Posted on 04/11/2008 1:06:37 PM PDT by BenLurkin
You're pounding the keyboard, double-clicking away, sighing and grumbling, but to no avail: That devilish little hourglass icon refuses to give way to the Web site you're trying to reach. Most Internet users have encountered trouble reaching online destinations, but they often attribute the problem to their wireless network cutting out or a server momentarily going down.
Sometimes, though, the problem is more mysterious. At any given moment, messages throughout the world are lost to cyber black holes, according to new computer science research.
Ethan Katz-Bassett, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington, and his advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy, designed a program to continuously search for these strange internet gaps, when a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing e-mail gets lost along a pathway that was known to be working before. To make sure the black holes they detect are not simply due to a problem with the end user or the host server, they look for computers that can be reached from some, but not all, of the Internet, meaning the issue must be occurring en route.
"We were astounded when we did an initial four-month study and we saw how many problems there were," Katz-Bassett told LiveScience. "It seemed infeasible that this could be happening so often. They're definitely more common than we thought."
Now the team constantly monitors the Web for black holes and posts a map of where the problems are around the world at any given moment. They hope their data will help Internet service providers track down the route of problems experienced on their networks.
"Network administers are definitely interested in it," Katz-Bassett said. "I think we need to do more analysis of the data and see where exactly these problems are occurring. It would be interesting to come up with predictions about where problems were most likely to occur."
The scientists named their monitoring system Hubble after the Hubble Space Telescope, which can also detect black holes, albeit the astrophysical kind. They hope their data will help improve the consistency of the Internet, where we increasingly entrust vital information.
"I think we would like it to be more reliable," Katz-Bassett said. "It's orders of magnitude less reliable than the telephone network right now. I think it should be pretty possible to get it closer."
The researchers will present their findings at the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation being held next week in San Francisco. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation.
L
Probably a pile of unmatched socks there too.
Are they talking about the redundancy of the internet?
It’s way over my head.
Hopefully some tech savvy FReepers will come along and pontificate.
What in the world do you have to ‘double-click’ on the internet? Am I missing something here, or is this just incredibly poorly researched?
I have sent myself an email before and it took 6 hours to receive it. Where the heck did it go?
I don’t complain about the internet. I am surprised it works at all.
Must be underpants gnomes surfing the web.
“Must be underpants gnomes surfing the web.”
I am having to reread this reply to get the full impact of the .....sheer audacity of your reply. Brilliant and insoucient.
Possibly it will become an oft quoted line. A part of the Freeper lexicon.
Congratulations.
It has to do with the way packets are routed. When you connect to another server, the messages “hop” from router to router. You send your message to the router at your ISP, which looks around for other routers to get to the destination. Routers are supposed to advertise the other routers they’re connected to, so in daisy-chain fashion the message eventually reaches the destination. The problems arise if the any of the connected routers in the list is offline- when that happens your message is supposed to be sent to a different router instead but quite often it reaches a dead end.
The email protocol is designed so that if the destination server is not available it will keep trying, so sometimes your emails can be sitting on the outgoing server waiting for the host on the other end. Most mail servers are configured to try every few hours for a couple of days before giving up.
Just as an odd guess, are you using Comcast?
I once received an e-mail 10 minutes before I sent it to myself.
“I don’t complain about the internet. I am surprised it works at all.”
A customer once asked me about personal computers and their consistency/reliability. I answered as follows:
Whenever I turn on a computer, it posts, starts up, gets to a desktop, all of the programs work and I can actually get on the internet, I am amazed.
His repsonse was, “I was going to say that the difference between a novice and a professional is that the professional is surprised when something goes right.” :-)
“I don’t complain about the internet. I am surprised it works at all.”
A customer once asked me about personal computers and their consistency/reliability. I answered as follows:
Whenever I turn on a computer, it posts, starts up, gets to a desktop, all of the programs work and I can actually get on the internet, I am amazed.
His repsonse was, “I was going to say that the difference between a novice and a professional is that the professional is surprised when something goes right.” :-)
I had one of these moments shortly before logging in.
Lost somewhere west of Lake Titticaca.
When I first got into this business I assumed that when one clicked on a link to a web page and after visiting that page then clicked on another link to some other site somewhere else on the internet that the connection collapsed and started over from the originating computer. That’s what common sense told me.
Uh-uh.
For example, if you visit a site in the UK then visit a site in Australia the search for the site in Australia starts in the UK and is directed to Australia from the UK so that your connection to any given site can literally go around the world even if the site you are currently visiting is literally next door to you.
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