3 ms·

seems like the internet in 2020 has a diminished ability to route around damage

Frost1x 6y ago
My opinion is that this, like many issues were seeing today, is largely an issue with ongoing consolidation trends. The less diversity of systems/solutions we have for a given problem or set if problems, the less chance we're protected from unknown unknowns that creep up. The more diversity you have in systems, the more likely you have some option that is hardened against unknown unknowns when they arrive and the quicker we can work around them. Modern society is all about consolidating systems into a few efficient solutions typically dictated by market forces which I argue, don't concern themselves much with these sorts of problems. As a result, when we run into problems, we're left with fewer options to resort to and instead have to identify problems and develop new solutions on-the-fly. Consolidation leads to complacency and stagnation. Sometimes this is reasonable (and even desirable) for certain non-critical systems, it just doesn't make financial sense to pour resources into system diversity for certain systems we could do without--find the one that works best/most efficiently and use it. If it breaks, it's not critical and the work around can wait. On the other hand, if a system is critical, then I think it behooves us to continue looking at improvements of existing systems and alloting resources to investigating new approaches.
sp332 6y ago
BGP has always had this issue. It depends on trustworthy information being available. Any trusted source who starts lying (or just screws up) is going to cause routing problems.
- salawat 6y ago
  Note, trustworthyness jumps off of being a technical problem, and becoming a human/people problem. Level 8 as someone mentioned, or GIGO (Garbage-In-Garbage-Out) as others may know it. To safely use a system, your operator needs to be 10% smarter than the system being operated. It is clear that we have problems in that department with certain AS's. This is about, what the third major outage attributed to CenturyLink in the last handful of years? I have no idea what exactly their process must look like, but good heavens, a better look need be taken, as this is becoming a bit regular for my tastes.
swinglock 6y ago
Yes and no. Yes, because maybe so. No, because he issue you're commenting on doesn't suggest that. It looks like the nature of this particular outage is such that a previous iteration of the Internet wouldn't have been any better equipped to solve this faster.

My opinion is that this, like many issues were seeing today, is largely an issue with ongoing consolidation trends. The less diversity of systems/solutions we have for a given problem or set if problems, the less chance we're protected from unknown unknowns that creep up. The more diversity you have in systems, the more likely you have some option that is hardened against unknown unknowns when they arrive and the quicker we can work around them. Modern society is all about consolidating systems into a few efficient solutions typically dictated by market forces which I argue, don't concern themselves much with these sorts of problems. As a result, when we run into problems, we're left with fewer options to resort to and instead have to identify problems and develop new solutions on-the-fly. Consolidation leads to complacency and stagnation. Sometimes this is reasonable (and even desirable) for certain non-critical systems, it just doesn't make financial sense to pour resources into system diversity for certain systems we could do without--find the one that works best/most efficiently and use it. If it breaks, it's not critical and the work around can wait. On the other hand, if a system is critical, then I think it behooves us to continue looking at improvements of existing systems and alloting resources to investigating new approaches.

sp332 6y ago

BGP has always had this issue. It depends on trustworthy information being available. Any trusted source who starts lying (or just screws up) is going to cause routing problems.

salawat 6y ago
Note, trustworthyness jumps off of being a technical problem, and becoming a human/people problem. Level 8 as someone mentioned, or GIGO (Garbage-In-Garbage-Out) as others may know it. To safely use a system, your operator needs to be 10% smarter than the system being operated. It is clear that we have problems in that department with certain AS's. This is about, what the third major outage attributed to CenturyLink in the last handful of years? I have no idea what exactly their process must look like, but good heavens, a better look need be taken, as this is becoming a bit regular for my tastes.

swinglock 6y ago

Yes and no. Yes, because maybe so. No, because he issue you're commenting on doesn't suggest that. It looks like the nature of this particular outage is such that a previous iteration of the Internet wouldn't have been any better equipped to solve this faster.