic, and that it would be the middle of the night on that side of the pond. Sure, enough, I was correct -- while it was difficult to get to many news websites inside North America, several very respectable European sites were no problem to bring up in those very early hours after the first jet hit the WTC. It wasn't traffic on the Internet that was a problem -- it was specific websites being very heavily congested. There was still a lot of bandwidth available to go around -- just not for specific popular North American news websites (many of which have hopefully learned a lesson from that day, and have done some upgrading of their services to better handle traffic during serious emergencies).
Yaz.
I really can't believe I'm reading this... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we'd collectively be more concerned with, you know, people dropping like flies in huge numbers than we would about telecommuting or browsing YouTube, or at least I like to think that we would.
Seriously, the health and safety of my loved ones and society as a whole would be paramount in my mind, and everything else would be a distant second. This story reminds me of those Starbucks managers selling water to injured and shocked people and the idiots quoting SLAs while the World Trade Center's twin towers were falling.
What next? People posting articles about how a human H5N1 pandemic would mean more server queues for WOW players as the servers would be swamped by people skipping work for the safety of home and looking to get a few more quests done while they were off?
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:9/11 caused net stoppage (Score:4, Insightful)
course you would, it would be the only way to get non-censored information, you know, cell phone footage of food riots or nuclear plants melting down due to lack of workers, people dying in their beds, zombies at the shopping mall, that kind of thing, the next pandemic will be live on YouTube.
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:3, Insightful)
Based on what usage? (Score:3, Insightful)
If we assume that they will, for the most part, actually be, WORKING at home, how much bandwidth do people need? Copy a couple Word documents over the VPN? POP their email ever 2 minutes? These things are are NOTHING compared to things like Bittorrent during peak hours.
Worst case scenero is that ISPs are forced to throttle certain types of traffic that is labeled superfluous so as to provide accceptable service for other things. I know it isn't an ideal situation, but geez, the 'net'll survive! What is this talk about governments stepping in?
-matthew
Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a bird flu pandemic... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why (Score:2, Insightful)
If the world shuts down because of a pandemic, there will be problems because of upkeep negligence. Obviously, non-essential business and basic cleanliness applies (which, really, is how 90% of sicknesses are prevented. And i theorize that the reason so much crap keeps coming from the east is their general lack of cleanliness - spitting in streets, etc. But, im sure ill catch heat for that.).
As always, this falls under "Don't Be An Idiot, And You'll Be Fine."
-Red
Re:I really can't believe I'm reading this... (Score:5, Insightful)
The institute I work for will be sequestered by the government in the event of a pandemic.
We've ring fenced large quantities of diskspace, and other resources to cope with the demands that are likely to be put on us in this event. However the one resource that's going to be vital we have no control over - the ability for our staff to work from home. The last few months I've been asked repeatedly if our remote access solutions will cope with 90% of the staff working from home, the answer has been 'if the internet copes'.
It doesn't take much contention on a DSL circuit to make video conferencing or IP telephony unusable, theses are the sorts of collaboration tool that will be required in this event.
It's only sensible for people to be planning for this scenario, it's something that can only be controlled by the telcos, and they won't do anything unless it is mandated by government.
Sort of ironic (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait a minute - the network designed to be distributed in order to survive a massive nuclear attack couldn't survive a pandemic flu virus - because it is distributed?
Of course the whole thing is a fantasy in the minds of telco executives. There would be much more important things to worry about such as the direct deaths, illness and 'secondary' effects like the failure of electricity generation, water supplies, food distribution, trade etc. In fact you could pretty much see the failure of human civilisation as we know it today.
See, anybody can dream up a doomsday scenario and not being able to 'work' from home is the least of it.
Re:Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Note also that the current US Director of National Intelligence, John McConnell, was previously Senior Vice President with Booz Allen Hamilton. They aren't just telco management consultants, they're government management consultants (this doesn't mean they're not bozos, but it does mean that if they are bozos, they're very dangerous bozos)
Re:Why (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why (Score:3, Insightful)
We don't know how many this is. Could be half the people who get bird-flu gets seriously ill (and 60% of those die), but it could also be that 5% of the people infected with bird-flu gets seriously ill (and 60% of *those* 5%, or 3% of the total infected die)
To all those who think this is fud. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just consider stuff like hosepipe-bans, rolling black-outs and travelleing advisories.
Is internet access/trafic just another resource with an ultimately finite supply that may at times to be to limited so its distribution would have to be regulated?
We know this is true for other resources. In areas with droughts and insufficient reserves the goverment will regulate what you can and cannot do with the available water. Sure, sometimes the lack of water is because off extremely poor management often by that same goverment BUT that doesn't change the fact that when the reservoirs are low and there is no sign of rain the goverment first ASKS people not to waste water and finally orders them too.
You would have to be a liberal to an extremely silly degree to object to that.
Same with say electricity. Thanks to the believe that private companies run things better we in holland now get problems as well as private companies don't invest enough to cope with extreme situations and foila, nature always throws up extreme situations, often with a general helping of unfortunate coincedences. Who would have thought that in a hot summer, the temperature would be hot, water supplies would be reduced and demand for electricity would go up.
The goverment then first asks people to reduce their electricity consumption and finally just plain orders the consumption to stop, although over here by shutting down industrial users. In the US rolling blackouts seem to be favored.
Bad weather? Well, over he we get advice not to travel because of 5 centimeter snowfall. But that is because nothing ever happens here and we need an excuse to have a nice crisis now and then. "And NOW we go LIVE to our reporter on the street, what is happening Dave?" "Well Alan I can honestly report that right now, LIVE from an average street in Holland, absolutly NOTHING is happening BUT it might and I will here to report it, the MOMENT it happens, LIVE!"
So why is it so silly to presume that internet access through a combination of mismanagement and high demand could also find itself either having to deal with the results of extreme use (blackouts) or restrictions.
In fact, we have already seen this. Ever been in an office were the main pipe has gone down and now 1000 people are on a ISDN link? You bet your ass there is going to be some restrictions on the kind of sites visited.
For that matter have you seen the effects on the net during high profile events like the various terrorist attacks of the last decade? I do know that during the london bombings the dutch 3G (mobile phone) network had troubles dealing with all the demands for live video. So did newswebsites.
BUT is FLU likely to do this?
Ah, well that is the question. You see, the during the 9/11 attack at least the world I was in grinded to a halt. I worked at an ISP at the time (we hosted several of the newswebsites that saw their demand soar) and we didn't get any regular work done that day. We watched the news. So while one demand on the network increased it also lowered and in any case was of to short a duration.
But now imagine a prolonged sudden increase in the demand on traffic. Could it be delivered or would you find that working from home has become impossible. Well, I have my doubts but then, so did those people who thought our various other infra structures would be able to deal with extreme situations.
Is working from home really such a gigantic demand on the work? Especially if you consider that a person like me would for instance first shutdown his constantly running P2P program if the network was to slow. I already do so now.
I suppose it also greatly depends on the type of work. Say a creator like a programmer/writer could just literally work at home and only need the net to send his finished work to the office and get new instructions. A bit of code up and loads of gibberish emails down. More important, no immidiate demand. So an email takes an hour to get through. *sorry email junkies, t
Re:Absolute nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
I see this as one (or both) of two things:
1) as suggested, a blatant attempt to get investment in their own industry
2) an attempt to get more internet control for the government from (according to a previous post) a government affiliated company. IE if they get some law passed that lets them throttle users in "times of emergency" and then declare a constant state of emergency, they get control over something they should not have control over (what users use their own bought and paid for bandwidth for). Kind of like america has extreme laws only meant for very extreme one off cases in times of war, and this war should not have been declared except by congress, but after these laws where made, they just slowly turned america into a constant state of "pseudo war" without actually declaring a proper war (therefore getting round the congress thing) and get to constantly abuse these laws (that shouldn't exist in the first place imho but thats another issue).
Question (Score:3, Insightful)
If I can work from home during an HN51 epidemic, why can't I work from home today?
Anyone?
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Absolute nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:5, Insightful)
But at some point of time reality has to sink in. If people start using the connections in the ways they were promised, ISPs will feel the heat, and a sudden lack of bandwidth. All this FUD should be directed back at them, they should get to fix the problems caused by them. Asking for more funding is a lame excuse - they should not provide something which they don't have in the first place.
Re:Restraint? (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that it's blocked by the firewall?
Re:I really can't believe I'm reading this... (Score:2, Insightful)
How could these two goals be achieved concurrently? By having as many workers as possible working from their own home. Which means telecommuting. Now, if the entire population is keeping inside their homes, they will seek something to occupy themselves. Part of this will be checking on their families, friends etc.. Which will likely be done either over the phone or internet. Part of this will be entertainment to assuage the boredom. Part of this will come from the internet. When people are on the internet looking for entertainment, where do they go? Often, to YouTube. Hence massively increased traffic to sites like YouTube, although I think these sites will crash long before the internet as a whole does.
Hype as hype can (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, what bird flu? Who has been affected? People who have very close contact with infected birds. People living and working with them, having contact with the blood and droppings from infected birds. There has been no single confirmed transfer from human to human, and the only infections affected people who have almost intimate contact with those birds.
The biggest threat we're actually facing is the hype around it. Sure, a few pharmacy corps are making big bucks out of it 'cause every government on this planet is trying to rake together as much antidote as possible, generally, though, the biggest problem we could face is people going bonkers over the alleged 'danger' of the bird flu. I don't plan to kiss my parrot good night and I don't spend my weekends with the girls in the hen den, so I guess I should be fairly safe.
And so is about 99% of the population. Unless we let that hype catch up.
Re:Why (Score:3, Insightful)
That didn't stop it from being a fearful thing, to be avoided like the plague; just because you're more likely to die one way than another doesn't make that other condescendingly snubbable as a probability to be ignored. Death is death. Avoiding it is goooood.
What's the difference?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would people using the web at home cause it to go down faster than people using it at work?
If anything, some people's crappy ISPs that over-allocate their bandwidth would be clogged - not "the Internet", whatever that is supposed to mean.
The main pipes would not be seeing much more traffic than usual. Sure, people's VPN would use a bit more, but do you really think most VPN traffic uses more bandwidth than bittorrent/WOW/etc, all of which would have to be turned off since the traffic would be booted off of their VPN?
Re:Why (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, here we go. Look, what do you suppose would have happened to the economy if no one had done any Y2K remediation? I was very busy in advance of that roll-over, and a good number of the clients I worked with would have been out of business without substantial system upgrades. Not just BIOS patches, but extensive code reviews and fixes to giant, sprawling, interdependent systems. For companies that operate (as so many do) on a just-in-time basis for goods and materials, even a week's downtime could mean bankruptcy. Multiply that times thousands of businesses, and you've got a major hit. Some of those are companies that supply medical materials, or deal with food processing, or deal with fuel. You surely aren't one of those people who thought it all could have been simply left well enough alone, are you? I directly experienced work that, left undone, would have resulted in financial ruin for organizations employing thousands of people and delivering important products and services to millions of people.
275 cases of it out of 8 billion people does not a pandemic make
And right up until the flu pandemic of 1918 killed millions of people, it wasn't a pandemic either. Do you approach everything in life with a "we'll deal with it after it happens" strategy? Sometimes that's not as effective. Like, when you can't pay your employees after 1/1/2000, or you're dead from a highly contagious virus and whatnot.
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:5, Insightful)
If people start using the connections in the ways they were promised, ISPs will feel the heat, and a sudden lack of bandwidth
I made this argument in a net neutrality thread and got ripped to pieces. I dared to suggest that ISPs shouldn't be selling unlimited bandwidth if they don't have the infrastructure to actually provide it. And that it's inherently unfair and deceptive to sell something as unlimited and then start kicking off the power users who violate the fine print. I wouldn't be the biggest fan of metered bandwidth since I use quite a bit -- but it's fair to ask why Grandma down the road who uses her DSL to read e-mail/play Bejeweled is paying the same price as I am when I leave bittorrent running 24/7/365.
If you sell it as unlimited then no fine print and you damn well better be able to back it up. Otherwise meter it and use the income from the power users to improve the network. And net neutrality should apply -- it's none of my ISPs business if I use my bandwidth on porn, bittorrent, a VPN to the office or even a web server on my home DSL account. It is their business how much bandwidth I use.
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:3, Insightful)
There were two towns in the US that experienced ZERO fatality or illness in the 1918 pandemic. They did it by closing down traffic in and out of their town for the duration. Physical isolation is a highly effective tool, but it can be devastating from an economic point of view.
The other problem is that the US has developed a strong social stigma against staying home from work unless you're horribly ill. It only takes one infected bonehead to decide to "tough it out" and come to work, touch a doorknob with a snotty hand and start an outbreak in a whole population.
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:3, Insightful)
You're entitled to your opinion, but the great-grandparent post is not entitled to denigrate those who take such risks seriously. What you determine to be a serious risk worth the investment of defending against depends on the damages of those risks.
It's a straight-forward simple calculation of the probability of an issue multiplied by the direct and incidental costs of the issue occuring, vs. the cost of proposed protections against those risks.
Shutting off access to high-bandwidth sites such as YouTube in the event of a major disaster is a very cheap risk-mitigation solution. Setting up fault-failover mirroring sites across the country is not. Provisioning enough capacity to allow the majority of employees to work from home is not cheap, either.
Yet many companies have already made those high-dollar risk-mitigation investments, and continue to do so.
You might want to give more thought as to the "why" of their decisions.
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:3, Insightful)
When it does come, it will spread much more quickly than 1918-19 (or even the mini-pandemics of the 50s and 60s) due to the enormous growth in international jet travel. Factor in worldwide mass communications, which also weren't really in place in the 50s/60s (stuff the Internet, if my parents ever wanted to make an international call they had to book it in advance with the operator...) So the thing will be everywhere within a few days, and everyone will know roughly what it is. Even with "low" infection rates of 20% and a "low" mortality rate of, say, 40% (both are conservative) a lot of people are going to witness deaths in their social circle - friends, family, colleagues at work, etc. I have a couple of friends who are involved in UK civil defence and the military, and the official contingency plans are, roughly, to cordon off all large cities and shoot anyone trying to escape. Ditto for looters and other threats to law and order. Believe me, when it kicks off, it is going to get very, very messy. The third world will be a much better place to be, because the economic and social infrastructure doesn't have as far to fall, and because people are used to getting by without much in the way of official help. For us decadent westerners it's going to be horrible.
For true FUD-mongering on this topic, consider what happens to all those nuclear, chemical and biological weapons slowly rusting in bunkers. Not to mention all the wacky millennialist "last days" nutters, and plain ol' large industrial complexes such as oil refineries, chemical factories and the like which have plenty of scope for damage if the people monitoring, controlling and protecting them simply don't turn up for work after a week or two.
One possible ray of hope is that Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" may actually come to pass. Actually, hang on a sec., did I say "hope"? A world populated entirely by fat blokes in curry-stained T shirts with no social skills? ** ph33r!! **
Shinning example of a misinformed person. (Score:5, Insightful)
1.-A responsible government does multitasking. It will have to worry about the citizens' health, but also about the economy keep moving. The amount of people dying would not justify a complete shutdown of all productive activities.
2.- Bird flu is dangerous because it has proben to infect humans, generally with high index of mortality. This by itself is not a problem. The problem is that virus mutate (don't believe idiotic creationists and the like), and eventually one will find a mutation that will allow infection from human to human. I hope you have not forgotten that this virus is highly lethal.
3.- Your cavalier attitude parades your ignorance. You will not need your parrot to get infected, any person infected could infect you in case a pandemic takes place.
4.- If you think all is hype you clearly need to broaden your education, it is sorely lacking.
Re: on selling "unlimited" bandwidth (Score:3, Insightful)
The most popular compromise was selling plans that don't monitor your personal usage at all, but come with the "catch" that the network may get congested and slow down without warning.
That catch doesn't bother me as much as the providers that have fine print that says they can basically terminate you for doing anything they don't like.
If you buy into the concept of network neutrality (disclaimer: I do) then it follows that it's really none of your ISPs business what kind of traffic you are using it. Be it bittorrent, VoIP, http, ssh, irc, etc, etc. It may be their business how much bandwidth you use (because that impacts them) but not the manner in which you use that bandwidth.
IMHO, anyway.
Re:Why (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that people don't seem to realize about "bird flu" is that its really just one part of a larger issue. No one really knows if it will make the jump to human-to-human transmission. The people who know what the hell they are doing are doing their best to reduce that chance. (By preventing bird-to-human infections.) But the larger issue is that an entirely different disease that is currently neither known nor tracked could do the same thing. The chance of some other unknown disease becoming a pandemic is probably more likely than that of "bird flu" becoming a pandemic.
If "bird flu" never comes to anything, it may well be precisely because a lot of doctors and biologists worked very hard to prevent it. And if "bird flu" never comes to anything, the press will probably ignorantly blather on about how maybe the original fears were overblown just like today they are blathering on with panic and scare stories. Just like Y2K.
Re:Why (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're right, then the poster was right by accident, or in the wrong way. I read his comment to mean that a flu pandemic risk isn't any worse than the "fake" Y2K risk. Check his tone, and you'll see what I mean. He didn't see any airplanes fall out of the sky on 1/1/00, so he's making it sound like there was no big deal after all. Which is complete BS.
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:4, Insightful)
I know that and you know that and he knows that; we all know that. Aren't we clever?
My parents don't know that, and they're sold exactly the same package in exactly the same way. My non-techy friends don't know either, and nor do their friends, and so on.
Just because we know that doesn't mean it's ok; we're in the business, or nearly so. Most people aren't, and can't be expected to know unless you tell them.