It’s Amazing How Fragile the Internet Really Is
This morning, many of the Internet’s most popular sites- Technorati, Archive.org, Netflix, Craiglist, LiveJournal, and others, went down. This was caused by a power outage at a single data center(or, some rumormongers say, a drunk employee accidentally hitting the off switch.) Coupled with the still-popular Onion video about the crash of the Internet, this serves as a stark reminder of just how fragile the Internet really is.
Even the most popular websites are hosted on only a few servers, usually all at the same location. Websites that we take for granted (I type in cnn.com when I want to test whether my own Internet connection is up) could go down in a heartbeat if a natural disaster, or even a terrorist attack hit their servers. Without our most trusted websites, all of the Internet could plunge into chaos. Even more worrying is the fact that the root DNS system, which maps domain names to individual IP addresses/servers is hosted on only a handful of servers aroound the world. A determined terrorist group could stage attacks on all of these, and knock the entire Internet offline, resulting undoubtedly in billions of dollars in financial damage, and perhaps even the collapse of Web 2.0 as we know it.
It’s a scary and somehow foreign concept- that the digital world, cyberspace, is so firmly rooted in the physical world. The Internet, where physical space seems to cease to exist, is actually quite dependent on the real world(foreign websites can take much longer to load, for example).
So what’s the solution t the perilous condition of our most valuable digital resources? Simple. I strongly believe that P2P technologies like BitTorrent are the next revolution in hosting- it has yet to catch on with mainstream websites, but it will. Give each client a copy of a webpage, checksum it, and serve it to others. The result is minimal hosting costs and 100% uptime. Give out free premium content in exchange for sharing it with others (BitTorrent already does this illegally), and you have a truly global, indestructible network.
Web 2.0 is about democratizing content- so why are a few web hosts still monopolizing it?
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[…] Inevitably, many are wondering why this professional outfit’s backup generators didn’t go on. Neomeme makes the good observation that the Internet is really quite fragile. […]
[…] - especially in relations to California’s tendency to get hit by earthquakes. While Ilya at Neomeme suggests that there is a danger to have these Web 2.0 host by a small circle of hosting companies, Carlo at […]
P2P style hosting would be a great way to prevent such outages. In those times you really realize how dependent you are on the internet. A few weeks ago our internet went out at my office, and we had no way to even look up the providers number as yellowpages.com or a google search is our first method of finding out any information now days.
[…] Inevitably, many are wondering why this professional outfit’s backup generators didn’t go on. Neomeme makes the good observation that the Internet is really quite fragile. […]
I had not heard of these sites going down. Kinda of scary to think it would be so easy to wipe out the internet.
Ya it really does indicate the fragility of internet, and
@ Kirkwood , i think even p2p style hosting , is not the right answer as it is not consistent and is very prone to Virus attacks and personal data can be hacked really easily.
I agree !!! It really is very fragile. p2p style hosting should help solve this problem to a great extent. But we should have some backup option in case of natural calamity or may as said if any terrorist attacks happen.
Lotensin….
Is lotensin a beta blocker. Lotensin….
That is kind of scary, it would make for a great movie but we sure don’t want that to really happen. People depend on the internet more than the tv now days. If you block everyone from it, it would be complete chaos. I agree that they should make it more secure so we don’t lose everything we’ve worked so hard to create.
good article
i appreciate the good advices written in this article
i like the great advices and this is great content too allthough it is a bit scary for me ..