Re: Internet FUD Abound

[Scott Marcus <smarcus () genuity com>]

At 18:16 07/26/2000 -0400, David Charlap wrote:
> Sean Donelan wrote:
> > The Reuters article skips over some of the important qualifiers
> > in the Nature letter.  Read the entire letter on the Nature
> > website.  http://www.nature.com/
> >
> > The conclusions are interesting, but I think missing a few pieces
> > of data.  Every major public NAP has had service affecting incidents,
> > and so far we have not seen the partioning effect Albert et al write
> > about.

I agree with Sean that the article itself is an interesting read. In fact,
I'd say it's better than I expected based on the Reuters report.  A key
conclusion -- that elimination of a random 2.5% of the routers of the
Internet would cause little harm, but elimination of the most central 2.5%
of the routers would at least triple the diameter of the network -- is
likely correct.  (Although I don't think we needed fancy mathematics to
tell us that.  ;^)

Sean, I don't think that they were arguing that EVERY failure would cause
this kind of collapse.  They were saying that a scale-free system might be
particularly vulnerable to a systematic attempt to cripple its most
critical elements.  A failure of a single public NAP is probably well below
that threshhold.



> ... and David Charlap wrote:
> Note also that the graph they examine is one of web pages linked to each
> other.  Not the underlying network of fibers and routers...

Perhaps you read this too hastily?  They appear to have evaluated both.

Cheers,
- Scott