<story><title>The internet is held together with spit and baling wire</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/11/the-internet-is-held-together-with-spit-baling-wire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toast0</author><text>Back in the 90s when I got on, so much of traffic was exchanged at MAE-West or MAE-East, and a backhoe in Iowa could make nearly all the cross-US traffic go through Europe and Asia instead.&lt;p&gt;These days, there are lively public internet exchanges up and down both coasts, in texas and chicago and elsewhere. A well placed backhoe can still make a big mess, many &amp;#x27;redundant fibers&amp;#x27; are in the same strand, and last mile is fragile, but if my ISP network is up to the local internet exchange, there are many distinct routes to the other coast and a fiber cut is unlikely to route my traffic around the world.</text></item><item><author>fredophile</author><text>&amp;quot;The internet routes around failure&amp;quot; hasn&amp;#x27;t been true for a long time. It refers to the original topography which has been replaced with a hub and spoke model. Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet.</text></item><item><author>h2odragon</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s Anti-Fragile. If it breaks all the time, everybody is highly experienced at patching together new workarounds, mechanisms for fail over are in place and regularly tested, and there&amp;#x27;s whole classes of corner case bugs that get flushed out to be stomped (or nurtured as cherished pets) instead of breeding in the dark and jumping out at you all at once.&lt;p&gt;How can the &amp;quot;Internet routes around failure&amp;quot; be trusted without testing? Everything needs regular exercise or it atrophies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fragmede</author><text>I wonder if I can nerdsnipe anyone into figuring out the fewest BGP hijacks it would take to force traffic on the Internet from the West Coast of the US to take the long way around to the East Coast of the US. Never mind the latency, that pipe isn&amp;#x27;t big enough for all of that traffic, so it&amp;#x27;ll effectively be a netsplit.&lt;p&gt;I bet it&amp;#x27;s a lower number than anyone&amp;#x27;s actually comfortable with, though it would be rather difficult to pull of.</text></comment>
<story><title>The internet is held together with spit and baling wire</title><url>https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/11/the-internet-is-held-together-with-spit-baling-wire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toast0</author><text>Back in the 90s when I got on, so much of traffic was exchanged at MAE-West or MAE-East, and a backhoe in Iowa could make nearly all the cross-US traffic go through Europe and Asia instead.&lt;p&gt;These days, there are lively public internet exchanges up and down both coasts, in texas and chicago and elsewhere. A well placed backhoe can still make a big mess, many &amp;#x27;redundant fibers&amp;#x27; are in the same strand, and last mile is fragile, but if my ISP network is up to the local internet exchange, there are many distinct routes to the other coast and a fiber cut is unlikely to route my traffic around the world.</text></item><item><author>fredophile</author><text>&amp;quot;The internet routes around failure&amp;quot; hasn&amp;#x27;t been true for a long time. It refers to the original topography which has been replaced with a hub and spoke model. Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet.</text></item><item><author>h2odragon</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s Anti-Fragile. If it breaks all the time, everybody is highly experienced at patching together new workarounds, mechanisms for fail over are in place and regularly tested, and there&amp;#x27;s whole classes of corner case bugs that get flushed out to be stomped (or nurtured as cherished pets) instead of breeding in the dark and jumping out at you all at once.&lt;p&gt;How can the &amp;quot;Internet routes around failure&amp;quot; be trusted without testing? Everything needs regular exercise or it atrophies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xattt</author><text>This happened with regular phone service as recent as 2017 in Canada (1).&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;atlantic.ctvnews.ca&amp;#x2F;mobile&amp;#x2F;many-atlantic-canadians-lose-cellphone-internet-service-in-widespread-outage-1.3533539&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;atlantic.ctvnews.ca&amp;#x2F;mobile&amp;#x2F;many-atlantic-canadians-l...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>