The Status of Routing Reform — How Fragile is the Internet? 139
crimeandpunishment points out the Associated Press's look (as carried by SkunkPost) "at an issue the government has been aware of for more than 20 years, but still isn't fixed and continues to cause Internet outages: a flaw in the routing system that sends data from carrier to carrier. Most outages are innocent and fixed quickly, but there's growing concern the next one could be devastating. A general manager at Renesys Corporation, which tracks the performance of Internet data routes, says, 'It amazes me every day when I get into work and find it's working.'"
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No single point of failure? Correct. Instead it seems to be many points of failure. I am not a networking wiz and I don't even like networking issues, but I have taken a few networking classes and after trying to set up even basic RIP stuff I'm amazed that the internet works at all. It's been a while ago but I recall that even one team in our lab screwing up brought down the whole network.
Re:Strength is weakness (Score:5, Informative)
And that is a big reason why the Internet exterior gateway protocol is not RIP or any other IGP.
A premise of the RIP and other IGP protocols is routers talking to each other trust each other.
With BGP, the premise is the opposite... routers speaking the protocol implement policies against each other: policies regarding what routes they propagate or originate outbound, policies regarding what routes they accept, and policies regarding what incoming routes they propagate.
So networks that don't trust each other only accept appropriate routes from their peer based on AS-path and Prefix-list filters.
Basically almost all networks should treat their peers as untrusted, and list out prefixes of end users.
It doesn't start to get hairy, until you need to peer with a provider (instead of an end-user) and accept all prefixes from them, because you want their customer prefixes, or you want to buy transit from them.
As for ISPs and providers though... failing to filter downstream announces is the exception to the rule.
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Why don't we let congress fix it ? We'll be back to running RIP on the internet backbone before anyone can say "it doesn't scale".
BGP works, and all secure origin (never mind secure path) bgp announcements require and effect a total government takeover. It basically brings internet routing under government control, and the government (ICANN) key can take any IP offline, through revoking it's authorization, without warning and without recourse.
About the only thing that could remain operational without govern
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key can take any IP offline, through revoking it's authorization, without warning and without recourse.
The only solution to that one I see is: all certificates should be irrevokable.
If you want to stop someone announcing something they have ever been authorized to announce, you have to follow the traditional channels.
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Actually, I'd believe it. Or, at least that it's true enough enough of the time to cause a problem.
One, you probably are a super-genius. Relatively speaking. In your area. If you're interested in your work you're in the top 1% at least. If you've got moderately wide training so that you use the right tools instead of beating what you know into the wrong hole you're far ahead of the game.
But it's not just the individual techs. There's easily at least one trained network admin for each ISP, and many work ther
Re:Strength is weakness (Score:5, Insightful)
"I am not a networking wiz and I don't even like networking issues" So you tried to setup basic RIP and you are amazed the internet works at all huh.
Well this artical is pure BS, sure you packets go between multiple backbone ISP's and a couple smaller isps on the edge maybe, but the guys that run the bigger ISP's do have rules that govern how they BGP peer with other backbones and peers. They enforce strict BGP filtering, to keep the smaller compaines from causing major issues.
Sure every once in a awhile someone might fat finger some shit and mess something up that will effect 1 of the main backbones, but with more automated tools this happens way less than it used to. Most big backbone ISP's use router hierarchy and pure core routers are protected from anyone configuring them much at all once setup.
I think the system runs well, I am sure it could be made better in many ways, but the issues made here are non issues, the backbones one security would be the main factor here, and that should get only better over time.
Its better there is no central routing authority on the internet. Each company has it in thier best interest that it has the best routes to get to a centain network, and if that company messes its routes up, others should be protected by proper BGP filering. BGP filtering can get pretty complex, on ciscos this can be with prefix based ACL's and also with BGP AS number based ACL's, you can also use BGP communities to keep things nice and neat. If done correctly it can be pretty rock solid, if a rookie does the filtering you can have holes and issues, but a big company like LEVEL3 for instance, should have standards and all this stuff pretty hardened and worked out.
This internet sky is not falling.
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Well this artical is pure BS
"Uh Hacker told Uh Panel Uh thing, and now we're all gonna die". I dunno, I might have appreciated some links to sources discussing the events in more detail or filling in some, any of the gaping informational holes.
"Routing errors also blocked Internet access in different parts of the world, often for millions of people, in 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009." ORLY? Certainly you could name these incidents or link somewhere, or do you expect me to google "routing error 2004" and figure out which event y
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/don't know if serious
between this and that dnssec thing... (Score:5, Funny)
...i'm glad I decided to wait for internets2 before i get online.
[posted via FIDOnet]
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No, it's on dogs. See, he posted from Fidonet! Dogs carry around TCPIP packets.
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No, it's on dogs. See, he posted from Fidonet! Dogs carry around TCPIP packets.
Damn kids and your blatant disregards for standards [rfc-editor.org]. Embrace, extend, extinguish, roll over, and you expect a treat EVERY TIME!
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Dogs usually don't get attacks by preditor birds, so maybe yes.
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Dogs carrying TCP/IP packets... is that more reliable than RFC1149?
It's certainly more reliable than when they tried using cats. Not only was it very high latency but sometimes packets would get dropped or lost under the fridge. In most cases, the data wouldn't get delivered at all. Add to that the inability of RFC1149 to operate in the same spectrum as cats (too many mangled packets) and you can see that dogs were clearly the better choice.
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a large amount of people who's hard work stopped the millennium bug being a massive problem.
And probably caused it in the first place ;)
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ZING!
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I always laugh when I read this. It's like a great asteroid is headed to earth, we dispatch Bruce Willis to blow it up, he succeeds, and you say "See, nothing happened, why did we bother with Bruce Willis?"
I think even some animals are more logical than that.
It is fragile (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of. However, it has also always been this way, and it has survived so far. All that has really changed is the number of players has increased, and the size of the routing tables are increasing.
It has to work, so a lot of people should notice very quickly if something large goes wrong.
It also cannot very easily be fixed, as many players would have to spend a lot of money for it to change, and there is little financial incentive to chase that ghost.
And you thought IPv6 or DNSSEC adoption was taking a long time... imagine how many decades it would take for SBGP adoption?
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This sort of thing always works the same way. Something works well, really well (considering just how many things it's connecting), because of a lack of government control.
So they invite a problem, something that everyone knows isn't a problem at all, but the only solution is total submission to government control.
Democrats will, obviously, not stop this. Heck, I'd be amazed if republicans would stop it, but at least they'd be somewhat more restrained.
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Yea ... it's Hyperbole Headline Monday from slashdot!!!
(Day extends to tues-sun as well).
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Speaking of the internet... civilized society as we know it is pretty fragile too. One volcanic eruption, or one really big earthquake, tsunami, or meteor strike -- pretty minor common events in the cosmic scale, and suddenly we've stopped all travel, everyone's hiding under a table, running, or civilization as we know it is over.
P.S. The internet may be a very large, fragile sculpture, in an area where earthquakes sometimes happen, but if so, there is a large army of trained monkeys, each one watching
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I have never heard the various IT departments responsible for keeping everything going referred to like that.
You are wrong about one little thing. They are not so willing to help friends mend their pieces. Most of the tim
Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, the US federal government shouldn't have the power to do this even in America, and it definitely doesn't have the power to enforce this in the rest of the world.
Secondly, no sane ISP will forward BGP data.
This limits the problem to people with access to core internet routers. Companies that own these routers should only give access to extremely trustworthy people, and even then, they should still only need to access the server when there's a legitimate change. The issue then lies with accidents, which will always happen, no matter what you do, and corruptness. Corrupt ISPs should be removed from the network as soon as they are found to be corrupt.
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Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Damn you, DARPA!
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Society has been conditioned to think the government needs to take care of everything. We become more of a nanny state with each passing day because a select few refuse to accept responsibility for their actions. These same people want the government to protect us from ourselves for our own good. Bad people will do bad things, that's a fact of life. Hell, good people do bad things sometimes too. Oh well, my opinion matters not. Give them a few years and they will turn the Internet into another over-re
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I just pray that the government doesn't start getting involved with Medicare and start screwing that up.
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umm...Comcast. They need to be nuked.
Agreed, but... (Score:2)
I don't have real numbers or statistics I can back up my claims with, but having experimented with implementing SONET and ethernet VLSI simulations, I'm convinced that SONET maintains a much more reliable connection and is able to recover from glitches MUCH quicker than Ethernet. Sure, we're talking about milliseconds, but over long distances, glitches mus
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Completely agreed. I don't understand why any government is quoted at all. The issue, if it exists, is more a technological one than any other thing. Definately (and thankfully) no politicians are or should be involved.
The current system has shown not only its outstanding scalability and reliability, but also its usefulness to filter out bad guys when they come in large chunks (which they do - look at the McColo incident for a dramatic example.)
My conclusion is that we're looking for problems to fix, of w
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Secondly, no sane ISP will forward BGP data.
What? That's what the ISP is payed for. If they don't advertise the routes we give them then they won't receive the traffic we want them to forward to us. If they don't forward their BGP routes from the rest of the Internet how do we know what they can reach (hopefully everything but probably nothing if they don't forward BGP)?
Hopefully they are being reasonably careful with their filtering but there is not an awful lot they can do. Hopefully they make sure that we only advertise our routes against our AS n
Two words.. (Score:3, Informative)
BGP Filtering. There, fixed that for you.
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Tier 1 & 2 ISPs tend not to filter between themselves because they have no way of verifying everything. A notable exception is address space assigned by RIPE as you have actually useful route objects, there. With those, anyone can filter root AS for any given prefix. But those are origin-specific filters without path verification. I could still claim that AS X is behind me and either drop your traffic or sniff it. The latter is more complicated, granted. Toss in a few more specific routes and sloppy fil
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I showed your mom some good tube management last night.
Use phone to manually change routes? (Score:5, Insightful)
"In the meantime, network administrators deal with hijacking an old-fashioned way: calling their counterparts close to where the hijacking is happening to get them to manually change data routes. Because e-mails may not arrive if a route has been hijacked, the phone is a more reliable option, says Tom Daly, chief technical officer of Dynamic Network Services Inc., which provides Web hosting and other Internet services."
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I suppose phone != skype.
Re:Use phone to manually change routes? (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately you can't make that assumption any more.
Even national telcos, such as Telstra in Australia, are routing all of their landline and mobile voice and data telecommunications over IP networks (and have done so since 2007 [computerworld.com.au]).
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Re:Use phone to manually change routes? (Score:5, Funny)
How about carrying an iridium phone?
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I was being serious, shirley.
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No solutions look heavy when you have been using Eclipse.
The Internet is not going to end (Score:1, Redundant)
This "hijacking" happens all the time, people immediately see it and fix it and nobody notices.
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But there are only 13 internet root servers . . . .
13 root DNS servers...this is a different protocol altogether. I don't pretend to understand real well--VLSM/CIDR confuse the hell out of me, and that's where I gave up trying to understand the nuts and bolts--but there's a very large number of systems whose routes would need to be compromised, and quickly, to make this have an effect that is visible to end users--and even that would be short lived. As the parent put it:
This "hijacking" happens all the time, people immediately see it and fix it and nobody notices.
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Euh... their are more then 13 routes, their are 13 addresses (prefixes) but their are many, many more routes, most of those 13 prefixes are announced in many places it's called anycast and their aren't just 13 servers either. Every one of them is a cluster of machines and as many use anycast their are multiple clusters per 'root nameserver'.
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Stop hurting the English language! What has it ever done to you?
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English is not my first language. Sorry about that.
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it's hard to work out if your joking, ignorant or stupid
Not true. There's a lot of stupid ignorants joking while they work out in my gym.
Route filtering (Score:5, Informative)
Route filtering, USE IT!
Especially when peering with Pakistani/Chinese/etc ISPs.
This is why RIRs such as RIPE/ARIN/APNIC have their information publicly available.
So you know which addresses belong to who.
Only accept routes from your BGP peers that you know belong to them.
This also (in addition to hijack prevention) prevents a clueless NOC monkey from another autonomous system from messing up your whole network by announcing a default route.
That cannot be done. (Score:2)
For it would deprive us of these terrible sensationalist articles. The InterWebz is doomed!
Mistakes will be made. And some people will lose their Internet connectivity (in some form or other) for a period of time.
During that time, the people who control the routers will be working to fix whatever problem happened and the idiots who caused the problem will either learn how to do it CORRECTLY or be fired. Although the executives who insisted on cutting the budget so that they couldn't hire people with the kno
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What about ISPs whose customers bring their own portable IP address space along with them, and then multi-home? (i.e. have two or more ISPs, and request BGP peering with both?)
The directly-connected ISPs can do their checks to make sure that their customer owns that IP address and adjust their filters accordingly... but anybody else with BGP peering to these ISPs (i.e. other ISPs) can only hope and pray that their peers are doing the right thing. Blind faith might not be good enough.
As I understand it, SBGP [cisco.com]
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This also (in addition to hijack prevention) prevents a clueless NOC monkey from another autonomous system from messing up your whole network by announcing a default route.
If you have a full table, or even half of it, even if you allow default routes being accepted, no harm will be done. More specific networks win over less specific, and the default is the least specific of all.
Accepting a default route can even be an elegant way of doing things in certain scenarios, for example for small but multihomed stubs.
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Use Route Views [routeviews.org].
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So I peer with Sprint, and Time Warner. I accept their address space ... how exactly do you expect me to communicate with places outside of the US or large portions of the US?
What you're proposing simply isn't the way it works and thank god as it would be nearly impossible to get anywhere that you don't directly peer with otherwise.
On the flip side, how does someone like Cox Cable ever communicate with me since I don't directly peer with them? How about someone on Telia in Europe?
Thanks for your ignorant
we're doomed (Score:1)
Next article... "How Fragile is Wikipedia?" (Score:4, Insightful)
What?! Anyone can edit it?! Really???
'It amazes me every day when I get into work and find the Wikipedia front page has not been blanked or filled with goatse porn.'
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Well, Wikipedia's front page is protected.
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Yes, but it's only protected against non-sysop Wikipedians. And there is a very massive number of sysops, some who are trustworthy and some who are questionable.
Much like BGP is only protected against non-ISP router operators/networks.
In both cases, there is a big giant morass (lots of organizations speak BGP), but for most users, there is no unfettered access.
We know what kind of "solution" DHS has in mind (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
"It's kind of everybody's problem, because it impacts the stability of the Internet, but at the same time it's nobody's problem because nobody owns it," says Doug Maughan, who deals with the issue at the Department of Homeland Security.
So clearly we need one centrally owned routing system under the watchful and benevolent eye of DHS, right? With help from advisors provided by Microsoft and Disney.
Decentralized routing is a feature, not a bug. And although the problems identified in the article are real enough, the implications of this kind of discussion always scare the hell out of me.
Re:We know what kind of "solution" DHS has in mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Decentralized routing is a feature, not a bug. And although the problems identified in the article are real enough, the implications of this kind of discussion always scare the hell out of me.
While agreeing with you, I would go a step further and suggest that the bugs of decentralized systems are often more palatable than the the features of centralized systems. (this is of course considering the context of this article -- the internet)
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bugs of decentralized systems are often more palatable than the the features of centralized systems. (this is of course considering the context of this article -- the internet)
You can get to the general law easily from there - things that are wrong, ill or plain bad news run faster and are more eagerly consumed than things that go right, well or are good news. This summary (and /. news in general) is no exception.
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Wasn’t decentralization the whole point of the Internet? You know, because centralization would offer a SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE?
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Right. The issue is that people don't get it. There is no "THE INTERNET". It's just a name to describe the phenomenon of various people who own networks making agreements to
A. make connections between the networks
B. share traffic traversing the networks
It must amaze the Government bureaucrats that something without a command and control structure works so well.
The bottom line is that it works well because it's a free market of connections; as a network owner, you are free to connect to other networks at
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In fact, and I'm just going to continue this a little, the BGP space should be opened to MORE people, not less. Why shouldn't I help my neighbor with a 56K modem out with his traffic when I have extra bandwidth available? This is the conversation that should be happening, and the reason P2P stuff exists. People want to share, they want to trade on a free market. The hierarchial telcom structure does not enable that.
it is fragile, but it works (Score:4, Insightful)
Feature not a bug (Score:4, Insightful)
This is ridiculous, I suspect this is FUD created to take control of the Internet. Routing tables are a feature of the Internet that are designed to ensure the Internet doesn't have a single point of failure. Hacked router?, connection hit by bomb?, satellite suffering from solar flares?... change a few routes and it's fixed. Security?... TLS. The moron even suggests that creating a central authority would make the Internet more secure!!! Imagine if you wanted to take out the Internet and it relied on a central authority, hmm, what would you attack, billions of Internet clients, millions of routers, or the one authority?
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This is ridiculous, I suspect this is FUD created to take control of the Internet
Or, rather less dramatically, just to promote a new beta site (from TFA) that quotes an article written by some clueless guy at AP...
Clarke's Third Law (Score:3, Funny)
Or, as Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
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"If it's distinguishable from magic, it's not advanced enough."
"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science"
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I like to phrase it this way:
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
This is going to get worse (Score:2, Insightful)
With the FCC stymied in its attempts to regulate the internet, it's going to be basically an ISP fur ball. Layer general greed and self-interest of individual providers on top of load and routing problems, take away the regulators ability to maintain order and you have a recipe for disaster.
I got a bad feeling about this.
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take away the regulators ability to maintain order and you have a recipe for disaster
No one has taken away the regulators ability to maintain order. The FCC decided several years ago they didn't want it. Now they want it back. No problem, all they have to do is apply the right law ("Title II" of the 1934 Communications Act as amended). No one is stopping them except themselves.
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fix worse then the problem (Score:1)
if the government gets to "fix" the internet, i may just have to give up slashdot.
Oh crap, this can get worse than net neutrality (Score:2, Informative)
Beware: plans to fix this are misguided (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen alternate routing protocols proposed wherein your traffic has to barter/haggle its way through the network at every hop, as some new troll demands a passage fee for a certain QOS.
These new methods look to me like they would create two issues:
1. Unpredictable permutations of complex, balkanized, and non-local routing strategies. Performance of the system as a whole would be unpredictable and possibly unstable.
2. It really is back to the old circuit-switching network of ma bell, on top of IP. A few nice low-latency end-to-end Concorde-like connections for those willing to fork over the dough, clogging up the routers so all the proletariat traffic suffers in a poverty of routes and bandwidth.
Deep Simplicity at the core of routing protocol is the only thing that will work at the scale of the Internet. Maybe a "voluntary-QOS-downgrade" flag on email packets etc, and a "pretty please low latency" flag on video packets, might work, but these should not have monetary contracts associated with them. They should just indirectly affect the end-consumer's bandwidth bill if anything.
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They should just indirectly affect the end-consumer's bandwidth bill if anything.
That would be one large roadblock--possibly the largest--to implementing any wholesale changes to the whole scheme; if transport costs go up, invariably part of that cost is sent down to the consumer, which would at least lead to vicious consumer backlash (at most, a race to see who can dicker down those costs best, which could lead to subscribers hopping like mad from ISP to ISP). In any case, revenue to some degree gets impacted, and over an issue that the VAST majority of end-users know nothing about. Y
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It has happened in the past, it's just not a big enough deal that people hear about it.
I think it was iran which tried to block youtube in their country and accidentally routed the whole world to their network which then melted.
and some guy years ago who told the whole net he had the best route to everywhere.
New tag (Score:1)
Can we please have a tag "moronswithnobasicunderstandingofthetechnologyproposestupidsolutions" ? The article is mostly fear-mongering and a a waste of time. Should we be looking at what every idiot on the planet thinks about something he doesn't understand?
If so, can I write something on how bad particle physics is, because there are always problems with the accelerators and they carry a lot of energy and can open black holes?
As on the BGP hijacks, etc. - there are BGPmon and a ton of other projects that tr
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Yes, a non-issue, the Telecoms rely on each other to correctly route traffic.
BGPSEC (Score:2)
Where's BGPSEC when you need it?
Filtering works, for those that configure it (Score:2, Informative)
As someone who's accidentally announced the entire Internet routing table to an ISP when setting up a dual-homed configuration, I can confirm that good upstream ISPs do BGP filtering. I was trying to troubleshoot what was going on, and the Tech on the other end was helpful enough to tell me that I was sending him the full route table. Fortunately they had filters in place to stop them from going out any further and impacting anything. But I had it clearly demonstrated to me how important filters are on b
obligatory m$ related insult (Score:2)
'It amazes me every day when I get into work and find it's working.'"
Sounds like he is ready to start administrating an exchange server.
How it keeps working is actually straightforward. (Score:2, Interesting)
Criticize the Piece/Applaud the Whole (Score:2)
Bad Analogy (Score:1)
Such a bad analogy on so many levels. The driver (the traffic) is never really aware of the route they are taking. Ignoring this for a second, a slightly better analogy would be that the driver gets a updated map of the route at each cit
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Routing reform? The answer is simple. Just fine Cisco $750 for every router until it starts routing correctly (or they go bankrupt and take Federal bailout money in exchange for incorporating federal guidelines in all future router designs; including backdoor, and mandating USGaBGP, US government-authorized BGP, where the government will issue every router operator who pays the fee and follows the rules a digital certificate to use their AS number, and a digital certificate for each IP prefix the router
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Actually no, DARPA is, if it was the US Government that was the founder, IPv4 would still be in a committee somewhere :)
Hint: Military trumps government for getting stuff done...
You don't actually know what "the government" is, do you?
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Actually no, DARPA is, if it was the US Government that was the founder, IPv4 would still be in a committee somewhere :)
Hint: Military trumps government for getting stuff done...
You don't actually know what "the government" is, do you?
I'd agree with the GP. The military is not directly "the government" (unless you live in a place under martial law). They certainly work for the government, but so do school teachers and I wouldn't refer to a school as being "the government".
I consider "the government" to be "that which governs". The military's job is NOT to govern, but to defend the nation (which often takes a myriad of forms depending on where you live) - the government is responsible for directing the military to do this and may ofte
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Yes, but since the Congress controls DARPA's budget directly, they effectively control them: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/09/darpa-budget-sl/ [wired.com]
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