NOW READ THIS
("Security Advisory")
Submitted by: Bill Hickey
NCVA List Master
NRT-0482 Mapping Information Black Holes on the Internet:
You're trying to log on to a web site and its not working. You try again and again.
But persistence doesn't pay off. The site you want is inexplicably, frustratingly,
out of reach. The other computer might just be turned off, but the casues could be
more mysterious. At any given moment, a proportion of computer traffic ends up being
routed into information black holes. These are situations where a path between two
computers does exist, but messages - a request to visit a web site, an outgoing email,
etc. - get lost along the way. A University of Washington (UW) system named Hubble
looks for these black holes and maps them on a web site providing an ever-changing
constellation of the internet's weak points. The project is named for the Hubble
Space Telescope, which can observe black holes in deep space, because the UW tool
performs a similar function for the maze of routers and fiber-optic cables that make
up the internet. The Hubble map is posted at http://hubble.cs.washington.edu/, where
visitors can view a map of problems worldwide or type in a specific web page or network
address to check its status.
(PhysOrg.com 08APR08)