
How an unfixed Net glitch could strand you offline - jaybol
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100508/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_fragile_internet
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Locke1689
Ugh, reading mainstream media reports on technical topics is almost physically
painful. It takes almost half the article to get to the topic.

The subject is BGP hijacking. I assume most people who have taken a networking
course are familiar with the basics, but here's a basic link which carries
links to more information if necessary.
<http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4975>

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shaddi
Really? I thought this was a quite good lay description of BGP and BGP
hijacking. The example about driving with no road signs seemed particularly
lucid for someone with no technical background.

Edit: What /is/ physically painful is reading the comments on the story...
_face palm_

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quicksilver03
What's weird is the final comment, especially coming from a CTO:

> "You make some phone calls and hope and pray"

With so much phone traffic going over VOIP these days, if there's really a BGP
hijacking then his phone calls haven't much chance of be effective.

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jurjenh
That made me think of an old story - never underestimate the bandwidth of a
station wagon.

If the internet does go out (and phone with it, because most main carriers use
VOIP in the main trunk lines I believe), how many people would actually think
of doing something the old physical way?

Guess this would be a demonstration of just how seriously we depend on the net
in daily life. Would banking be affected - do banks use entirely separate
comms lines? Emergency services? Power networks - how is energy usage
monitored in nation-wide grids? And what sort of fail-over systems exist?

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count
People are doing something about it -
<https://www.arin.net/announcements/2009/20090706_rpki.html>

