[15% of ALL] Internet traffic was routed via Chinese servers [for 18 minutes on April 8th]

The Washington Times ^ | November 15, 2010 | Shaun Waterman

[Christian Engineer Mass]

"It remains unclear whether the redirection was intentional" lol.

Read carefully.

[ronnie raygun]

It was done with the blessing of our beloved leaders

[givemELL]

Gee, April was a VERY long time ago, ....in the meanwhile??

[KoRn]

To KNOW why this happened, you would need LOTS of information. Obviously routers routed traffic that way. Why?

[NativeNewYorker]

[_Jim]

Nearly 15 percent ... Internet traffic ... was briefly redirected through computer servers in China in April

Does anybody know if China has an over-capacity of fiber to even HANDLE the excess traffic (me thinks not) into and out of the REST of the WORLD? (THIS would also mean that a LOT of routers iin the ROW would have had to have their routing changed ... again, doubtful IMNSHO.)

Note: The term used is 'computer servers', not routers (WHICH are optimized to pass traffic swiftly via implementation in ASICs or FPGAs vs a 'computer' which would have to move 'data' internally via the execution of specific instructions).

[Christian Engineer Mass]

I would need to look more into it, but I guess it was something like:

* routers choose routes for traffic based on how congested routes are

* chinese routers claim to have huge amounts of bandwidth free

* routers route traffic through chinese routers

It’s an incredibly open system. Not complicated. Maybe IP needs an update to solve this backdoor. I wonder if IPv6 takes care of it.

[Christian Engineer Mass]

“a LOT of routers iin the ROW would have had to have their routing changed”

see #7. The routing is dynamic.

[_Jim]

A) Have you misinterpreted the term 'dynamic routing' as it applies to routers? (meaning: routing tables are still set up by network engineering, unless routers have become sentient in applying such things as Path vector protocol and Distance vector algorithms)

B) Now, address the issue of route capacity, i.e., fiber capacity in/out of China ...

[Christian Engineer Mass]

OK: those 18 minutes would have been very slow on the ‘net

Had it gone on longer, people might have started complaining

[Cvengr]

Gee, April was a VERY long time ago, ....in the meanwhile??

Took that long to cache the data...?

[Cvengr]

2 of my favorite texts are Transaction Processing by Gray and Network Flows by those 3 guys (Ahuia et al.)

Know any more recent good ones in that same league?

[enduserindy]

Start here.

“SHANGHAI, October 12, 2010 – Cisco today held a grand ceremony to mark the 5th anniversary of the Cisco China Research and Development Center (CRDC). Established in 2005, CRDC has become the third largest R&D center for Cisco around the world.”

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/global/asiapac/news/2010/pr_10-12.html

[blueplum]

from the White House: crickets

[zeugma]

All web traffic should be encrypted. It would put an end to this type of childishness. The trouble is, then the governments of the world, most notably our own beloved Fedgov would find it more difficult to snoop on us. There is no real reason why any internet traffic is still in the clear except that governments don't like privacy.

[ShadowAce]

[Washi]

see #7. The routing is dynamic.

Would the route change because a Chinese router "had more bandwidth available," or only because a router within the current, preferred path suddenly went down or became congested?

How, exactly, could the Chinese influence traffic routing of specific U.S. data?

[Christian Engineer Mass]

I’m not sure exactly, but from what I remember of networking class routers need some way of determining which routes are congested and which have excess capacity - they have no way of determining that independently, so they must rely on status information from other routers.

If that status information was spoofed, you could get a lot of traffic to go through your nodes

[martin_fierro]

That explains why my FR post that day looked like this:

工業實力幽默平

[NeverForgetBataan]

When are we going to realize that even if this was not an
intentional act by the Chi-Coms, we have enough others that
we KNOW were.

These are probes. The electronic version of us overflying the Soviet Union with the U2.

The Japanese had agents in Hawaii to size up the defenses of Pearl Harbor before that disaster.

This is the same kind of stuff.