Tag Archives: infrastructure

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From King’s Cross to Beijing by rail

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I love to travel by train, me. Though a habit born of necessity in my case (I never took my driving test), there’s so much to recommend it over cars or flying. Especially flying. [image by Let Ideas Compete]

Well, the far edges of my potential-destinations sphere is going to grow considerably in the next ten years or so. Did you know China are the world leaders in high speed train technology? Well, apparently they are, and they’re involved in serious talks with neighbouring nation-states aimed at linking the Chinese rail system to the European one and extending it down onto South East Asia, with China footing the infrastructure bills. Once it’s all done, you could ride from London to Beijing without once needing to take a car, boat or plane… and that’s a journey I’d love to do*.

Interestingly enough (though not surprisingly) there’s more to China’s plans than some sort of idealistic Victorian-era notion of rail travel as symbolic of progress and industrialisation. Indeed, it’s something far more blunt: in exchange for adding considerable value to its partners’ rail networks, China is cutting preferential deals with them on raw materials that it can’t source locally. Remarkably capitalistic thinking for a nominally Communist nation, eh? Talk about moving with the times… might as well make hay while the sun shines, especially if everyone else is waiting out the rain.

[ * – Seriously, if any publishers out there are willing to make a promise to buy the resulting work for a large four-figure sum plus research expenses, there’s a great book to be written once that network is complete, and I’m definitely the guy for the job. Market me as the new (and scruffier) Paul Theroux, perhaps – hell, I’ve got all the cynicism about human nature you’d need to fill his shoes. I might need to work on amping up my condescension toward other cultures, though… ]

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What happens to the internet if there’s a viral pandemic?

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Map of the internetOur beloved internet could suffer badly at the hands of a pandemic virus. And not just computer viruses, either: a pandemic attack of an illness like swine flu might have knock-on effects in the digital domain, and the US General Accountability Office isn’t pleased that no one appears to making any contingency plans [via SlashDot]:

… the Homeland Security Department accused the GAO of having unrealistic expectations of how the Internet could be managed if millions began to telework from home at the same time as bored or sick schoolchildren were playing online, sucking up valuable bandwidth.

Experts have for years pointed to the potential problem of Internet access during a severe pandemic, which would be a unique kind of emergency. It would be global, affecting many areas at once, and would last for weeks or months, unlike a disaster such as a hurricane or earthquake.

H1N1 swine flu has been declared a pandemic but is considered a moderate one. Health experts say a worse one — or a worsening of this one — could result in 40 percent absentee rates at work and school at any given time and closed offices, transportation links and other gathering places.

And what do you do if you’re stuck home from work or school under house quarantine? You fire up your computer and mess around on the internet (unless that’s just me), meaning a severe pandemic will cause a serious uptick in bandwidth demand, potentially slowing down essential infrastructure systems at the same time. [image by matthewjethall]

In a rare display of pragmatism, Homeland Security has told the GAO that there’s not really much it can do to prepare for this sort of eventuality – despite theories to the contrary, the internet is not a series of tubes. Commercial ISPs are unlikely to be keen on being told to lock down the connections of their customers, either.

Homeland Security might well have spent a moment to think about the psyops angle of such a move, as even the positive practical results of restricting consumer bandwidth might be seriously outweighed by the psychological negatives. Ill internet habitués might break quarantine to go to locations where the connection was faster; the state of fear and paranoia that attends a serious pandemic might be amplified by the perceived restriction of information channels (“what are they trying to hide?”)… having technological impossibility as a scapegoat is probably something of a relief.

The good news, however, is that most of the major securities exchanges and financial institutions have their own private networks that don’t rely on publicly-available bandwidth, so we can rest easy in the knowledge that, even when we’re stuck at home sweating out a nasty virus without so much as a bit-rate that’ll let us peer at Fark every ten minutes, greedy shysters in expensive suits will still be able to skim the cream from the global misery without any inconvenience.

Frankly, I’m not sure that the issues would be as big as is being suggested; schools and businesses surely contribute significantly toward bandwidth consumption during the daytime, so there’d be some slack to take up thanks to absenteeism. The whole thing has a slight smell of Millennium Bug about it, at least for me; if there’s a networking expert in the audience, I’d appreciate being set straight on the details.

And while we’re talking about the internet, good old DARPA – who invented the thing in the first place – are trying to work out how to extend it into orbit and link up our swarm of satellites to their own broadband connections. That’s easy enough (though still slow) when you can set up a persistent link from ground to orbit with a geostationary platform, but not so simple for sats that move relative to the Earth’s surface. If you’ve got an idea of how to get around the problem, DARPA would like to hear from you before 5th November…

… but in the meantime, would anyone like to open a book on how soon a military or commercial satellite will be hacked over its own broadband connection?

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Rumours of the internet’s death have been greatly exaggerated

Internet - serious business.Hey, have you heard? The internet’s goose is pretty much cooked, as far as Nemertes Research are concerned, thanks to exponential traffic increases running up against linear infrastructure investment – and net neutrality legislation will be the nails in the coffin lid.

The thing is, there isn’t a whole lot of factual data to back up the assertion, which has been made (and debunked) numerous times since the rise of video streaming services like YouTube. Ars Technica has a good takedown:

What’s most odd about Johnson’s argument about network neutrality is that she admits that this is default network behavior right now. And while she frets about the huge growth of Internet traffic, the reality is that the growth rates have been much faster in the past (doubling every year or faster)—and the Internet abides! As for ISPs not having the money to invest in enough infrastructure to keep up with demand, well… just take a look at ISP balance sheets. Tremendous profits are being made now, even as cable operators roll out DOCSIS 3.0 tech and boost download speeds to 50Mbps or 100Mbps.

In the end, the song remains the same: of course the Internet has issues, but some kind of network-killing “exaflood” hasn’t materialized in two years and doesn’t look about to wreak devastation on the Internet in the near future. What we have instead is declining traffic growth rates in mature markets, and big boosts to access line capacity (for Verizon and the cable operators, at least), plenty of bandwidth in the core—all on a network that has generally been neutral for decades.

So there’s probably very little to worry about… except perhaps where Nemertes’ research funding originates from.

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How to dismantle a nuclear bomb (before it dismantles you)

old Russian nuclear bombNo, it’s not a U2 reference; in the wake of the proposed nuclear reduction initiatives between the US and Russia, those helpful folk at the BBC have an article on how nuclear weapons are decommissioned – only the procedure they witnessed was a simulation. [image by mikelopoulos]

The dismantlement experiment is a joint exercise between the UK and Norway – the first of its kind – and was held a few miles from Oslo.

The five-day exercise has been keenly anticipated internationally as a way of building trust between nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states.

It is designed to see if one country can verify the disarmament of another country’s nuclear weapon, but without any sensitive information about national security and weapon design being compromised.

This is one of the things that has always baffled me about these sorts of agreements: everyone saying “oh yes, we should be mutually disarming!” but then tacitly acknowledging that “actually, we’d best be keeping the technology secret, because we don’t really trust you not to build more – and if you do we’ll want to have better ones”. So much for building trust, eh?

Still, the descriptions of the procedure are kind of interesting – not so much from a technical standpoint (you don’t get a list of the wrench sizes you’ll need) but as a physical manifestation of nation-state psychology:

From the start inspectors watch, photograph, seal and tag key items. They cover entry and exit points to the disarmament chamber, sweeping all those going in and out to ensure no radioactive material is smuggled away.

“It is a very choreographed process, almost like a ballet,” says Mr Persbo. “Timings are very precise.”

The amount of fissile material in a nuclear bomb is itself classified, so a number of techniques have to be employed by the inspectors to ensure nothing is diverted when they are not able to measure it in detail themselves.

Each country’s scientists have separately designed and built their own prototype devices known as “information barriers”, which can confirm that an agreed amount of radioactive material is present in any container.

If nothing else, you’ve got the switcheroo-loophole plot mechanics for a fissile re-run of The Italian Job right there. That should make for a cheery movie… but if you want some real nuclear angst to set you up for the weekend, you can read this (PDF) report from the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament that looks at the possibility of the old and flaky nuclear command and control infrastructures of the superpowers being hacked by terrorists in order to kick off a modern-day Ragnarok. I can hear Dan Brown firing up his word processor as we speak… [via SlashDot]