WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at the week's net and technology news and 
comment
by Alan Lenton
October 6, 2002

Well at first this week looked like a quiet week, but then no less than three 
major stories broke. Digital Rights Management - the Consumers fight back, 
UUNet vanishes for the best part of a day, and Google stirs up the bloggers. 
I've covered the latter two here, space prevents proper coverage of the DRM 
stuff, and I suspect that there will be more in the coming weeks so I'll probably 
cover it in an analysis piece later this month.

There won't be a Winding Down next week (the 13th), because I'll be out of 
town, and in any case our servers will be down for part of the weekend. 
Winding Down will resume the following week (the 20th), but since I will be 
away for part of the preceding week, it will probably be mainly analysis rather 
than news.


Stories:

If it ain't broke...

The first signs of the week's biggest story first became visible at around 8am 
EDT last Thursday (the 3rd) when UUNet stopped talking to the rest of the 
Internet. It wasn't until after 5pm EDT that UUNet came back on line, but the 
ramifications were felt for most of the evening.

UUNet is owned by WorldCom (yes, that WorldCom) and is a major part of 
the Internet backbone. In fact it carries around half of the world's Internet 
traffic and an even larger percentage of the US traffic. Even leaving aside the 
people and companies who directly use UUNet/WorldCom as their Internet 
Service Provider (ISP), that's a large chunk of the Internet backbone to 
suddenly vanish from sight. 

The Internet, as any schoolboy knows, is designed to route around and find 
alternative paths if there is a problem, but the sheer magnitude of this one 
was such that its effects were felt all over the net as other areas because 
overloaded. In addition, to make things worse, the nature of the problem 
(which I'll explain in a minute) meant that the routers were being given 
incorrect information, making it even more difficult to find alterative routes.

The Internet didn't exactly grind to a halt, but it wasn't nice and there were 
noticeable delays all day long for many users, and no access at all for the 
unlucky.

So what happened?

Well to explain it you need to understand a bit about how the Internet works. 
The Internet is a network of networks (Inter-Net). That is, it is a network that 
connects other networks. Originally it was a single network that connected up 
the networks of US research institutions. This single network was the origin of 
what is now known as the Internet backbone - a high speed, high capacity 
network which connects the individual networks. 

As the Internet grew and became more commercial, so, of course, did the 
backbone. But as it grew bigger it changed. Different companies put in cross 
country and trans-national high speed/high capacity networks to fill in gaps in 
the original coverage. Over time these networks too became part of the 
backbone, so that the backbone is no longer a single network, but a collection 
of (hopefully) cooperating high capacity networks.

Ok, so far so good. Now, obviously, if they are going to be of any use there 
must be a way of routing messages from one of these backbone networks to 
next one. And there is indeed a specialist protocol which runs on the routers 
at the edges of the networks and talks to other networks. (It's called Border 
Gateway Protocol or BGP and the routers are called border routers.)

So now we can explain what happened on Thursday. UUNet decided to 
upgrade the software that runs on its border routers. Normal procedure for 
this is to upgrade one or two routers and make sure they work properly before 
a full deployment. UUNet, however, having what turned out to be a completely 
unwarranted faith in their new software skipped the in situ testing and plowed 
ahead with deploying the new software on all (or at least most) of their border 
routers.

The result was Thursday's steadily increasing shambles as the affected 
routers first gave out wrong info and then started to disappear under the 
strain. It took UUNet around nine hours to back out the offending software and 
restore a semblance of normality.

And what are the lessons of this fiasco?

Well, obviously, software needs to be properly tested before it goes into 
production. Not only that but it needs to be deployed incrementally so that if a 
bug has crept in it only affects one or two machines that can be switched out 
of the net as soon as the problem becomes apparent. As a corollary, we could 
also suggest that the policy of making highly experienced network engineers 
redundant while hanging on to managers who don't have a clue should be 
reviewed by all the networks experiencing financial problems.

And most worrying of all is the way in which the whole shambles underlines 
the inherent fragility of the Internet. The problem is fundamental. The Internet 
was designed on the assumption that its users would cooperate in keeping it 
running, and would be competent to do so. These assumptions haven't 
applied for some considerable time now, and the consequences are that the 
system is vulnerable not only to serious programming errors but also 
malicious reprogramming of the basic components of the Internet - routers 
and switches.

Sooner or later these issues are going to have to be faced. The only question 
is what magnitude of disaster is required to make people spend the money?

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,55580,00.html
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20021003/wr_nm/tech
_worldcom_outage_dc_5


My Kingdom for a Listing

The second big story of the week was one about the Google search engine. It 
seems that there's an algorithm called 'Page Rank' which Google uses to 
figure out which sites go on the first page of a search report. There is much 
activity among the web meister cognizianti to try to do all the things that will 
make Google put their site on the first page. 

The result is a sort of arms race, because periodically Google tweak Page 
Rank to try to avoid people being able to optimise their pages for its search 
engine. Then, of course, there is a scramble by the web sites to figure out 
how to optimise for the new tweaks.

The high exponents of this art of fooling Google's Page Rank are the 
bloggers, whose ability to create massive quantities of hyperlinks assured 
them prime eyeball time on any first results page they chose to target.

Well, all good things come to an end, and in this case Google finally caught 
up with them! Its latest tweak seems to have banished them to the far reaches 
of page 20 and its ilk. And, lets face it, you have to be pretty desperate to be 
looking at research results on page 20...

There was a great deal of amusement from the non-blogging part of the web 
community, but it was mostly drowned out by the howls of protest from the 
bloggers. Bloggers are by the nature of their trade a pretty vociferous bunch 
much given to hyperbole, and this brought out the best in them. I particularly 
liked the one who proclaimed 'Google's penalty literally took food out of my 
families mouth.' The URL at the end of this story will take you to one of the 
bloggers' forums where you can sample the angst...

Of course, I'm biased, I'm not a blogger. But that apart, I can't see that Google 
are doing anything 'wrong'. There is no reason to allow -any- group of web 
sites to hog the prime positions on its results reports. Indeed it could well be 
argued that the change in Page Rank was not only justified, but necessary, in 
order for Google to maintain its position as the number one search engine. 

If it became a general perception that Google's results were skewed in favour 
of bloggers, then people would start to look elsewhere for their searches. 
When you use a search engine you expect the results to be unbiased, but 
with many engines, that isn't always the case. Google, to their credit have 
always tried to maintain unbiased metrics.

Caveat Emptor, as the Romans used to say.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/5699.htm


Shorts:

Thinking of buying a new PC? Then hold off for a month or so, because the 
expectation is that they are going to get even cheaper in the run up to Xmas. 
It seems that the hoped for buzz of the pre-back-to-school selling season 
failed to materialise, so the vendors are lining up an even more aggressive 
blitz for Xmas. It's not clear whether this will be in the form of even cheaper 
prices or whether it will take the form of heavy promotion. Dell, for instance, is 
already offering a $50 rebate, free shipping, and a free CD burner with one of 
its desk top machines. Whatever - it seems worth waiting a month or so for 
this year's Xmas promos.

http://www.cnn.com/cnnfn/2002/10/03/technology/cheap_pcs/index.htm

Like to play Tetris? Would you like to play Tetris on a display the size of a 20 
story building? I know just the place for you - Paris. Project BlinkenLights has 
turned Tower T2 of the Bibliotheque Nationale into a 20 story, 3370 square 
meter computer screen with a resolution of 20x26. People can actually play 
Tetris on the display using their cell phones as a controller! It's part of the 
Paris Nuit Blanche arts festival and it includes facilities for programmers to 
add their own code to the edifice - Linux only. C'est Magnifique!

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT2620409458.html

The big music companies and retailers have been caught with their hands in 
their customers wallets. The five largest record labels and the three largest 
music retailers have agreed to pay $67.4m for fixing the prices of CDs in the 
US. Those paying up include music companies Universal Music group 
(Vivendi) BMG Music Group (Bertelsmann), Warner-EMI Group (AOL-Time 
Warner) and retailers Musicland Stores, Trans Entertainment and Tower 
records. Now, tell me again about the iniquities of file swapping...

http://reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=entertainmentnews&StoryID=1515
099


Scanner: Other stories

Webcast royalties - compromise may help
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4199961.htm

US Congress to fight Net censorship - but only outside the US
http://go.hotwired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55530,00.html/wn_ascii

Microsoft issues critical security fix (again)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/27409.html

Amazon to change privacy policy guidelines
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/19525.html

Hands off Net shopping - Feds do something popular!
http://news.com.com/2010-1071-960048.html?tag=politech


Have fun on the web!

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
6 October 2002

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at 
http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


