Well, crap! What a revolting development.
I was working on the property yesterday but didn't do any chainsawing. Sometimes sawdust in the eye will irritate them. I sprayed herbicide and was whacking Black Walnut saplings. The herbicide lists eye irritation from the triclopyr ester as a symptom of eye contact but I have no memory of any spray-drift getting near my face.
According to my records, I went to the zoo three days ago when I might have been exposed to virus/bacteria.
We will see how I feel tomorrow.
Fiber-Optic Cables
Did we just see a trial-run on hobbling the information infrastructure in France?
It got some attention from the media due to the novelty. Main fiber-optic trunks were damaged at multiple points and nearly simultaneously a series of fires caused the trains to stop running. The media said "it is unclear if the two attacks are connected"
The most recent news articles are from six days ago which sounds like the story was squashed.
I cannot speak to the fragility of the internet. At one time, it was claimed that the internet was designed to be highly redundant in terms of routing and expected to retain some degree of functionality even after a nuclear strike.
Intermittent service
The internet is such a part of our economy now that loss of several major trunks might have large implications. I HOPE there are disaster contingency plans-on-the-shelf that outline an orderly step-down. One approach is to have a hierarchy where military and emergency services get highest priority, medical second highest priority...and so on down to recreational video streaming and personal emails getting the lowest priority and being heavily throttled.
Another strategy is to provide intermittent service where some functions like Youtube and Netflix (lots of bandwidth consumed by just those two) are prohibited when most people are working.
We see similar approaches during electrical power shortfalls. We see rolling black-outs and deliberate brown-outs. As an aside, if you have a well that relies on electricity then you probably want to have a convenient way to store/transport water. Figure out how much weight you can carry and size your containers appropriately. Humans can endure "without" a lot of things. Water is not one of them.
Conversations with a 70-year-old Vietnamese man
I missed much of what he was telling me. His voice was soft. He never lost his accent. My ears are old.
He was one of the boat people. One of his uncle's boats was attacked by pirates when they were twenty-miles off-shore. Some people swam out-to-sea in hopes of being picked-up by boat-people. They left with literally just the clothes on their backs.
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| There are two bands of traffic off-shore of Vietnam. The closest part of the commercial shipping band is about 200km (125miles) off-shore. Local traffic is closer but approaching them was likely to get you executed or thrown in prison. (Source of image) |
He moved to France while much of his family relocated to Winnipeg and Toronto. Years later he moved to Canada and then to the US. Even today I doubt that he weighs more than 120 pounds.
Life was very hard. "Evil walks in this world" he told me. He could have been quoting 1 Peter 5:8
I didn't ask him what he thought of Communism. I didn't feel like I needed to.
It might have been designed to be resilient but cost issues have put many links in the same areas, and sometimes the same tunnels. I recall a fire in a railway tunnel in Baltimore disrupted Internet traffic for the entire Bos-Wash corridor, all the different fiber companies used the same tunnel route because it was cheap and available.
ReplyDeleteAn often overlooked point.
DeleteMultiple channels aren't really redundant if they run together.
Getting long distance rights of way can be a big challenge, so data lines in the US often run along existing rights of way - typically highways, railroads, and pipelines. Of course this leads to important things clustering together.
A study a few years ago found two points in the country where a single attack would take down power, gas, and Internet for most of the country. They didn't say where those points are.
Jonathan
Winner winner chicken dinner!
DeleteThe technology of TCP/IP has redundancy built into it, but it is only the protocol. The media, aka wires or in this case fiber optic lines, may not be resilliant.
We were working with a hospital that was setting up a hot site on the other side of the metropolis. The networking lead ordered dedicated dark fiber runs from two different vendors and made sure they followed two routes that only shared the beginning and end points. He even split head end equipment in the hospital facility.
DeleteAs I see it the biggest problem when the internet goes down is that too much of commerce is paid for electronically over the net. Sure prepared people keep some cash on hand but if they push the digital currency through we would be back to trading. A long outage could leave a lot of desperate people who might act dangerously.
ReplyDeleteA couple years ago, Sweden intentionally slowed digital currency use and has taken steps to have cash infrastructure available in case of emergency.
DeleteJonathan
Stray thought. I just filled the water tank in my camper. Two 55 gallon drums are next after I figure out how to rinse and sanitize. Then some Jerry cans.
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I reluctantly moved to Big City, Illinois a month ago. Without fail, I lose internet every friggin' day if the temperature is over 75. The ISP has "fixed" the issue four or five times. At least I get connectivity most nights. Redundant, my butt.
ReplyDelete