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)
Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:5, Insightful)
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That the net is inherently able to route around problems is obviously ignored here.
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Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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Re:And a butterfly could cause a hurricane (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're underestimating the potential risk. A pandemic is far more likely than a major terrorist attack or any other such nonsense causing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to work from home. Businesses could not just shut down were there a pandemic worse than SARS.
When SARS hit the GTA, there was a significant increase in remote access to corporate resources from telecommuters. But while this article focuses on the impact on the backbones of the internet and the potential need for data- and site-based traffic shaping, it neglects to consider the far greater risk of individual businesses which flat out do not have the connection capacity to have the majority of their employees working from home.
Just because risks are low doesn't mean problems cannot happen, and a good business manager needs to allow for those risks. Consider something so simple as a RAID-5 disk array. Most techies consider them virtually fault-tolerant and bullet-proof, yet I personally know an admin who had a second drive fail while replacing a bad drive, losing the whole array.
That site now uses RAID-6 (two parity stripes instead of one) so that they reduce the chances of losing any of their servers in such a fashion again. Yet even they know it's only a statistical game and that it is theoretically possible to have three drives fail at the same time. There are just limits as to how much you invest in hardware to avoid such problems before one starts looking at full off-site redundancy solutions that cost millions, not thousands of dollars.
If you want a US-based real world example, take a look at what happened to industry on 9/11 and the subsequent week. I worked for a company that lost people, hardware, and services that had been operating out of the towers. The impact was not small, and if we hadn't had disaster recovery plans in place and tested ahead of time, the impact would have been much worse.
You're free to stick your head in the sand and ignore risks, but some industries (such as banking) don't have that option.
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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 YouT
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Troll me, but this article is not news. We need a bullshit or a snore tag.
P.S. And probably an angry moderation option.
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FIrst post (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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)
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Indeed. I was calling into question using such a serious term for a simulation / group mental exercise.
As for the management consultants having been govt. management consultants, color me unsurprised. They'd know exactly how to 'lobby' for investment to be made in infrastructure.
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I do see your point (although you could make the same statement about Cobyneal posting a vision he had of pink ponies and their relationship to Global Warming to the science section).
I dunno, I'd just like to see stuff that's a little more.... sciency (sp?) in the science section.
(whinge over, back to your scheduled broadcast)
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.
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I see this as one (or both) of two things:
1) as suggested, a blatant attempt to get investment in their own indu
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A lot cheaper than giving every employee a license for all your apps and sending tech supp. to their homes to install them.
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In a crisis a lot of the extra people working form how will either have taken a work laptop home, or be doing the work on their own PCs (not ideal, but we are talking about a crisis situation).
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Only affects windows users (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Only affects windows users (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Only affects windows users (Score:5, Funny)
9/11 caused net stoppage (Score:5, Interesting)
Working from home in times past relied on dialling direct to a modem pool at the office. The telephone network could probably handle a fair amount of teleworking like that, particularly if the old school model of connecting, uploading and downloading email & files, and then disconnecting was adopted.
If there were a pandemic, I doubt that people would necessarily be surfing YouTube. It'd be no loss to me to not have that kind of site available anyway
Sounds a lot like scaremongering to me. In the event of a pandemic, net habits would change beyond recognition, so mentioning high bandwidth leisuretime sites seems a bit strange. It's not out of the question that certain services could be restricted though... but you can't analyse current surfing habits and apply them to bandwidth use when teleworking. If I'm working from home I'm not on YouTube, and use very little bandwidth.
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.
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According to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4606719.stm [bbc.co.uk] , international requests go to their server farm in new york.
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Thanks for that -- it's an interesting (albeit brief) view of how the BBC serves up pages world-wide. The article is, however, from 2005 -- it doesn't necessarily follow that this was the same setup back in 2001.
I found this bit interesting (emphasis mine):
Re:9/11 caused net stoppage (Score:5, Informative)
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We're five hours ahead of you, not behind you. It was early afternoon here when the first plane hit.
Tim.
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Thanks to everyone for the correction. I feel quite the idiot now, and rightfully so :).
The point, however, stands -- where it was very difficult to get information from the websites of North American-based news services in those crucial first few hours, the BBC's website came through.
Yaz.
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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.
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Worse, if like the Spanish flu they will probably be dying in the street - as a friend who has learned it from his father who was an eye-witness told me - and is also mentioned here [historysociety.ca], quote: "Victims were dying in the street, in stores, in offices, in military barracks, turning blue and struggling for air as they suffocated in bloody froth.".
Reason enough for people to use youtube just for the sensation.
CC.
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Re:9/11 caused net stoppage (Score:5, Interesting)
Internet was severly strained in some areas of the USA. So people routed around it. I personally helped getting 3 people living in NY get a decent net-connection, by *modem* to a Norwegian modem-pool. Yes, sure it was 28.8. Yes sure it cost $0.10/minute. There's some situations where youre honestly *happy* to pay $6/hour for surfing the net at modem-speed. (I know, in some areas phone-service was also spotty)
It was impressive. I think, on that day I realized the net had grown up. When disasters strike, and people go turn on their laptops, you realize this thing ain't just a toy anymore.
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i just shrugged and went on websurfing. nothing was slower than usual at all.
computer viruses (Score:4, Interesting)
by a human epidemic. just remember the mssql virus from a few
years ago
come on, with all the downloads and botnets running from a home PC,
will ANYONE AT ALL notice the few extra clicks from the humans?
Restraint? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The fact that it's blocked by the firewall?
alright then (Score:4, Funny)
None of those birds have a deadly flu. They're just pining for the fjords.
Oh Noes! (Score:5, Funny)
What's more likely... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Another reason may be that many businesses are insured against natura
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.
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The keyboard on the VT-100 was horrid. I am sure I am still paying for it with my RSI. OTH the 320 was a nice little terminal. I installed a couple of dozen of them at one stage in the 80's and I can still remember that new terminal right out of the box smell. Mmmm polystyrene.
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http://www.honeynet.org/papers/bots/ [honeynet.org]
and here for the amount of bugfixes since XP rollout:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/09/23/AR2006092300510.html/ [washingtonpost.com]
EVERY Home PC that runs Windows XP needs updates, to remain stable and sane. How many home users run P2P? Very tiny fraction, IMO.
Amazing... my rectum's got more wisdom than your brain, perhaps.
But massive epidemics are natural for all species (Score:2)
Besides, sooner or later it's going to happen anyway. (oh and btw people would work from home to avoid getting infected)
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?
Please Mod Up (Score:2)
First, sensible post I've seen on the topic here.
If a large percentage of the population came down with the virus and it was even 10% fatal, instead of the 60% of bird flu, no one would give a shit about youtube ... if it was still up it would be closed if it presented a problem.
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.
Re:I really can't believe I'm reading this... (Score:4, Interesting)
This sort of thing isn't like a hurricane or a 9/11. Just read up on the 1918 pandemic. "Heading for the hills" sounds great... which hills are you going to head to? What food, potable water, and shelter will you and a few tens of millions of other people (who will be bringing the virus with them) be using once you get there? If it gets into human-to-human pandemic mode, you're right that YouTube won't mean much of anything (especially because Google will probably just shut the damn thing down) - but I think that the normal keeping-the-family-alive stuff is also going to be a lot more challenging than most people are prepared to even consider. Of course, any preparation that includes stopping people from congregating in public or that regulates where and how you line up for food will just be seen by the shrill idiots as more of Teh Evil Fashionists taking power. No-win. Can't prepare most people, and can't save 'em, either. Oh well.
Not if (Score:3, Funny)
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Or you'd find out via thousands of spam messages that the Prime Minister of Nigeria has declared that enlarging the size of your penis protects you from Bird Flu. And if you just send him the number to your bank account, so he can use it transfer his monies, you'll recieve a FREE SAMPLE plus a 10% gratuitiy from all samples sold.
I can see it now...
Subject: Re:
Hey Dude;
Be a batter bird flu lover by incresing the sise of your one eyed monster....
I don't th
Riiight. (Score:4, Funny)
And at that I think I'm being generous about their motives.
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
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Peak time in Australia would co-incide with "work time" in parts of the USA etc. If "work time" becomes as bandwidth intensive as peak time, then at Australian peak time, bandwidth would double (or at least greatly increase) on a global scale.
Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
bird flu... (Score:2)
idotipf@11 (Score:2)
There's a bird flu pandemic... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ironic... (Score:5, Funny)
A chicken is going to choke the internet...
Must... not... make... "In Soviet Russia..." joke...
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 civilis
+23 Staff of Paranoia (Score:4, Funny)
"Staff" is already plural. Why would they ask their "staffs" to work from home, unless they were wizards who employed an especially large number of magical sticks?
It could kill everybody on Earth too. (Score:2)
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
Question (Score:3, Insightful)
If I can work from home during an HN51 epidemic, why can't I work from home today?
Anyone?
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.
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.
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?
Minor Detail (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why (Score:5, Informative)
Just a guess.
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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 lac
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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.
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: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.
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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 li
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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)
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It makes perfect sense to limit human interaction in order to brake or halt the spread of infectious disease.
Umm - are you representative? :-) (Score:2)
I'd agree with you for those who grew up on a command line (hell, I can even remember rubber cup 300 baud modems), but I've seen enough people mass-mail multi-MB powerpoints to staff to know that it's not a universal given that bandwidth won't be affected.
For instance, those who presently download their once-a-minute MS and anti-virus updates from a central corporate server will now do this all online. Securityfocus has already observed that users
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Nonetheless, although this though-experiment sounds like something a 5 year old would wonder ("gee, what happens if everyone in the WHOLE world turns on thar intarnet?") it shows that the public perception of the internet has shifted form "toy for nerds & criminals" to "serious infrastructure". Which to me seems to be a good thing.