Internet Full of 'Black Holes'

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Internet Full of 'Black Holes'
At first glance this would seem to be old news, until one discovers they are not talking about butt porn...

Interesting article. Do they have any idea what causes these "cyber black holes"?

I'd assume incompetent administration

could be a host of things
Internet protocol is passing packets to a line that isn't working well (though that's supposed to be self-correcting).
Bad web site design (they'll let anyone put up something...
server overloads, etc.

Good thing there's the Wayback Machine (good for those vanished 'club 404' sites..

The boogey-server is eating your transmissions. Or is it zombytes?

they're wrongly using a normal situation. The internet is especially built so if a path to a destination stops working, an alternative path is chosen. The protocol responsible for managing this is BGP. The time taken by the protocol to chose and switch to an alternative path when the primary one goes down is called "convergence time". That time can be anywhere between microseconds to many minutes long. During convergence, any communication trying to use the old path will get lost, ... of course, it's down!! !!

Do you have any idea of how many of the trillions communication links making the internet goes down throughout the world at any given time ? Yes, many thousands. In fact, BGP is constantly busy, computing new paths... so if you program a bot that will go out there and look for "black holes" (un-completed convergences) you'll find a lot... i mean... A LOT ! !! !

It's a router thing. There's so much traffic that your average router gets over-loaded and traffic gets mis-directed. Also there's the possibility of people sending corrupted packets JUST to cause such a problem...