Internet Black Holes

An anonymous reader writes "Hubble is a system that operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur. Hubble has operated continuously since September 17, 2007. During that time, it identified 881,090 black holes and reachability problems. In the most recent quarter-hourly round, completed at 04:40 PDT, 04/09/2008, Hubble issued 46,846 traceroutes to 1,815 prefixes it identified as likely to be experiencing problems (of 78,772 total prefixes monitored by the system). Of these, it found 195 prefixes to be unreachable from all its vantage points and 139 to be reachable from some vantage points and not others." No relationship to that other Hubble which also tries to find black holes ;)

More info ...

Here's the full academic paper on Hubble [washington.edu] - this work is out of my alma-mater, the University of Washington - go Huskies!

Wikipedia has more info on Black Holes in Networking [wikipedia.org] ... and for grins, here is a Green Hole ;-) [watching-grass-grow.com]

take note that

a large majority of them are in manhattan, followed by dc area, then france.

Re:

The holes in DC might have to do something with the contents of the heads of the politicians.

obligatory

[insert obligatory link to goatse with vague comment of black holes]

this is so gonna hurt my Karma...

Re:obligatory

Hopefully nobody tried to finger the host first.

Re:obligatory

The Uncyclopedia has this to say about Black holes:

"Black holes are simply where I decided to divide by zero"
~ God on Black Holes

"That's crazy"
~ Mr. Replier on God's black holes

"It's a hole that is black"
~ Captain Obvious on Black Holes

"It's a hole that is white"
~ Captain Sarcasm on Black Holes

"Falling in is bad for your health"
~ Captain Understatement on Black Holes

"Originally, Black Holes were known as 'Gravaitationally Collapsed Stars'"
~ Steven Hawking on Gravaitationally Collapsed Stars

Oops, wrong black holes. We're discussing internet black holes, right? Wow, what a coincidence, when I went to the Uncyclopedia to look up black holes I see the featured article on its front page reads

So I was online, right, just chatting away with my friends about normal things. Porn, killing fluffy bunnies, the sad state of the world, things like that.

When all of a sudden --
Well, maybe it wasn't all that sudden, when you're online you're used to sudden things like popups and viruses and parents bursting in when you're Googling Lesbians Gone Wild 4 --
This guy IMs me.

He's one of those people that've migrated to the bottom of your buddy list, you know what I mean? The kind of person you may have talked to once regarding some homework assignment or other that you've never really had the balls to delete because you think having a long buddy list means you have a social life. And you don't remember why they're there. And you'd never expect someone like that to actually make contact with you again. But he did.

So he says

isllcrk88 [6:14 PM]: hey
Okay. So what have I got from him so far?

Username Seems standard enough. Bunch of random letters and two numbers: Maybe a birth year or something?
Font Default font, no webdings or any other communication problems there.
Greeting "Hey." Pretty typical. Neither suggestive nor harsh, not too formal or too friendly. Nothing to trip any alarms here. No misspellings yet, although I could be judging too soon. [More] [uncyclopedia.org]

So I click the link which goes to "Why?:Do I have a drug dealer on my buddy list?"

No, your karma's fine. Mine is now swirling down an internet black hole, as a lot of slashdot mods absolutely hate juvenile humor, while others have no humor at all, while some slashdotters hate ME. Fortunately for me most of them are trolls [uncyclopedia.org] who lost their karma long ago.

My eyeball hurts. Damn your goatse link!

So what?

It found a tonne of internet holes. Now what? Bhuler? Bhuler? Bhuler? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone?

Re:So what?

That's Bueller.

From "Ferris Bueller's Day Off". The spelling clue is in the title.

Does it matter?

Since traffic cannot go to these black holes, I don't think it matters. A white hole, constantly spewing out crap (spammer) is a real problem, but a dead machine doesn't matter.

Re:Does it matter?

I was under the impression that traffic to legitimate hosts was being lost into these black holes. Its not a dead machine, but rather bad routes being advertised for live machines. Thats general not supposed to happen, although I suppose it would be sweet if all the gunk the white holes spewed out is sucked into the black hole.

Re:Does it matter?

I suppose it doesn't matter, but it's nice to know about it.

I've often wondered why we don't have some kind of system that when I try to go to a web-page, and it is unreachable (host down? internet down? slashdotted?), I instead am given the "last known good copy" of the site. If you combined this black-hole detector with the "automatic archives" that exist (e.g. Google's cache, or the Wayback machine), then instead of getting an error page, you could get a banner that says "host not available for reason X; here is what the site looked like on datetime Y".

Seems like this could be built into a Firefox plugin perhaps, with it automatically delivering the cached version if the host is on the black-hole list or doesn't respond after a set wait time.

(Of course, typically when I have an idea like this, I then discover that people have already implemented it. So, if anyone knows of a browser-level or system-level utility that does this, please let me know!)

Re:Does it matter?

ErrorZilla [mozilla.org] mods the firefox error page to give options for the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, and Coral Cache.

Re:Does it matter?

Obligatory Red Dwarf quote:

A white hole?

But what is it?

Re:Does it matter?

I thought a "black hole" was when the hosts were there, and you can send packets to them, but there's no packets coming back. Just like you can send mass and light into a black hole, but you won't get a reply.
In the case of Internet black holes, it's usually due to bad routing or misconfigured firewalls (which, IMNSHO, is most of them, and it will continue to be so as long as companies hire on ability to do, and not actually understanding what you do).

Purpose?

Can someone please explain to me what the purpose of this is? Seriously?

Re:Purpose?

The purpose is to give slashdotters an excuse to make thousands of Goatse jokes.

Black holes may be intentional

Since it's coming from University of Washington, presumably from a .edu domain, could these black holes simply be running PeerGuardian?

Let's get these all out of the way now

1) The Large Hadron Collider is causing it.
2) The government(s) is capturing your traffic because it thinks your a terrorist, and it's losing packets due to the [Republican created] bureaucracy.
        (a) And your packets are being water boarded
        (b) AT&T helped
        (c) The EFF wants to know
3) The RIAA is capturing your traffic because it thinks your a pirate, and doesn't know how to get them back to you at a reasonable price.
        (a) Your packets are being sued
        (b) Congress is helping
        (c) The EFF still wants to know
4) It's a setup for the next Matrix movie. Neo's abilities are causing corruption in the matrix, creating failures in command nodes and putting millions of people to sleep. Like most of his movies.
5) The two Hubble's are tied together, and the internet is an existential manifestation of our physical universe as we discover it.
6) Global warming / El Nino's internet revenge.
7) Tubes are clogged.

How is this different from ITR?

I saw the site last night when it popped up on MetaFilter. For those of you who know, what are the differences between something like this and what shows up on the Internet Traffic Report? [internettr...report.com]

Well, that's useful information

They have a button where you can check if your current IP address is in a black hole. Anyone else find that ironic?

Re:Well, that's useful information

They have a button where you can check if your current IP address is in a black hole. Anyone else find that ironic?

Alanis did:

"It's like rain, on your wedding day,
a website that has a button to tell you if your IP address is in a black hole,
a free ride, when you already paid..."

Name collision is cute, but overall a BAD idea

...because ANYONE who goes looking for this will have to sift through an impossibly high mound of totally unrelated "hubble space telescope black hole" stuff. Or WORSE, the former will start appearing in the middle of searches for the latter.

The same also goes for people who name their products or companies using simple short common terms strung together - whereupon a search for that returns a BAJILLION other unrelated hits.

This is sorta like "naming servers". "Short unique names that are easy to type." That's the primary criteria where I'm at. "Cute" and "in" and "cool" are completely secondary.

# ssh -l root supercalifragilisticexpialadocious
.

Re:GNAA Gay Nigger Monkey Scientist News

No, I think they're just being jerks rather than going for irony..

Re:Map?

Population density? Not unless you think Pakistan and Afganistan are deserted.

Not yet, but they're working on it.

Re:Description

The possibilities for /. jokes are endless. A combination of the following terms seems unavoidable
1- Comcast
2- Particle Accelerators
3- Internet black holes
4- Goatse
Have fun.