The Awakening Internet Paul Baran l l l

The Awakening Internet

Paul Baran l l l His job at RAND corp Developing a communication system that would survive a nuclear attack. His inspection resulted three types of network topologies of that time. l l l Centralized or Star topology Decentralized or Hierarchical star topology Distributed or mesh like topology His proposal is to break messages into small bits and transmit them which is impossible to acheive with the analog communication systems of that time. He advocated the digital system. Baran’s ideas were defeated on that time.

ARPA l l l l l Same vision of Baran Understanding the topology of the internet is a prerequisit for designing tools and services that offer a fast and reliable communication infrastructure. ARPA had sweeping control of the most advanced military research and development projects. Different military agencies were handling themselves. Bob taylor became concerned with a huge waste of federal resources he had just discovered. To stop this waste why not link these incompatible machines somehow. (The idea of Bob) Donald Davies(lon) also had the same idea and he reinvented packets and packet switching technology. The network that today we call Internet was born. But the Internet lagged the undercutting vulnerability to attacks. The Internet, however, took on a life of its own.

``Ches´´ l l l l Best known for his work on firewalls and computer security. But we recognize him for the colorful internet maps. Produce and sell through Peacockmaps. com Works for DARPA. (his job is ’ mapping the internet’) No central authority has controlled or documented the growth and design of internet. The underlying network has become so distributed, decentralized and locally guarded that even such an ordinary task as getting a central map of it has become virtually impossible. There are important practical reasons for seeking a global internet map.

The internet Map 2001

l l l Without knowing the internets topology it is impossible to design better tools and services. E-mail leaked out. The internet lives a life of its own. It has all the char of complex evolving system. Many diverse components, developed separetely contribute to the functioning of a system that is far more than the sum of its parts. Neither computer scientists nor boilogists known is how the large scale structure emerges once we put the Pieces togeather. Vern paxon & Sally floyd, identified our limited knowledge of the network topology as the main obstacle towards a better understanding of the internet as whole. Two years later 3 greek computer scientist brothers showed that the internet is a collection of routers linked by various physical lines, is a Scale Free Network. Their discovery had a simple message that quickly penetrated the research community. All tools used to model the structure of the internet before 1999, based on ideas rooted in random networks were simply wrong. After all, internet is comprised of physical lines and routers.

l l l l In october 1969 charley kline, was asked to arrange the first computer to computer message through an ordinary telephone line. After he succeded, more nodes were joining the network and the system was beginning to spread its wings. Today 2 decades later, it continues to expand node-bynode. (1 st cond. . of (SFN)scale-free network) Preferential attachment is more subtle. (2 nd cond. . of SFN) Routers offering more bandwidth likely have more links. Routers are added where there is a demand for them, and demand depends on the number of people wanting to use the internet. The amazing thing is that these coexisting mechanisms delicately balance each other, maintaining a scale free network. This very balance of power is the internets own Achilles Heel.

l l l l l MAI Network services Sprint April 25 1997, routing table update for its routers. These routing tables are the road maps of internet. Because of an incorrect configuration, the update did not stop at the borders of MAI but escaped and rewrote the routing tables of a large number of routers owned by Sprint. It instructed them to send all traffic to several MAI routers. MAI turned into a Black. Hole, absorbing packages at an incredible rate. Sprint recovered only after it manually changed all the routing tables it owned. This is an example of Cascading failure. The open access policy brought along unexpected dangers and vulnerability as well, increasingly threatening our inter linked world.

l l l l l Jay brokeman mentioned to ’james mc adams’ that the web is a computer. But this limited user driven communication doesn’t yet make the WWW a single computer. Could we make computers drive each others activity? Working on this, after many discussions and tutorials on how computers communicate, a simple but controversial idea emerged: ’parasitic computing’. The implementation of parasitic computing demonstrated that we can enslave computers located thousands of miles away, forcing them to perform computation on our behalf. Could this mark the birth of internet computer? Parasitic computing suggest that in the future computers could swap information and services on an as needed basis. With broadband communication on its way, the gap will shrink. On a smaller scale this possibility has already been exploited by SETI@home, berkely based project that harbours unused time of millions of PC’s to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The SETI model requires your voluntary collabration.

Conclusion l l Our skin is a unique piece of engg. Our planet is evolving into a single vast computer made of billions of interconnected processors and sensors. The questio being asked by many is, ’When will this computer become selfaware? ’ It is impossible to predict when the internet will become selfaware, but clearly it already lives a life of its own.