Deep in the Data Mines
As a community of researchers we don't actually understand the internet. We've had models for it. Fluids in pipes. Self-clocking handshakes between connected pairs. Congested router queues with arbitrary drop policies. Over the last couple of years the work at CAIDA has resulted in visual models like the below. The man in the photo is of no importance, nor is the signage from some governmental agency. Think of them as a mere (l)user and a credit bureau, a Joe Biden and MBNA or some equivalent data thieves.
We would fund, and perform, this work, simply because it is hard to understand a complex system, and it has quite a few users, some of them paying. The work was publically funded, in particular DARPA grant N66001-01-1-8909, DARPA grant N66001-98-2-8922, and NSF ANIR Grant NCR-9711092.
The visual is the current AS (autonomous system) Internet graph. Its use is to visualize the network topology in the large. What isn't in a static image is how the AS model changes when a backhoe takes out a core fibre. The stable model is of limited interest. The dynamic variations, causation understood and causation not understood, are of real interest. This particular data set is from a two week period in April of 2005. A larger version (300 KB) is here.
What caught my ear yesterday evening was a poem read on WRCT. It was an interesting hour of Appalachia from a poet who name I didn't catch while I folded and sorted children's clothes, but the voices she created were clear. The closing piece was in the voice of a miner, deep within the coal wars of the 20's, writing the President. He allowed as how he'd seen men gassed in France, and wagons of men with the same limp limbs, the same bleeding from the nostrils, who'd been gassed in the mines, and he'd seen US planes ready to drop gas on the striking miners... He concluded his letter to his President that most of the men had been in France, and all of them had been in the mines, and they knew the President had the power to kill them, but they didn't know why they should be afraid of him or his power.
Some of us have FBI dossiers that date to our work to stop nukes, to stop the Vietnam War, to stop the Nicaraguan War, ... and all of us have had our votes stolen. The Regime has the power to spy on us, to spy on the DNC, the DSCC, the DCCC, the persons of Al Gore and John Kerry, on the cow that jumped over the moon, and to steal another election, and the one after that.
But they don't have the power to make us fear.
1 Diane Gilliam Fisher. If anyone can supply me with the text of the poem, I'll post it.
http://www.odeo.com/audio/623933/view
Comments
The do have the power to make me angry, though. Maybe if enough of us get angry, we can do something about it.
Nice post. :)
Posted by: shargash | February 6, 2006 08:13 PM
I'm stunned by that image of Bush. That's the network diagram of the Internet hubs that we used to show, in the network architecture of treason, how easy it would be to set up, well, TIA. Just sniff the hubs. Now here's a photo of Bush in front of it.
Posted by: lambert strether | February 6, 2006 09:08 PM
And do have the link to the source of the photo? I want to put this in the context of our liveblogging of the surveillance hearings. TIA...
Posted by: lambert strether | February 6, 2006 10:14 PM
Joe McGuckin posted it to NANOG Sunday morning.
The url is: http://tinyurl.com/doy6r
Posted by: ebw | February 6, 2006 10:55 PM
The poetry collection you want is "Kettle Bottom," from Perugia Press, in Florence, MA.
I'll see if I can dig up the text, I don't know aboutr rights, though you can probably contact he author through the publisher.
Posted by: Craig R. | February 10, 2006 04:55 PM