Everyone in China
So, today's Media Guardian has an article about net use in China which includes a nice little quote by the CEO of an online marketing company about why companies should pay attention to China
Apart from the simple fact that if everyone in China went online at the same time, it would bring the whole net down
I like "simple facts" like this. One of those "OK, maybe it's not accurate, but it serves to illustrate scale... you fucking pedant" sort of "facts". A technical version of the old "prove me wrong" chestnut about what would happen if everyone in China jumped at the same time.
So, somehow, overnight - without the infrastructure of the worldwide Internet changing, the number of PCs in China goes from about 35 million to one billion. One billion PCs are switched on, disks and fans spin up, but the power surge is easily handled by the Chinese power network. One billion network connections are established with no contention problems since China's IAPs are designed precisely for this. Obviously they don't all have unique IPv4 addresses, so they're mostly going to be going through NAT gateways (which easily take the strain) Then one billion Chinese users make multiple requests via the national filters - which, naturally, don't falter under the increased pressure. And by a weird quirk, all of these are from sites outside of China (I'm assuming web traffic here, but who knows). Luckily the external bandwidth out of China is more than enough to support one billion simultaneous requests...
Yet somehow, the servers and the networks of the rest of the world prove to be the weak link in the chain. The Internet is brought down (whatever that means).
The implication here is that the worldwide internet is somehow not decentralised and distributed. That there are some fundamental scaling issues with the net here. Even if everyone in the UK phoned in a gameshow vote, you wouldn't expect that to cause the phone network in Luxembourg to crash.
I don't know, maybe there's some CAIDA data to back up this "everyone in China" fact. The net being "brought down" is seems believable when the fagility of the net is shown by worms and distributed attacks from trojan infected "zombie" PCs. But it's precisely the distributed nature of these issues (along with the shocking negligence of networks that still don't employ ingress/egress filtering) that causes problems.
Google.com is not "the net". Microsoft.com is not "the net". Hell, ".com" is not "the net", regardless of the headlines after a NetSol screwup. Even the necessary single-point-of-failure represented by the root servers are more distributed than you might think.
Not really sure what point I'm trying to make here. But anyway, in about, um, 40 years - when everyone in China has Internet access, and they all log on at the same time to a website that synchronises them all to simultaneously jump off their chairs, and the networks of the US and Europe go down shortly before they are wiped out by massive tidal waves... feel free to rub this in my face.
Unclassified: posted at 12:59, link