[73761] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Petri Helenius)
Thu Sep 2 16:55:01 2004
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 23:54:06 +0300
From: Petri Helenius <pete@he.iki.fi>
To: Erik Parker <eparker@mindsec.com>
Cc: Scott Call <scall@devolution.com>, Mike Tancsa <mike@sentex.net>,
Dan Hollis <goemon@anime.net>, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <0408301539490.0@somehost.domainz.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Erik Parker wrote:
>
> Speaking of which.. I wish P2P had been a little bit more organized
> when 9/11 happened.. Trying to watch the news online, download clips,
> or images for those few days following.. was nearly impossible.
> CNN/TimeWarner should recall that their entire cluster was destroyed
> and they had to move back to a simplified text only page that had
> nothing on it.. Likewise with Foxnews, but a little bit to a lesser
> extent.
>
This is an instance of the "good enough" or "best effort" phenomenan.
When it works 99% or 99.9% of the time, there is hardly any incentive to
make it work 99.99% of the time because the observed level of service is
good enough and the next event might never come. Prepareness usually has
a cost associated and unless other benefits can be realized, it's easy
to just ride through the rough time.
> If P2p was built upon a little bit, putting in protocols of trust (ala
> certificates/signed files, etc.) it could give F5 a run for its money
> and lower the cost drastically of certain network designs.
You don't need trust on the protocol level to disseminate information
which has a verifiable source (hash). This was discussed to death just a
few days ago.
Pete
