Internet2 Taken Out by Stray Cigarette

AlHunt writes "A fire started by a homeless man knocked out service between Boston and New York on the experimental Internet2 network Tuesday night. Authorities say the fire, which also disrupted service on the Red Line subway, started around 8:20 p.m. when a homeless man tossed a lit cigarette. The cigarette landed on a mattress, which ignited and led to a two-alarm fire."

obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory firewall joke here, please...

Re: obligatory

[spyder-implee]

Forget hardhack, this is hobohack!

Re:obligatory

[maxwell demon]

It actually was a successful test of the ultimate firewall. It prohibited all malicious hacking on Internet2.

G0d@|\/|N smokers!

[ukemike]

You know cigarette smokers somehow think that flicking their butts isn't littering. It pisses me off to no end. HEY SMOKERS, YEH YOU! Put them out and then throw those butts in the trash, pathetic litterbugs. It's bad enough we have to smell your stink, we shouldn't have to look at your trash strewn all over the place.

Hopefully not too many smokers have mod points today...

Re:

[Nimey]

Explain to me why you goddamn smokers can't just put your butts in your car's ashtray[1] or carry around a little cup of water or *something* that shows you're capable of not being utterly selfish about your butts. Then we'll get on the subject of why smokers congregate around doors that non-smokers need to use.

[1] If you're worried about burning paper, you can get little trash bags for paper & such that hang from your control stalks -- the ones for windshield wipers and so on. You can spend a little

Re:G0d@|\/|N smokers!

[Eccles]

f you had just let them smoke in their offices

I'm old enough to have worked with smokers who could smoke in their offices. My girlfriend at the time could tell the days I'd gone into the smokers' offices, even for a brief visit, and would demand that I shower before I'd get any action.

Sorry, but having a smoking section in a building is like having a peeing section in a pool.

Re:

[EMH_Mark3]

So you're saying that since some people leave bottles of beer everywhere, you should be able to leave cigarette butts everywhere too? Nice.

Re:

[ivan256]

In other news, two wrongs now make a right?

If a cop saw you toss a beer bottle out the window, not only would you be hit with a littering fine, but you'd probably be subjected to all sorts of other unpleasantries to find out if you had just consumed said beer while you were driving. Toss your butt out this window where somebody else has to clean it up (open your door and look at the curb at any intersection) and you should get off scott free?

Sorry, but there should be a $500 fine and 8 hours of community se

Re:

[StarvingSE]

Cigarettes rarely, if ever, start fires in the wild. Lightning strikes and dry conditions are way more responsible than a cigarette being tossed out a window.

ORLY? [cnn.com]


As an aside, I don't dislike smokers, I just dislike discourteous smokers. And yes, I consider anyone who smokes inside a public place discourteous. I enjoy going to places like the bar, bowling alleys, and small diners. However, I am always subjected to breathing in the filth that comes our of cigarette smoke. Now, I have extra medical

Re:

[StarvingSE]

The dumb analogy strikes again! Homosexuals don't cause me health problems. They also don't pollute the air with chemicals (well, unless they're homosexual smokers).

And your comment about going to a "non-gay" bar would seem to suggest that you're telling me to go to a non-smoking bar. If you can give me the name of even one bar in the metro detroit area that is non-smoking, I'll buy you a pack of smokes.

Re:

[Emperor Cezar]

"If you can give me the name of even one bar in the metro detroit area that is non-smoking, I'll buy you a pack of smokes."

Karra's Bro's. Tavern
225 Jos. Campau, Detroit, Michigan; Tel. [phone]
A non-smoking sports bar, with a rooftop patio, in the heart of downtown with sports on TV, electronic trivia and games.

"Both Miller's Bar and Redcoat Tavern do have non-smoking sections, and you can be very express with them and tell them "*Very* non-smoking, please." which is usually understood and accomodated,

Re:

[pestario]

"A smoking section in a restaurant is like a peeing section in a swimming pool."

Re:

[StarvingSE]

The problem with your comment is that "smoker" is not a minority group. How can I choose to go where people don't smoke when businesses don't ban it. I'm happy that smoking is banned at the workplace around here, but if I want to go get a beer, get some food, watch the game at a bar, or go bowling, it means subjecting myself to cigarette smoke.

Re:G0d@|\/|N smokers!

[jacksonj04]

Smoking places second-hand smoke into the environment. I go for a drink somewhere with smokers (Only one or two), I come home smelling of cigarette smoke. I go for a drink somewhere with homosexuals (Only one or two), I do not come home gay.

I dislike people who pollute my local environment. This includes people who thing playing dance music on their phone at full volume is the height of cool and those who otherwise do things which irritate me if I'm not really paying attention. Smoking falls into this category, and I fail to see how things like 'noise pollution' can be covered by laws yet 'smoking pollution' can't.

Re:

[sporkme]

In other news, a molehill has become a mountain. Here's tom with the weather:

I am reminded of This 2001 train accident [com.com] in Baltimore, where a tunnel fire severed a major internet backbone among other things and disrupted local communications as far away as Africa. [thestandard.com] It seems that while decentralized and robust on the massive scale, the internet is vulnerable as a child to small accidents or attacks, whose ramifications can be felt worldwide. It is too big to be defended or destroyed.

Re:obligatory

[plover]

The same thing happened here in Minneapolis in the mid 1990s. As I recall, some homeless people had built a fire under a bridge, and it destroyed a couple of conduits mounted beneath the bridge deck. The conduits held the main fibers of US West connecting Minneapolis to the backbone, blacking out the city. Apparently US West was unaware that their backup fiber providers leased space beneath the same physical bridge as their own fibers.

Since then, more carriers have installed more fibers. I don't know if carriers ever sit down and compare "bottlenecks" but I doubt that a single point of failure remains here.

As far as the Africa thing you pointed out, it's a case of a single application being down because the required servers were offline. It's certainly not a reflection of weakness with "the internet" but with that corporation's architectural design -- if they were dealing with a mission critical application, why didn't they have geographically diverse redundant data centers? The answer could have been "money" or it could have been "inexperience". Either way, the internet didn't fail the people in Africa, WorldCom failed their subscribers (there's a news flash.) It's a huge difference.

Re:obligatory

[CmdrGravy]

I worked somewhere once which had one main comms link and then a backup comms link if the first one went down. They had bought each one from a different carrier to be on the safe side only they hadn't realised one carrier was simlpy leasing space on the other carriers link, the exact same link their main one ran over.

Geek priorities...

[AndersOSU]

INTERNET DOWN! THE experimental INTERNET that nobody uses WENT DOWN, in a fire that killed three people and did millions of damager to property.

Re:

[vancbc]

Take it easy, nobody died, as well there is no structural damage.

Re:Geek priorities...

[Anonymous Coward]

~ <-- joke

* <-- your head

If a cigerrette can

[Splezunk]

take out the internet... what hope do we stand against nukes?

Re:If a cigerrette can

[iabervon]

This is what happens because the internet is designed to deal with nukes. If a nuke took out the Longfellow Bridge, Internet2 users in Boston wouldn't be complaining about their network connection to NYC, or doing much of anything else. The internet is only designed to route around damage at larger-than-blast-radius scales, and the affected area was actually quite small by those standards.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens because the internet is designed to deal with nukes.

This is common misunderstanding, so you have nothing to be ashamed of. Internet and Internet2 were first built for fast porn delivery, later military got interested and started using it for reliable porn delivery under nuclear attack.

Re:

[ronanbear]

You fool! The entire online porn industry is just a way to fund the NSA. What better way to ensure they have enough bandwidth and ability to shift lots of data than to control a huge chuck of it. When the time comes the porn will be the first thing they switch off to keep their access. This way they have a network backup operational and ready to operate at the flick of a switch.

[/tinfoilhat]

Re:

[lakeland]

I'm not sure you're right. Well, you are right about it being designed against nuclear attack, but I don't remember anything in DARPA being specific to smaller than nuclear?

Everything is based around: "oops, that route is down, lets try another". That sure doesn't sound scale specific to me.
I would hazard a guess that either: a) Internet2 isn't designed along the same goals or b) cost cutting has lead to a structure far more similar to a tree than a graph and nowadays a well targetted bomb could take out

Re:

[Jesus_666]

As far as I know Internet2 isn't quite as big as the "regular" internet. Maybe there just aren't enough nodes (and thus routes) to allow for effective damage mitigation.

Re:

[dcam]

Yeah. Except for DNS, but nobody needs that.

Wait...

Re:

[Secrity]

The internet was originally designed to deal with nukes. Now, the Internet is simply a commercial communications medium that has limited self healing capabilities. The corporations that own the Internet on the whole have built a robust national network, HOWEVER there are many areas that have limited or no alternate routing capability.

The entire Internet2 network has very limited or no alternate routing capability.

In and around many cities, fiber optic cables are concentrated into underground conduits and

A modest proposal

[alienmole]

If a nuke took out the Longfellow Bridge, Internet2 users in Boston wouldn't be complaining about their network connection to NYC, or doing much of anything else. The internet is only designed to route around damage at larger-than-blast-radius scales, and the affected area was actually quite small by those standards.

You know what this means, then: homeless people, and other sources of minor disturbance, are actually a much greater threat to the stability of the Internet than previously realized.

Clearly, we

Re:If a cigerrette can

[Anonymous Coward]

take out the internet... what hope do we stand against nukes?

No need for anything that elaborate, terrorists will just send a DMCA notice to ATDN/AT&T/GX/LVL3/Verizon/NTT/Qwest/SAVVIS/Sprint informing them that their core routers are caching the IPv6 address 09F9:1102:9D74:E35B:D841:56C5:6356:88C0 inside the routing tables.

Hmmm.

[CannonballHead]

I wonder if there will be a new Internet protocol for protection against malicious smoking hackers.

Re:Hmmm.

[deftcoder]

Is IPv6 flame-retardant?

Re:

[thc69]

Is IPv6 flame-retardant?

I'm sure that's written on the "Under penalty of law, do not remove" tag. Doesn't IPv6 have one of those?

I bet the bum didn't bother reading the tag on the mattress before he flicked the cigarrette...or maybe someone removed it and should have gone to jail.

Re:

[smittyoneeach]

Is IPv6 flame-retardant?

No, but the concept of web services is.
Oh, wait...retardant , not -ed . First day, new eyes.

Re:

[MichaelSmith]

I wonder if there will be a new Internet protocol for protection against malicious smoking hackers.

Wherever you see a user name "benson" the password will be "hedges", and vice versa.

An MIT student's take

[Jazzer_Techie]

It apparently also knocked out normal service to MIT students living on the Boston side of the Charles. One of my friends called me around 9:20PM (an hour after the fire started) to see if my internet connection was down. Fortunately, I live on the Cambridge side (with the main campus) so I wasn't affected. Here's what MIT IS&T had to say.

--
Wed, May 2nd:
Internet2 Service has been restored.
We have re-routed our connectivity to the Verizon TLS service, so all ILG's should be back in service as of 01:47AM this morning.

Tue, May 1st, 2007:
There was a fire earlier this evening under the Longfellow Bridge, on the Boston side of the river. This fire appears to have destroyed electrical and communications conduits that run over the Longfellow, including fiber used by MIT and other Boston area institutions to connect to Internet2.

MIT and other New England Schools are currently disconnected from Internet2. Traffic to Internet2 institutions is being routed via the Commodity Internet, but performance may be less then normal experienced.
--
They got things back going again in less than 6 hours, even though it started in the evening. Not too shabby.

Re:

[Garrett Fox]

See, there is a good reason why the Institute decided to keep all freshmen on campus. What would they have done without Net access that evening?

An LSU student's take

[coderedave]

We had the same thing happen here at LSU last Spring semester. Someone had thrown a cigarette into a drain and caught some dry leaves on fire causing some serious fiber optics damage for most of the campus. But of course not on the scale as what happened in Boston. Luckily enough it was a small fire and happened on a Friday, so they got it fixed before Monday; so only us people in the dorms felt the effects of it :(. So I wonder if there is any kind of protection that could be used to help prevent thing

Re:

[MollyB]

Do I read this correctly? Are fiber optic lines routed through storm drains? I had no idea...

Re:

[The_Wilschon]

A fire in a storm drain might very well heat up the surrounding earth sufficiently to damage fiber in nearby conduits.

Re:

[peragrin]

No they run them through storm drains. your phone, cable, and electrical company's do it all the time. At least for the larger trunk lines of the drains.

Firewall

[Dude163299]

Guess they forgot to install the firewall.

Homeless?

[bulliver]

It wasn't a homeless guy, it was a torch job paid for by Internet 1.

Re:Homeless?

[Hanners1979]

Or, more likely, the RIAA and/or MPAA. ;)

Level3?

[BigDuke6_swe]

Internet2, level3? What's level3?
"Level 3 Communications cables used by the network went up in flames"
"Level 3 engineers estimate it could take one to two days to restore the circuit"

Taken out by a level 1 homeless person?

Re:Level3?

[Anonymous Coward]

He obviously rolled a 20 on his attack roll.

In other news

[Baricom]

In other news, witnesses reported a spontaneous cheer coming from the corporate headquarters of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Re:

[Hoi Polloi]

I always said the RIAA was a bunch of bums. This just proves it.

This is why we need tougher safety standards...

[Mish]

Obviously the newly imposed mattress fire safety rules [consumeraffairs.com] just aren't working!

Re:

[Hognoxious]

But in that case you'd expect it to be less flammable because it's soaked in pee. No, not IP. Goddam geeks.

Re:

[Stripsurge]

You are incorrect sir. The mod saw the humour in the comment but deemed the bit of information about the new ruling to be quite informative to those not up to date on mattress laws. Obviously if the law was just passed I wouldn't expect a mattress on the street to meet the safety standards. It is nice to see an example of how a new safer mattress *could* have actually saved a lot of people a lot of time and money. Firefighters, internets, and buildings aren't exactly cheap.

aside: is that a correct usage of

We Must act Now!

[scenestar]

Clearly the homeless are not only unsightfull to look at, they also pose a direct threat to homeland security by sabotaging our infrastructure.

It seems clear that we must *eradicate* the homeless.

(don't mod this a troll straight away)

Re:We Must act Now!

[Glowing Fish]

I heard they have hammers.

Re:We Must act Now!

[0rionx]

I was going to mod this comment -1 Unsightfull but for some reason I couldn't find that option...

Damn it man!

[ichigo 2.0]

I can jump 2 homeless people, maybe 3, but there is no way I can jump this many!

Smokey says...

[Genocaust]

Only YOU can prevent Internet fires!

Routing protocols? Redudnancy?

[arivanov]

Is the internet devolving or this is just my impression? Routing protocols? Redundancy? Multipath anyone?

Re:

[Yetihehe]

Funny how parent was modded redundant. BTW, there IS redundancy, TFA says they switched to other lines.

O How the mighty have fallen.

[ShagratTheTitleless]

From the article: "The homeless man, whom authorities identified as one Kevin Rose, was apparently despondent after the recent shutdown of his tech news aggregation site. Witnesses reported seeing him staring into the flames and rocking slowly while mumbling a series of letters and numbers."

Re:O How the mighty have fallen.

[fuse2k]

"He just just kept saying '09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0' over and over"

Re:

[ookabooka]

Witnesses reported seeing him staring into the flames and rocking slowly while mumbling a series of letters and numbers.

Maybe it was an IPv6 address...

so the fire starter didn't have a home?

[c_jonescc]

Sorry, but isn't a little absurd, and likely judgmental, to mention TWICE in the abstract that the fire was started by a homeless person?

If the cig was tossed from a car window would we be hearing repeatedly about how a Toyota driver started this all?

Re:

[alzoron]

Something about this story is fishy. If they knew so many details about how the fire started, down to knowing it was a homeless smoker at precisely 8:20, why didn't anybody do anything to stop the fire. You don't just throw a cigarette and "boom" interweb 2.0 goes up in flames instantly. Sounds to me they don't really have a clue how the fire started past a mattress catching fire and just wanted to pin the blame on today's favorite evil... tobacco. Watch out folks, cigarettes kill the interweb! Secondh

Re:so the fire starter didn't have a home?

[kripkenstein]

Sorry, but isn't a little absurd, and likely judgmental, to mention TWICE in the abstract that the fire was started by a homeless person?

I agree that twice looks a little suspicious (and how do they even know how the fire started?), but my guess is that they are trying to make it perfectly clear that it wasn't one of their own that caused the failure. That is, it wasn't a fire started by someone using Internet2, so they aren't directly to blame (but might be to blame for inadequate preparations for such events, I really don't know).

Re:

[Detritus]

We also eat lost tourists. Throw another Aussie on the barbie, Billy-Ray! The young'uns is hungry!

Re:

[dcam]

Aussies are tough. We don't make very good steak.

Re:so the fire starter didn't have a home?

[dhalgren]

Anyone who's been beaten by an Aussie after complaining about the steak can confirm both points.

Torben

Re:

[dcam]

Don't complain about our steak. My uncle grows prime Angus [okstate.edu] and it is clearly the best steak available anywhere.

Re:

[uhlume]

And rightly so! If SUVs have learned to use cell phones, homeless smoking guys are the least of our worries.

In other news...

[Monsterdog]

...US Government brought down by chili farts. Pictures at eleven.

The new public-service ad slogan...

[laughingcoyote]

"Alright, if you don't care about killing yourself, quit smoking or you'll kill the Internet!"

Might work.

smoke kills

[dunkelfalke]

smoke kills [antimult.ru]

Internet and Internet Killers have this in common:

[Glowing Fish]

What are cigarettes, after all?

They are tubes, a series of tubes...

Old Slashdot poll

[dj245]

I am reminded of This [slashdot.org]

I remember voting backhoe.

Look Sharp

[kram175]

One if by land, Two if by sea, Three if by burning mattress under a bridge! Good thing the minute men (well, 6 hour men) were on the job. But seriously, what does this say about the vulnerability of our infrastructure? I mean, a homeless guy with a cigarette?

Firehose

[Chiisu]

No wonder Slashdot developed Firehose....

boston or new york red line?

[brunascle]

i know boston has a red line, i take it every day. i believe new york also uses colors. which red line is it? (TFA doesnt specify)

Re:

[Dragonslicer]

Considering the fire was on/under the Longfellow Bridge in Boston, which the MBTA red line goes across, I would assume that's the subway that got disrupted. If a fire in Boston can interrupt subway service in New York, that'd be a pretty impressive fire.

Re:

[Rob T Firefly]

While NYC has a line which is represented by red numbers, it's not commonly refered to as "the Red Line." New Yorkers usually call it "the 1-2-3," "the West Side line," or "the Seventh Avenue line." The "Red Line" colloquialism is more likely to refer to Boston's one.

homeless man

[dwater]

...when a homeless man tossed a lit cigarette.

What a tosser [english2american.com]!

Fines

[dheera]

They should levy huge fines on people who improperly discard cigarettes and/or actually randomly decide to patrol parts of cities and cite people who drop cigarettes for littering. It's dangerous, filthy, bad for the environment, and makes cities just look bad.

Where's William Gibson when you need him?

[smchris]

If that is cyberpunk noire, I don't know what is.

Butts

[magarity]

I really don't care that smokers don't care that their polluting their own lungs and homes, and if the smoke in the air bothers at a public venue me then I know to move myself somewhere else. The only reason cigarette smokers REALLY irritate me is that in general they don't care one bit where they toss the ^%$# cigarette butts. Streets, sidewalks, flowerbeds, and now even old mattresses... the country is completely littered with the nasty things. I demand that all cigarettes sold be unfiltered so the re

Re:

[Nimey]

It'll have the positive side effect of killing off the lusers a little faster, too.

Smokers, and why I despise them

[Epi-man]

So can anyone give me any reasonable explanation as to why smokers always seem to consider the world their ashtray? What is wrong with these people? I get so disgusted every day driving home from work as I see at least 3-4 smokers drop their lit cigarettes out of their cars. They don't seem to care that we routinely have "red flag" days (high risk of brush fires due to lack of rain), that we have had several brush fires started by fellow members of their club of morons, that their freakin' plastic (they

What does it matter that he was homeless?

[Afecks]

Seems like they are trying to make a point of that. I just can't figure out what it is.

Re:reliability?

[dread]

The Internet was designed originally as a means of communication in the event of nuclear war.

No it WASN'T. It was certainly financed through DoD but go read a book on the subject instead of talking out of your ass. Where wizards stay up late is recommended, nay required reading.

Re:

[ubrgeek]

Good call on referencing the book. When I spoke to the authors a number of years ago they were appreciative that I read it and asked me to pass the word as the sales (at least at the time) were low. It's definately an interesting read about the intents, PDPs, etc. But, if I recall (and like I said, it's been years) the actual initial thought had to do with some general not wanting to remember different passwords for two divergent systems/networks and so thought that one, large network would make things easi

Re:

[SL Baur]

I think they're just confused with a different quote.

"The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/reagle/inet-qu otations-19990709.html [harvard.edu]

Re:

[westlake]

No it WASN'T. It was certainly financed through DoD but go read a book on the subject instead of talking out of your ass.

But after having said all that: it still seems fair to ask why core infrastructure isn't better protected against ordinary accidents, much less sabotage.

It was not comforting to learn that the explosion of a single tanker could bring down one of the approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Re:

[alienmole]

But after having said all that: it still seems fair to ask why core infrastructure isn't better protected against ordinary accidents, much less sabotage.

No, it isn't fair. The Internet2 is an experimental network, and I'd certainly vote against spending money on sabotage-proofing it at this point.

It was not comforting to learn that the explosion of a single tanker could bring down one of the approaches to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Life has infinite risks. It's impossible to guard against all of them. Th

Re:reliability?

[Half a dent]

It is still safe this was just a lucky strike.

Imagine if...

[Khyber]

It was one of those off-brand Black Death cigarettes!

Re:

[AndersOSU]

Reminds me of business quarterly reports. Earnings were up $0.56/share less one time items (our headquarters burning down).

Or, Earnings were up $0.56/share less one time items (that seem to happen every year for some reason).

Re:

[CoolVibe]

I guess they are becoming the modern equivalent of the backhoe, which is also a dreaded enemy of many an ISP. :P

Re:

[Bastard of Subhumani]

Nightmare scenario ... they merge by some obscure genetic process (involving a spider bite or something like that) to form a backhoebo.

Re:

[Afrosheen]

Hahaha...man I'm lucky I just sat my coffee down before I read that. +1 if I had it dude, that was dumb and clever at the same time. :)

Re:

[ookabooka]

Internet 2.0 + Cigarette 1.0 = Firewall 0.0

Ok so the firewall coefficient is irrelevant since it is multiplied by 0, and the 1.0 coefficient for Cigarette is redundant, moving Cigarette to the other side gets us:

Internet 2.0 = - Cigarette

Multiply both sides by -1 and we see that a single cigarette is worth (-2 Internets).QED

Re:

[user24]

"Physical security is always the weakest link in any implementation...they should back to the drawing board again.."

they would, but how can they be sure the drawing board is secure?
They need to design some kind of non-physical drawing board on which to design internet2 - that's how!

Now, how to design that drawing board?

Maybe some kind of non-physical... drawing...

ah.

Re:

[westlake]

that somebody who has no home would still rather smoke cigarettes than use the same money (or barter the cigarette with another homeless guy) for some food or shelter?

You do know that tobacco is addictive - that it satisfies both physical and psychological needs?