Posts Tagged ‘internet’
On the Border of the Internet #risk
The age old lie told by ISP support desks: ” The Internet is down,” was briefly reality again yesterday.
The past couple of days I’d been seeing and hearing comments that there was a disturbance in the force of the Internet. Initially a NANOG message was posted about a general malaise or instability in the Internet, some humorous quips were posted in response and the matter was soon forgotten.
A network operator looking with hindsight said that they had been able to see more than normal numbers of updates coming on BGP which is normally an indicator of network instability being solved by rerouting round the problem. That is all part of the normal operation of the Internet. And sometime yesterday morning as the east coast of the US was getting to work the looming disaster struck.
Juniper network devices started core dumping and restarting due to a bug in the code which handled the BGP UPDATE messages as another large updated was arriving. The self healing properties of the Internet broke and the Internet went with it. The Great Juniper Outage of 2011 was born.
Avoidable?
Almost certainly. The reliance on the hardware of one specific vendor on the part of large ISPs – backbone carriers – creates a single point of failure which is bad – mkay. A fail over situation should always be in place, not just at the ISPs. Companies who rely on the Internet for business should take this into account too. A recent outages at some of companies I consulted said that by placing their faith in one specific vendor they had created a single point of failure which had caused some high profile repercussions.
Do you have a single point of failure?
6 Months of Security Links #2011
I’m a regular curator of daily links, and like to give overviews of my collection of curated links and posts. This is partly as there are some good sources and articles in here and as I am working on a research project which I started based on a number of books I read.
I’m sure you’ll find something interesting in the items below – there are some gems in the list – and I dare to hazard the guess you might learn something you wanted to know. 🙂
Just Finished Reading: The Internet is a Playground #books
I advised The Internet is a Playground
Thorne manages to turn most of his personal attacks on people in to humorous anecdotes, turning round the impositions people put on him against the person. Whether it is making graphics, a poster for a missing cat or selling him a pair of bad gloves. Even attacks on him for being petty, bigoted or lazy are turned round against the attackers showing that their attacks stem from their own interpretation. I’d even go so far as to say that their dislike of Thorne stems from a dislike of aspects of themselves.
I would certainly recommend this book to somebody who has not read the posts on his website. I must say that while reading the book my girlfriend asked me to stop laughing multiple times, and left the house. I think she’s jealous of my relationship with David Thorne.
Image source: Amazon
Trumpet Winsock Author Compensation #risk #business
You wouldn’t be reading this if it wasn’t for Trumpet Winsock, after my initial use of Bulletin Boards in the early days of the internet it was thanks to the ISP Netland and Trumpet Winsock that I first arrived on the net. Being a snotty nosed kid I quite happily used shareware programs without a thought to the writers, let alone paying for it. I well remember the joy that this tool brought to me, although the rest of the internet may not be too happy about it.
I was sad to hear that Peter Tattam, the writer of Trumpet Winsock, got very little for the most widely used piece of shareware software[1]. So now is the time to set it right by paying the fee you should have originally paid using PayPal: payments@petertattam.com
Thanks all… I had honestly thought the Internet had forgotten about me.
—Peter Tattam
Image source: Imperial College London
Untitled
USENET still going strong, and more environmentally friendly than BitTorrent 😉 internet torrent http://ow.ly/1ak0Gh
USENET still going strong, and more environmentally friendly than BitTorrent ;) #internet #torrent
I like pronouncing things dead as much as the next guy, and don’t feel bound by facts. As I previously said in Death of USENET I don’t think USENET is dead, and neither do the statistics[1].
The war against trackers and users of bittorrent continues while all these movies and CDs can easily be downloaded from USENET servers across the world without too much trouble and without revealing your IP to the world. The ISPs are slowly removing this service for their customers, opting rather to deal with the increased traffic to their network uplink rather than promoting the use of the USENET servers they host containing exactly the same material as their leeching customers want.
Besides from cheaper for the ISPs, it’s also more environmentally friendly! 😉 Rather than wasting bits and bytes and the network impact that has on the internet it’s a form of recycling where the ISP uses a limited amount of bandwidth to download the data from it’s peers and redistributes this to the users who are going to download illegally any way. These left over bits and bytes can be used to transport more important things, or can be turned into art projects by art students.
- Usenet traffic today (wikipedia)
Images courtesy of Marc Smith and Wikipedia.
YouTube to end-of-life IE6 support March 13 #youtube #ie
I use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 to run Adobe Flash, in a sandbox, it’s they only place that I run Flash. (If I’m going to be unsafe, I might as well be really exposed.) Today I saw for the first time during a slow load that they are dropping support for IE6.
YouTube's message regarding IE6.
Mentioned previously on TechCrunch: YouTube Will Be Next To Kiss IE6 Support Goodbye (14 July 2009)
Chrome Beta Breaks Internet? #chrome
I hate programming UIs in browsers, I’m sure everybody does. With Google’s Chrome browser another headache is born. Chrome’s JavaScript Engine V8 implements ECMAScript-262, but not with some of the features that come in JavaScript v1.6 and are implemented by FireFox. One example is the “for each in,” not that this is implemented correctly in Internet Explorer.
var query = "plaap=poekoe&hi=hello";
var valPairs = query.split('&');for each (var pair in valPairs) {
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier
var tempPair = pair.split('=');
}
There is a solution for this I found on the Mozilla Developers Center: forEach, with this you are able to implement a callback that cycles throught the Element.
if (!Array.prototype.forEach){
Array.prototype.forEach = function(fun /*, thisp*/) {
var len = this.length;
if (typeof fun != "function")
throw new TypeError();var thisp = arguments[1];
for (var i = 0; i < len; i++) {
if (i in this)
fun.call(thisp, this[i], i, this);
}
};
}
technorati tags: javascript, ecma, chrome, firefox, internet, explorer, ie, ff
Extending Standard Firefox
I was reading Extend Firefox Contest Highlights the Catch-22 of Browser Add-ons, which discussed the Catch-22 situation that browser developers find themselves in when publishing a new browser: Do you add functionality because it’s useful to everybody? Or leave it out because it is isn’t.
My opinion is that the browser should at least have the same functionality as the browsers which which it competes. Other than that a method should be build in to query the users. I also tend to agree with the poster Baltic Zephyr who says:
Why not just offer a few versions of the firefox download which contain sector-specific bundles of the most attractive addons for each sector. This might include Firefox for designer, for programmers, for academics, etc. Another approach would be to simply offer bundled addons in addition to the standard firefox download.
That does leave the developers with the problem on how to discover which extensions should be standard for which sector and should the extended add-on be used or the limited implementation?
Personally I use the following, regardless of the setting I am in:
- GreaseMonkey
- FoxyProxy
- Del.icio.us Bookmarks
- Tab Mix Plus
- Yahoo! Toolbar
- VeriSign’s OpenID SeatBelt
technorati tags: firefox, addon, extension, plugin, mozilla, browser, internet
General Musing 