Mapping the Internet Makes it Stronger

The most comprehensive maps yet of the the internet’s infrastructure could help shore it up against disasters and sabotage.

IN MANY ways the internet is like another country. It has its own communities, cultures and even currency. But its infrastructure – the fibre optic cables that span the globe, and the thousands of buildings housing servers and routers – passes through almost every nation.

Internet cartographers have tried for years to chart its extent in the physical world, in order to manage traffic and assess weaknesses. Such vulnerability was shown on 27 March, when three scuba divers were arrested for trying to cut an undersea cable off the coast of Egypt, where several critical cables come together in one of the internet’s “choke points”. And last year, superstorm Sandy’s impact on internet connectivity in New York rippled all the way to Chile, Sweden and India.

Previous attempts to map the internet have been from within, using “sniffer” software to report the IP addresses of devices visited along a particular route, which, in theory, can then be translated into geographical locations. But this approach doesn’t work, says Paul Barford at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “After 15 years nobody can show you a map of the internet,” he says.

Such software is often inadvertently blocked by internet service providers (ISPs). Routers also try to find the shortest route between points, so sniffers end up mapping the internet’s major highways, but few of the back roads. “It leaves a very large part of the internet effectively invisible,” says Matthew Roughan at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.

Barford and Roughan head up two separate projects that are attempting to change that. Instead of relying on sniffers, they are scouring ISP databases to find published information about local networks, and piecing these together into a global map. Roughan’s Internet Topology Zoo is a growing collection of maps of individual networks. Barford’s Internet Atlas expands on this, adding crucial buildings and links between networks to flesh out the map. So far the Internet Atlas, perhaps the most comprehensive map of the physical internet, maps 10,000 such structures and 13,000 connections. Barford presented the work at the University of Cambridge on 28 March.

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Continue reading at New Scientist.

Lost in the Cloud

Feature written for New Scientist.

KYLE GOODWIN wants his stuff back. One day, he decided to set up a company in Ohio to film local sports events. For a while, business was good, but then he got a shock.

To keep his valuable footage safe, Goodwin had placed it in a popular storage facility. On 19 January last year, all those assets disappeared without warning. As did everything put there by more than 150 million others. When he asked for his livelihood back, he was refused. So he decided to go to court.

Goodwin’s experience represents a much deeper problem – and it is at the heart of the way we use technology today. “This is about internet users and the future of internet usage,” says Corynne McSherry of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is providing Goodwin with legal help. Why? Goodwin’s video footage was digital, and stored on a computer in the cloud.

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Continue reading at New Scientist (requires free registration).

New Scientist / 6 April

Highlights from this week’s New Scientist.

Google doodle exalts pioneer Maria Merian

Today’s Google doodle commemorates Maria Sibylla Merian – entomologist, botanical illustrator, explorer and pioneering female scientist.

DNA transistors pave way for living computers

Transistor-like devices have been made out of DNA, making biological gadgets with built-in circuitry possible.

New Scientist / 30 March

Highlights from this week’s New Scientist.

Quality control opens up synthetic biology’s Ikea

A new scoring system that rates biological components according to how reliable they are should let bioengineers mass-produce living machines.

Gut bacteria swap is key to knifeless gastric bypass

Mice can be made to lose weight with no change in diet – simply by giving them a sample of gut microbes from rodents that have had gastric bypass surgery.

Tiny blue-bellied fish discovered in the Rio Negro

Tiny fish makes a big splash as Amazon researchers find an entirely new genus in their nets.

Coding’s Cultural Bias

One Minute Interview with Ramsey Nasser, New Scientist 23 March 2013.

Disappointed by the heavy reliance on English for programming, computer scientist and designer Ramsey Nasser created a new coding language in Arabic.

Why did you design a programming language that uses the Arabic alphabet?
Studying computer science at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, I was struck that every coding language I have ever learned was in English. I wanted to start a dialogue about our dependence on English in modern programming.

What is it you want to draw attention to?
People have a tendency to see programming languages as immutable, but the opposite is true. The tools we use are built by men and women and are laden with the assumptions they make. This new language is meant to remind people of that and challenge some of those assumptions.

You have said this was an aesthetic project as much as an engineering one.
To programmers, coding languages are aesthetic works. We use words like ugly, gross, elegant and beautiful when talking about different languages. To me, this language, ﻗﻟب (pronounced alb), is a work of conceptual art. It is a celebration of the tradition of aesthetics in language design.

How big a difference do you think a programming language really makes?

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Read the whole inteview at New Scientist.