Internet Event Horizons

April 8, 2008 8:46 PM

Having trouble connecting to a site? It may be you and many others got too close to a network event horizon and the packets ...disappeared.... The internets has black holes, too. via
posted by Kronos_to_Earth (13 comments total)

insert generic Skynet reference here.
posted by SkinnerSan at 9:12 PM on April 8

there have been about 73 comments in this thread so far, but they ended up in a black hole
posted by davejay at 9:47 PM on April 8

How appropriate that the site crashed my browser.
posted by eritain at 10:33 PM on April 8

Based on this map, I'm really glad I don't live on the east coast!
posted by The Light Fantastic at 10:46 PM on April 8

Davejay, OK...but there are 417,000,000 comments (in hyperspace). Sorry about the browser crash, eritain.
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 11:18 PM on April 8

It's neat and all but surely not very useful to advanced users when laid on a physical map? I'd prefer some kind of London Underground-esque network map of the major routers and bridges, especially the international ones, with lines or cut lines between them. I imagine it'd get unruly extremely fast but you'd surely have more of a chance of going 'oh that's why I can't connect' when you compare it to a tracert.
posted by stelas at 12:52 AM on April 9

Strange site. It seems the folk behind it know how the internet works, but they present a bunch of glitches which I would guess are largely routing table errors as some spooky phenomenon.
Talk to any network engineer about how tricky it is to move a production server environment between ISPs and I would think all these would be accounted for.
Zooming in near me resolve geographically in power and network lacking national parks, so I expect they need to try a little harder.
posted by bystander at 3:49 AM on April 9

What's with Franch?
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:23 AM on April 9

France...
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:29 AM on April 9

France is used by a surprisingly high volume of spammers, a lot of which are busy messing around on open relays. Kind of makes a mish-mash of the internet (yes, more than usual).
posted by stelas at 5:11 AM on April 9

eritain:
Crashed mine too, so the Silicon Gods are not just pissed at you personally.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 5:45 AM on April 9

Crashed me, too. Older version of Safari. The page has a Google map embedded with about a bazillion hot spots. Google maps makes old Safari cry.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:01 AM on April 9

Cheap old routers don't have the memory capacity for the current BGP tables. Routes get dropped, sorta randomly.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:12 AM on April 9