Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Mon, Apr 12, 2004 at 06:41:14PM +0100, Jim Dixon wrote: Of course, most of this discussion revolves around one word: is. If you said the Internet _can be seen_ as a tree, few would disagree with you, especially if you allowed for the fact that that tree is continuously changing its shape. But the Internet _is_ a tree? That's simply an error. Do I have some 6 connections to my direct neighbours? Like the guy next door, who's on DSL as well? Geographic routing is just that. Once again, you're too caught up in current technology to understand what the fuck I'm talking about. It doesn't matter on the long run. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Meshing costs (Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies)
Tyler Durden wrote: Someone enlighten me here...I don't see this as obvious. I might certainly be willing to pay to route someone else's message if I understand that to be the real cost of mesh connectivity. In other words, say I'm driving down the FDR receiving telemetry about the road conditions downtown of me by a few miles. Um, just to point out the absolute obvious, if you're DRIVING you already have a power source, even if you have to use an inverter to power your notebook. At that point you're not worried about worrying about spending a few miliamps on transmission here and there. It doesn't matter at all whether or not there's a string of other you's ahead of you. Having already paid for the tank of gas, the juice is free, and so should transmission - even routing of other users' data. If you're in the woods, or at the beach, that's a different story. :) Ok, well, if you're at the beach, you could get a solar cell and geek away. If I'm a router, I'm also sending that info behind me (which is routing I'm paying for basically), but I will understand that the reason I am getting my telemetry is precisely because there's a string of me's in the cars in front of me, routing info down to me. If I insist on getting paid, so will they, and the whole thing breaks down. Actually, this reminds me of the prisoner's dilemma. I remember (I think) Hofstaedter doing an interesting analysis that showed that smart 'criminals' will eventually realize that it pays to cooperate, even if that doesn't optimise one's chances in this particular instance. Yup, can't have a network without nodes. Of course, the battery lifetime acts as the weighting factor here...if only a small % of the traffic I'm routing belongs to me, then I may not be so willing to route it if my battery lifetime is short. As battery time lifetime increases however (though this sorely lags behind Moore's law) then more and more people will be willing to route. In which case, you won't be to willing to transmit either since receiving costs you far less battery than transmitting. In this case you're far more likely to store whatever you want to transmit for later - same as working offline with a mail user agent.
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
Jim Dixon wrote... A) Two links to the same ISP: In terms of redundancy for the purposes of being fault tolerant, only one of the multiple links is ever used. With You don't understand and you are quite wrong. If one AS has more than one link to another AS, there are often very good reasons for it, and both links are used. If network A peers with network B in both Paris and New York, both will generally dump traffic for the other network at the nearest connection. He's not wrong, he's merely kinda confused on this issue. Any big link (T1/DS1/DS3/STS-3c...) into an ISP provided by the telecom service provider is almost certainly protected via SONET. SONET architectures can provide various forms of protection (not all utilize redudant compies of the data...UPSR and Linear 1+1 do, BLSR is different). Of course, the router does not see that redundancy and can not make use of it. The multiple links that do exist (each of which protected behind the scenes by the telecom service provider) can be utilized by the router. If one of those links goes down (perhaps it was unprotected extra traffic in a BLSR and there was a fiber cut), the router will just send the stuff through the other link. -TD From: Jim Dixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sunder [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 18:41:14 +0100 (BST) On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, sunder wrote: The term is used because most or all trees in the region where the English language originated are shaped just like that: they have a single trunk which forks into branches which may themselves fork and so on. These branches do not connect back to one another. I believe the real issue here is one of being able to stretch your mind into seeing things from different points of view. This is the reason I brought in the quasi-mystical quote about the sphere whose center is everywhere. Someone comes to me and says: the Internet is a tree. Then he points me at a graph of inter-AS (Autonomous System) connections to illustrate his point. That graph includes all of those seemingly redundant connections that make it _not_ a tree. These seemingly redundant connections are in fact a high proportion of all connections. That is to say, the graph is accurate and his statement wasn't. You can see the Internet in many ways. You can run a single traceroute and see it as a line. You can ping broadcast on your LAN and see it as a chorus line. If you understand what you are looking at, you can run traceroutes and see stable rings: hot potato routing at work, where the packets go out one way and come back another. Then again, I have spoken to hundreds? thousands? of people who think that the Internet _is_ the World Wide Web. Let's explain why we have multiple connections and what types of these you can expect. There are two common types of multiple connections: A) Two links to the same ISP: In terms of redundancy for the purposes of being fault tolerant, only one of the multiple links is ever used. With You don't understand and you are quite wrong. If one AS has more than one link to another AS, there are often very good reasons for it, and both links are used. If network A peers with network B in both Paris and New York, both will generally dump traffic for the other network at the nearest connection. Why? Well, on the one hand, there is no reason to carry packets originating in Paris and destined for a host in Paris all the way to New York. On the other hand, many or most networks employ hot potato routing, meaning that if network A picks up a packet for network B in Paris, it dumps it on network B as soon as it can, to minimize costs, wherever the destination might be. Some networks, concerned with quality of service, adopt the opposite strategy, and carry packets as far as possible within their own network. most ISP's, when you negotiate a contract for a backup connection, it's with the understanding that you'll only use it when the main one goes down. I don't think that you have any evidence for this assertion about what characterizes 'most' backup agreements. I do know that most networks regard this sort of statistical information as highly confidential. B) You have multiple connections to different ISP's (possibly with peering contracts, etc.) In this case when a node at your location tries to contact some other node on the internet, it's traffic doesn't go over ALL of your connections - it takes only a single path. [Ok, if your routers are correcting for an outage, then perhaps you'll see different paths being taken, but this is just the routing tables/routers settling or converging.] The world is more complicated than this. Much more. If both case A and case B, a single node in your location will see the entire internet as a tree with the root of that tree being the default gateway. (i.e. go back to doing traceroutes.) In the case
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, sunder wrote: The term is used because most or all trees in the region where the English language originated are shaped just like that: they have a single trunk which forks into branches which may themselves fork and so on. These branches do not connect back to one another. I believe the real issue here is one of being able to stretch your mind into seeing things from different points of view. This is the reason I brought in the quasi-mystical quote about the sphere whose center is everywhere. Someone comes to me and says: the Internet is a tree. Then he points me at a graph of inter-AS (Autonomous System) connections to illustrate his point. That graph includes all of those seemingly redundant connections that make it _not_ a tree. These seemingly redundant connections are in fact a high proportion of all connections. That is to say, the graph is accurate and his statement wasn't. You can see the Internet in many ways. You can run a single traceroute and see it as a line. You can ping broadcast on your LAN and see it as a chorus line. If you understand what you are looking at, you can run traceroutes and see stable rings: hot potato routing at work, where the packets go out one way and come back another. Then again, I have spoken to hundreds? thousands? of people who think that the Internet _is_ the World Wide Web. Let's explain why we have multiple connections and what types of these you can expect. There are two common types of multiple connections: A) Two links to the same ISP: In terms of redundancy for the purposes of being fault tolerant, only one of the multiple links is ever used. With You don't understand and you are quite wrong. If one AS has more than one link to another AS, there are often very good reasons for it, and both links are used. If network A peers with network B in both Paris and New York, both will generally dump traffic for the other network at the nearest connection. Why? Well, on the one hand, there is no reason to carry packets originating in Paris and destined for a host in Paris all the way to New York. On the other hand, many or most networks employ hot potato routing, meaning that if network A picks up a packet for network B in Paris, it dumps it on network B as soon as it can, to minimize costs, wherever the destination might be. Some networks, concerned with quality of service, adopt the opposite strategy, and carry packets as far as possible within their own network. most ISP's, when you negotiate a contract for a backup connection, it's with the understanding that you'll only use it when the main one goes down. I don't think that you have any evidence for this assertion about what characterizes 'most' backup agreements. I do know that most networks regard this sort of statistical information as highly confidential. B) You have multiple connections to different ISP's (possibly with peering contracts, etc.) In this case when a node at your location tries to contact some other node on the internet, it's traffic doesn't go over ALL of your connections - it takes only a single path. [Ok, if your routers are correcting for an outage, then perhaps you'll see different paths being taken, but this is just the routing tables/routers settling or converging.] The world is more complicated than this. Much more. If both case A and case B, a single node in your location will see the entire internet as a tree with the root of that tree being the default gateway. (i.e. go back to doing traceroutes.) In the case of a multi-homed machine, or machine that participates in routing, it itself becomes the root of the tree. There are tens of thousands of machines on the Internet that don't have a default gateway. Machines that participate in backbone routing have multiple connections and aren't the root of a tree in any normal sense of the word. There is no parent-child relationship between such routers: they are peers. These peers participate in a highly complex graph which dances continuously. The result is that routing has a large stochastic component: if you can understand what you are looking at, you often see traceroutes involving packets jumping sometimes one way, sometimes another. To make things even more difficult to understand, an increasing amount of traffic flows through MPLS tunnels, which are invisible to traceroutes. Once you eliminate cycles, and you do so in real life, you go back to a tree. You only see the alternate paths used when failover or routing errors occur. This just isn't true. Hot potato routing is the most easily understood example: traffic goes out one way and back another. It does this because the ASs involved have set their policy that way. Backbone routers have lots of knobs to configure traffic flow. Some of these allow you to throttle it, some allow you to split flows according to traffic type, some allow to to split flows statistically, some allow you to
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies - the internet is a tree.
It's a tree No, it's not a tree I thought we were sort of an autonomous collective! Watery marketers lobbing Powerpoints is no basis for a form of architecture Network engineers spend a lot of time making sure that their networks, and the Internet, are not trees. Multiple peering and transit relationships make the network robust - and cyclic. The core of the current Internet routing architecture in the US is a couple of dozen Tier 1 providers who almost all interconnect with each other, with each pair almost always connected in more than two places (usually an East Coast and a West Coast location plus others.) - Most of the Tier 2 providers are connected to at least two upstreams, either both Tier 1 or a Tier 1 and a Tier 2. - There's no well-defined boundary between Tier 2 and Tier 3, but the Tier 3 types of folks may not be as diverse. - Some big hosting companies are owned by Tier 1 carriers, and may just get connectivity from their parent company, but it usually still has physically diverse connections to diverse switches. - Many other hosting companies are independent of the carriers, and tend to have feeds from multiple carriers (usually multiple Tier 1 for the big players). - Many big end-user companies have multiple large internet feeds from multiple carriers; even small companies with a couple of T1s often try to get some diversity (in which case the ISP run by the local telco is often one of their providers.) - If you want physically diverse access to your building, you usually need to buy at least a couple of T3s - some local telcos will still do diverse T1 access, but most don't, or else they have it in their tariff rate but *your* street doesn't have it. As Jim and others have said, it's extremely not tree-like - we want to maximize the number of careless drunken backhoe drivers it takes to take down our circuits, as well as maximizing the number of equipment failures and operator mistakes it takes, and trying to minimize the damage any problem causes. DNS's namespace is tree-like, but the actual implementation of the DNS name server networks is very forested and meshy. The biggest problems are all at layer 9.
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
Jim Dixon wrote: The term is used because most or all trees in the region where the English language originated are shaped just like that: they have a single trunk which forks into branches which may themselves fork and so on. These branches do not connect back to one another. I believe the real issue here is one of being able to stretch your mind into seeing things from different points of view. This is the reason I brought in the quasi-mystical quote about the sphere whose center is everywhere. To see if you'd be able to go beyond your already rich knowledge and gain new benefit from another way of looking at it. (IMHO, it's important to be able to change POV's at will, it keeps you flexible and able to learn new ways of dealing with data by conversion.) In real life, the roots of a tree resemble it's branches buried underground, in an almost mirror image. A tree that terminates where the trunk meets the ground would fall. The only real tree resembling this, is one where logger's saw was applied. :) So we're already not discussing a real tree. The idealized mathematical definition of a tree doesn't quite a real tree any more than do B-Trees, B+/-Trees, nor red/black trees, or our debated friend, the internet. The Internet doesn't resemble a tree at all. It is characterized by many cross-connections, which form cycles. These are introduced deliberately by network engineers, because tree-like networks are unreliable. Of course. It's called redundancy and its goal is to eliminate as many single points of failure as possible. But from the point of view of one node talking to another, these aren't considered, I'll explain why. Firstly, don't confuse cycles with redundancy for high availability. These are two different things. Let's explain why we have multiple connections and what types of these you can expect. There are two common types of multiple connections: A) Two links to the same ISP: In terms of redundancy for the purposes of being fault tolerant, only one of the multiple links is ever used. With most ISP's, when you negotiate a contract for a backup connection, it's with the understanding that you'll only use it when the main one goes down. B) You have multiple connections to different ISP's (possibly with peering contracts, etc.) In this case when a node at your location tries to contact some other node on the internet, it's traffic doesn't go over ALL of your connections - it takes only a single path. [Ok, if your routers are correcting for an outage, then perhaps you'll see different paths being taken, but this is just the routing tables/routers settling or converging.] If both case A and case B, a single node in your location will see the entire internet as a tree with the root of that tree being the default gateway. (i.e. go back to doing traceroutes.) In the case of a multi-homed machine, or machine that participates in routing, it itself becomes the root of the tree. There are other cases but those are rare, and likely flawed. Now on to cycles and the whole reason for this debate: The whole point of many/most routing algorithms is to GET RID OF cycles. After you've done this, you're left with a tree. Loops/cycles are so anathema to the workings of tcp/ip, that one of the fields in IP packets has been added to help eliminate: the TTL. The only reason for a TTL value is to prevent packets that are going around in circles from congesting all the routers involved in the loop. (Only later did traceroute exploit this into helping provide you with a map of where your packets went.) This is why EIGRP, RIP, etc. use various mechanisms to explicitly prevent routing loops (and BGP to aggregate routes.) Routing loops are damage, they are by definition not desirable. At the data link layer (switches/hubs), this is why you want to use the Spanning Tree Protocol. Notice that name: Spanning *TREE* Protocol. After STP is done, you're left with a data link layer -TREE - not a cyclical graf. STP is even more important for LAN's than on the internet since there's no TTL on ethernet frames: a single broadcast, were it to be allowed to loop, could saturate your switches to the point of killing your LAN! What all this says to me is that a cycle is a circle, and that failover/ parallel links should be collapsed (and are by routing protocols) to a single link. Once you eliminate cycles, and you do so in real life, you go back to a tree. You only see the alternate paths used when failover or routing errors occur. Yes, I agree with you, if your POV is The Big Picture above from space, which includes all links, even the unused redundant ones, it's certainly not a tree. At the same time, I also disagree with you. If your POV is a single host, it sees the internet as a tree. In fact, one of the properties of trees is that you pick up any leaf node and designate it as the root. (Doesn't work too well on a B+Tree when you're
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 03:29:58PM -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote: At 11:28 AM -0700 4/8/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Geodesic means shortest path, and you'll note if you play with tracert that the shortest path (as seen on Earth's surface) is rarely taken. A pretty densely distributed radio mesh with good (geographic routing) algorithms would tend to use the shortest path. Very small cells based on current WiFi or ultrawideband/digital pulse radio might have to route around obstacles (large high buildings, flow along the nodes with aerials dangling into the streets). MobileMesh doesn't seen to be the single solution, at least one contender exists. Both are being used in practice, alas not yet in your $100 garden-variety WiFi routers (these do bridging already, though). Internet is mostly a tree (if you look at the connectivity maps). Wires over long distances will tend to follow geodesics (because cables are expensive, and an enterprise will try to minimize the costs). Current flow is mostly dictated by frozen chance, politics (peering arrangements). Automating peering arrangments and using agoric load levelling in the infrastructure will tend to erode that over time. Over time, physical lines will tend to be densest along densest traffic flow. American cities are orthogonal, European usually radial. The cities are connected with traffic ducts (rail, highway) which is typically loosely geodesic (but for obstacles in the landscape). Fiber typically follows railway or highway. Easiest is a cloud of satellites with mutual time of flight triangulation, and line of sight laser signalling. Measure the path in time? UWB gives you realtime location in each node down to cm scale. No idea how difficult to ToF triangulate with multipath. The higher device density, the less confusion. Intel's pushing UWB as wireless USB substitute. No reason why it couldn't cover 10 miles of open terrain with enough power and proper aerials. Anyone knows how UWB handles directional aeriales? Does it prefer fractal emitters, or are there specific optimal radiator geometries? -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Meshing costs (Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies)
RAH wrote... At 10:43 AM -0700 4/9/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Meshnets (everyone's a router) is cool, admittedly. But are you going to spend *your* battery life routing someone else's message? Only if they pay me cash Someone enlighten me here...I don't see this as obvious. I might certainly be willing to pay to route someone else's message if I understand that to be the real cost of mesh connectivity. In other words, say I'm driving down the FDR receiving telemetry about the road conditions downtown of me by a few miles. If I'm a router, I'm also sending that info behind me (which is routing I'm paying for basically), but I will understand that the reason I am getting my telemetry is precisely because there's a string of me's in the cars in front of me, routing info down to me. If I insist on getting paid, so will they, and the whole thing breaks down. Actually, this reminds me of the prisoner's dilemma. I remember (I think) Hofstaedter doing an interesting analysis that showed that smart 'criminals' will eventually realize that it pays to cooperate, even if that doesn't optimise one's chances in this particular instance. Of course, the battery lifetime acts as the weighting factor here...if only a small % of the traffic I'm routing belongs to me, then I may not be so willing to route it if my battery lifetime is short. As battery time lifetime increases however (though this sorely lags behind Moore's law) then more and more people will be willing to route. -TD _ Tax headache? MSN Money provides relief with tax tips, tools, IRS forms and more! http://moneycentral.msn.com/tax/workshop/welcome.asp
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 06:22:06PM +0100, Jim Dixon wrote: On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Eugen Leitl wrote: Internet is mostly a tree (if you look at the connectivity maps). Not at all. A tree has a root; the Internet doesn't have one. Instead you have several thousand autonomous systems interconnecting at a large number of peering points. A modestly high dimensional grid of some billion nodes doesn't look like this: http://members.easynews.com/L4/opte/www.opte.org/maps/static/1069646562.LGL.2D.700x700.png This is clearer: http://research.lumeta.com/ches/map/gallery/wired.gif It should look a lot like a Golgi stain of your neocortex, though, the horizontal component being dominating (until we've get several million birds zooming over our heads in the starry sky). The neocortex and the human CNS in general is also laid out in a specific way, because it's also been/is subject to massive optimisation, both evolutionary and in course of operation. For a long time, most traffic between European countries was routed through Virginia. This has improved only in the last few years. In the same way a lot of Pacific traffic still runs through California. In each case what matters is not geography but politics and quixotic regulations. You're proving my point. The network started as a bureacratic, static, tiny, suboptimal configuration. As it grew bigger, and started participating in economy it started minimizing itself. This isn't just connectivity, but goes down to the protocol level. We know IPv6 isn't the answer, mostly because it is largely geography agnostic, can't handle nodes moving with orbital speeds (or even a speeding car), doesn't handle interplanetary latencies and isn't local-knowledge routed/switched in general. It also can't handle relativistic speed cut-through, which is the killer requirement. Within most countries the same sort of illogic applies. In the UK, for example, most IP traffic flows through London, and within London most IP traffic flows through the Docklands area, a geographically small region of East London. It's fractal: even within Docklands, almost all traffic flows through a handful of buildings, and there is a strong tendency for most of that inter-building traffic to pass through a very small number of ducts. You're correct, currently. Things will become better as network ages, and especially if we get cellular radio architectures in densely populated areas (there's about a GBit/s worth of wireless bandwidth within a small cell, when we ignore THz and optical wavelengths). Current flow is mostly dictated by frozen chance, politics (peering arrangements). Automating peering arrangments and using agoric load levelling in the infrastructure will tend to erode that over time. Over time, physical lines will tend to be densest along densest traffic flow. Very true -- but this has nothing to do with geodesics. Human societies optimize. Geodesic is a shortest path on Earth surface. Look at Christaller and followup (Christaller and geodesics is good first start). ? City layouts that I am familiar with are either haphazard or built around rings or some mixture of the two. MFS built a US national ring, a ring in New York City, a ring in London, and rings elsewhere in Europe. Other carriers tended to follow the same pattern. I'm not going to dive into city architecture, but compare these two adjacent cities: http://www.redtailcanyon.com/items/18393.aspx connected with traffic ducts (rail, highway) which is typically loosely geodesic (but for obstacles in the landscape). Fiber typically follows railway or highway. That's certainly true, but now you are talking about political decisions made ages ago. Many roads in England were built by the Romans. These A road is a place channeling traffic from A to B. Roman roads which are still used (I use one quite frequently) were created between areas of major human activity, requiring traffic frequent enough to warrant an expediture (in terms of wealth fraction, roman roads were just as expensive as autobahns). roads lead to London. You see the same pattern on the Continent, of course, with the roads leading to the local capital (Paris, say) and then on to Rome. That is, fiber optic paths today reflect the strategic requirements of the Roman Empire, not geometry. 1) today, EU today, elsewhere, looks different. future, everywhere, looks even more different. We're at the beginning of the optimization process. You can't cheat physics in a relativistic universe, in an economic/evolutionary context. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Eugen Leitl wrote: Internet is mostly a tree (if you look at the connectivity maps). Not at all. A tree has a root; the Internet doesn't have one. Instead you have several thousand autonomous systems interconnecting at a large number of peering points. Wires over long distances will tend to follow geodesics (because cables are expensive, and an enterprise will try to minimize the costs). For a long time, most traffic between European countries was routed through Virginia. This has improved only in the last few years. In the same way a lot of Pacific traffic still runs through California. In each case what matters is not geography but politics and quixotic regulations. Within most countries the same sort of illogic applies. In the UK, for example, most IP traffic flows through London, and within London most IP traffic flows through the Docklands area, a geographically small region of East London. It's fractal: even within Docklands, almost all traffic flows through a handful of buildings, and there is a strong tendency for most of that inter-building traffic to pass through a very small number of ducts. Current flow is mostly dictated by frozen chance, politics (peering arrangements). Automating peering arrangments and using agoric load levelling in the infrastructure will tend to erode that over time. Over time, physical lines will tend to be densest along densest traffic flow. Very true -- but this has nothing to do with geodesics. American cities are orthogonal, European usually radial. The cities are ? City layouts that I am familiar with are either haphazard or built around rings or some mixture of the two. MFS built a US national ring, a ring in New York City, a ring in London, and rings elsewhere in Europe. Other carriers tended to follow the same pattern. connected with traffic ducts (rail, highway) which is typically loosely geodesic (but for obstacles in the landscape). Fiber typically follows railway or highway. That's certainly true, but now you are talking about political decisions made ages ago. Many roads in England were built by the Romans. These roads lead to London. You see the same pattern on the Continent, of course, with the roads leading to the local capital (Paris, say) and then on to Rome. That is, fiber optic paths today reflect the strategic requirements of the Roman Empire, not geometry. -- Jim Dixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
At 8:29 PM +0100 4/9/04, Jim Dixon wrote: Traffic was following a geodesic -- but not a geographic geodesic. Right. Geodesic is a topologic content. In three (two?) dimensions, a geodesic is a great circle route across a sphere. In higher dimensions, it's something else. No. I don't know the math. :-) Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Meshing costs (Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies)
Meshnets (everyone's a router) is cool, admittedly. But are you going to spend *your* battery life routing someone else's message? Fixed P2P energy costs are trivial. Not so for mobile P2P. And if your meshnodes are mains-powered, you have wires going there, so wireless is less useful. Solar nodes might be useful. At 03:19 PM 4/9/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: A pretty densely distributed radio mesh with good (geographic routing) algorithms would tend to use the shortest path. Very small cells based on current WiFi or ultrawideband/digital pulse radio might have to route around obstacles (large high buildings, flow along the nodes with aerials dangling into the streets). MobileMesh doesn't seen to be the single solution, at least one contender exists. Both are being used in practice, alas not yet in your $100 garden-variety WiFi routers (these do bridging already, though).
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Eugen Leitl wrote: Internet is mostly a tree (if you look at the connectivity maps). Not at all. A tree has a root; the Internet doesn't have one. Instead you have several thousand autonomous systems interconnecting at a large number of peering points. A modestly high dimensional grid of some billion nodes doesn't look like this: http://members.easynews.com/L4/opte/www.opte.org/maps/static/1069646562.LGL.2D.700x700.png This is clearer: http://research.lumeta.com/ches/map/gallery/wired.gif Yes. I know what a tree is, and I am quite familiar with structure of the Internet. These very pretty pictures certainly look like the Internet I am familiar with, but don't resemble trees. For a long time, most traffic between European countries was routed through Virginia. This has improved only in the last few years. In the same way a lot of Pacific traffic still runs through California. In each case what matters is not geography but politics and quixotic regulations. You're proving my point. The network started as a bureacratic, static, tiny, suboptimal configuration. As it grew bigger, and started participating in economy it started minimizing itself. This isn't just connectivity, but goes down to the protocol level. We know IPv6 isn't the answer, mostly because it is largely geography agnostic, can't handle nodes moving with orbital speeds (or even a speeding car), doesn't handle interplanetary latencies and isn't local-knowledge routed/switched in general. It also can't handle relativistic speed cut-through, which is the killer requirement. Over the last 30 years or so, various people have hypothesized about what the killer requirement might be. To the best of my knowledge, all have been wrong. The Internet is quite obviously optimizing along certain lines. However, these lines don't follow any geographical geodesic, which was my point. And it is only obvious what the lines of optimization are in hindsight ;-) Within most countries the same sort of illogic applies. In the UK, for example, most IP traffic flows through London, and within London most IP traffic flows through the Docklands area, a geographically small region of East London. It's fractal: even within Docklands, almost all traffic flows through a handful of buildings, and there is a strong tendency for most of that inter-building traffic to pass through a very small number of ducts. You're correct, currently. If you try to replace observations with theories, the most important thing is to verify that your theory corresponds with reality right now. If your theories aren't correct currently, it is very unlikely that they will be a better fit tomorrow. It isn't a minor point that the Internet is fractal. This is in fact what is consistent everywhere and has been, to the best of my knowledge, throughout the history of the Internet. If you go back to your pretty pictures and look, you will see fractal structures. Things will become better as network ages, and especially if we get cellular radio architectures in densely populated areas (there's about a GBit/s worth of wireless bandwidth within a small cell, when we ignore THz and optical wavelengths). dictated by frozen chance, politics (peering arrangements). Automating peering arrangments and using agoric load levelling in the infrastructure will tend to erode that over time. Over time, physical lines will tend to be densest along densest traffic flow. Very true -- but this has nothing to do with geodesics. Human societies optimize. Geodesic is a shortest path on Earth surface. Look at Christaller and followup (Christaller and geodesics is good first start). A geodesic is a minimal path in whatever geometry you are talking about. If you looked carefully at traffic between European countries around 1999, it turned out that the minimal cost path between say German and France was in fact through Virginia. Traffic was following a geodesic -- but not a geographic geodesic. As I recall, a 2 Mbps E1 between most major European cities and Virginia was about $30,000 a month, but an E1 across the English Channel was around $45,000 a month - 50% more to go 30 miles than to go 6,000. We had customers in Northern Ireland whose traffic to Dublin went first to London, then to our PoP in California, then to Virginia, and from there back to Ireland. This was our financial geodesic. ? City layouts that I am familiar with are either haphazard or built around rings or some mixture of the two. MFS built a US national ring, a ring in New York City, a ring in London, and rings elsewhere in Europe. Other carriers tended to follow the same pattern. I'm not going to dive into city architecture, but compare these two adjacent cities: http://www.redtailcanyon.com/items/18393.aspx I have spent time in both cities and am familiar with their layouts, but really can't see how this relates to how fiber
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
On Sat, 10 Apr 2004, Eugen Leitl wrote: Yes. I know what a tree is, and I am quite familiar with structure of the Internet. These very pretty pictures certainly look like the Internet I am familiar with, but don't resemble trees. There's a continuum between a tree and a high-dimensional grid/mesh/lattice. A tree as the term is used in mathematics and computer science has a single root. A continuum has an infinite number of points in it. A grid .. none of these terms has anything much to do with one another. It isn't a minor point that the Internet is fractal. This is in fact what is consistent everywhere and has been, to the best of my knowledge, throughout the history of the Internet. If you go back to your pretty pictures and look, you will see fractal structures. Dude, hypergrids *are* fractal. Not that it has to do anything with the current topology. I don't know why you introduce hypergrids. But you might consult a mathematical dictionary - the term seems irrelevant to the current discussion. A geodesic is a minimal path in whatever geometry you are talking about. The geometry on Earth surface is anything but whatever. Way above, with nodes in mutual plain view, it's plain old Einstein-Minkowski (basically Euclidian, with relativistic corrections). The geometry on Earth surface is anything but whatever? Sorry, this makes no sense. However, a geodesic remains a path of minimal length in the geometry under consideration. Or so it was when I last did some reading in finite dimensional metric spaces. I'm claiming peering arrangement evolve to make optimal use of given physical cabling. This is quick. As the term is normally used, peering is the settlement-free exchange of trafic between autonomous systems (ASNs). Settlement-free means that no consideration ($$$) is paid. This has bugger all to do with cabling. On the longer term, physical and virtual (radio, laser) cabling evolves to minimize the load on existing links. This is slower, peering arrangements change in realtime in comparison, very like Franck-Condon principle. Peering arrangements generally involve legal departments, and rarely change once inked. In the real world, peering policies normally reflect a mixture of common sense and total misunderstanding of what the Internet is about. Some networks just peer with anyone; some have incredibly detailed contracts and involve months of negotiation. When senior management is involved, they quite often have a telco background, and think that peering has something to do with SS7. That is, they try to insist that the Internet is really just the same as the voice telephone network, and BGP4 is SS7. The results are often comic. The end result is that most UK Internet traffic, and a large part of European traffic, passes through what used to be a more or less derelict area of East London, all because of a planning error on the part of some Tokyo-based banks. A nexus is a classical tree artifact. Once the network progresses along a meshed grid hugging Earth surface, we're going to see an increase in crosslinks and exchange points, crosslinking the branches. What do you think nexus means?? Conventional definition: -- n. pl. nexus or nexuses 1. A means of connection; a link or tie: this nexus between New York's... real-estate investors and its... politicians (Wall Street Journal). 2. A connected series or group. 3. The core or center: The real nexus of the money culture [was] Wall Street (Bill Barol). -- As Lewis Carroll tried to make clear a long long time ago, it isn't very useful to conduct arguments by redefining words as you go along. -- Jim Dixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies - the internet is a tree.
Jim Dixon wrote: Yes. I know what a tree is, and I am quite familiar with structure of the Internet. These very pretty pictures certainly look like the Internet I am familiar with, but don't resemble trees. It is a tree. I'll give you a hint. Think of this: God is like an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Nicholas of Cusa. It is a tree, but to see it, you'll need to find the root. The quote above is a hint to where the root is. Replace god with internet, sphere with tree, infinite with 2**32 (at least until it goes to ip6.) So where's the root? Scroll down for the answer. | | | \ / V Did you see it? No??? It's actually right infront of you. Still don't know? Ok then, keep scrolling down. The root of the internet is your own internet connection. Proof: If you were to iterate traceroutes over the entire ip4 space (good luck doing that by the way), and graph the results, you'd get a tree. It's root is your default gateway. :)
Re: Meshing costs (Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies)
Tyler Durden wrote: RAH wrote... Only if they pay me cash few miles. If I'm a router, I'm also sending that info behind me (which is routing I'm paying for basically), but I will understand that the reason I am getting my telemetry is precisely because there's a string of me's in the cars in front of me, routing info down to me. If I insist on getting paid, so will they, and the whole thing breaks down. Actually, this reminds me of the prisoner's dilemma. I remember (I think) Hofstaedter doing an interesting analysis that showed that smart 'criminals' will eventually realize that it pays to cooperate, even if that doesn't optimise one's chances in this particular instance. Myerson, 0674341163 (not to bash Osborne/Rubinstein which I'm sure is good) Fagin/Halpern, 0262562006 (I know of no book like it) Olson, 0674537513 (that's Mancur Olson)
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 4:43 PM -0700 4/8/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Feel free to ignore any constructive hints of course :-) your prose is more identifying than your pk sig. Apropros of actually something, that's how they used to go after Detweiller around here when he was spoof-a-licious mode. With a concordance program. Cheers, RAH ...and don't make me haul out the ~56k rant I wrote about reputation, behavioral persistence, and biometric holography, either, sunnyboy... -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQHXmzMPxH8jf3ohaEQK7iwCgsXyzrppu1FvPoiC/dd//L73CwU8AnjDJ KTM462CvAUcvXPm8zOQLOrFN =/vC4 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
RE: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies (Re: [irtheory] Re: Anarchy and State Behaviors)
The pre-microprocessor automation of telephony (pulse and then touchtone dialing) put expensive automation at the top of the hierarchy, and, as costs fell, moved down from there. Well, from the little I can understand of what you're saying, there seems to be some stuff worthy of at least cursory consideration there. However, the analogy to switching systems is a little off. For one, a telephony switch isn't really something that can be measured on one axis (ie, throughput). There are two (or perhaps 3) axes that really describe the family of telephony switches: throughput and granularity. Back in my telecom days I used to joke that In my pocket I have a switch matrix capable of 100 Terabits of throughput...whereupon I'd whip out a (fiber) jumper, and point out that this jumper could switch 100Tb from this port to this port. (This is an exageration of claims made about the throughput of OXCs, or optical cross connects.) This is important because it is indicative of the fact that there is no hierarchy of switches as you describe in a telephony switch. A Broadband DCS doesn't somehow control the network. In fact, you could argue that the 'little' 5ESS switches out on the edge ultimately control the network, though even that would be inaccurate. No, the entire phone network is governed externally by an OSS. I don't really see how this is describable by a hierarchy per se, and certainly not a hierarchy that can somehow be traced to a linear measure of switching capability. As for the tem geodesic, I have to admit it's cool sounding in this context. -TD From: R. A. Hettinga [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies (Re: [irtheory] Re: Anarchy and State Behaviors) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 13:56:47 -0400 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 4:41 AM + 4/8/04, Daniel Pineu wrote: I am very curious about what are your views about the twin concept of hierarchy Hierarchy emerges as a result of the economics of information switching. When you have expensive nodes (brains) and inexpensive lines (behavior, talking, writing, whatever), you end up with hierarchical networks. When you have a small number of nodes in a network, hierarchical switching (i.e. chains of command, etc.) can't emerge because direct communication is possible. For instance, in neurobiology, emotion is a way of weighting memory. In human networks, we have the ability to have significant emotional relationships with about 12-16 people at a maximum, not coincidentally the size of a hunter-gatherer band, a social unit that stayed with humanity, from our virtual evolution as a separate species until sedentarianism, which preceded agriculture by several thousand years, roughly 12-24,000 years ago. See Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel for a nice popular summary of this process. Food surplus creates an attractive nuisance, and causes large populations of even solitary, non-social animals to create dominance and social hierarchies, as a way of avoiding the wasteful expenditure of energy that constant battle would involve. Salmon streams attract Grizzly bears and Eagles, the town dumps at Churchill Manitoba attracts Polar bears, house-cats in a farm-yard, and the intersection of significant agricultural trading routes causes cities. Proto-humans have traded since they invented tools, including sites where hand-axes were literally manufactured at some negotiated rate of exchange for raw materials collected a tens or hundreds of miles away. Persistence of a food source over great lengths of time creates the evolution of social animals. Wasps evolve into ants, cockroaches evolve into termites, solitary proto-cats and -dogs become social lions and wolves, and so on. As a counterexample, Orang-otans are solitary because the distribution of food in jungles is uniform, sparsely distributed, and random in appearance over time. Notice that the speed of information processing is also a component. An Orang-Otan is a very sophisticated information processor, full of data about what plants bear fruit, when they do so, and where they are. And, contrary to popular belief, a beehive, or a termite or ant nest, is not all *that* hierarchical in its organization. Do not mistake functional specialization, like you find in ants and termites, as hierarchy. See Kevin Kelly's Out of Control for a nice survey of this idea. An ant queen is, in the final stage of her life, a breeding machine, she doesn't signal, even in a gross sense, what each worker does, in the same way that an army general does for privates, for instance. In mechanical information switching hierarchies, the fastest, most expensive switches are at the top, and there is a single route through the network. In the old phone network, you had a single operator for a small enough town, and central offices in large cities had rooms with hundreds of operators in them. The pre-microprocessor automation
Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies (Re: [irtheory] Re: Anarchy and State Behaviors)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 4:41 AM + 4/8/04, Daniel Pineu wrote: I am very curious about what are your views about the twin concept of hierarchy Hierarchy emerges as a result of the economics of information switching. When you have expensive nodes (brains) and inexpensive lines (behavior, talking, writing, whatever), you end up with hierarchical networks. When you have a small number of nodes in a network, hierarchical switching (i.e. chains of command, etc.) can't emerge because direct communication is possible. For instance, in neurobiology, emotion is a way of weighting memory. In human networks, we have the ability to have significant emotional relationships with about 12-16 people at a maximum, not coincidentally the size of a hunter-gatherer band, a social unit that stayed with humanity, from our virtual evolution as a separate species until sedentarianism, which preceded agriculture by several thousand years, roughly 12-24,000 years ago. See Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel for a nice popular summary of this process. Food surplus creates an attractive nuisance, and causes large populations of even solitary, non-social animals to create dominance and social hierarchies, as a way of avoiding the wasteful expenditure of energy that constant battle would involve. Salmon streams attract Grizzly bears and Eagles, the town dumps at Churchill Manitoba attracts Polar bears, house-cats in a farm-yard, and the intersection of significant agricultural trading routes causes cities. Proto-humans have traded since they invented tools, including sites where hand-axes were literally manufactured at some negotiated rate of exchange for raw materials collected a tens or hundreds of miles away. Persistence of a food source over great lengths of time creates the evolution of social animals. Wasps evolve into ants, cockroaches evolve into termites, solitary proto-cats and -dogs become social lions and wolves, and so on. As a counterexample, Orang-otans are solitary because the distribution of food in jungles is uniform, sparsely distributed, and random in appearance over time. Notice that the speed of information processing is also a component. An Orang-Otan is a very sophisticated information processor, full of data about what plants bear fruit, when they do so, and where they are. And, contrary to popular belief, a beehive, or a termite or ant nest, is not all *that* hierarchical in its organization. Do not mistake functional specialization, like you find in ants and termites, as hierarchy. See Kevin Kelly's Out of Control for a nice survey of this idea. An ant queen is, in the final stage of her life, a breeding machine, she doesn't signal, even in a gross sense, what each worker does, in the same way that an army general does for privates, for instance. In mechanical information switching hierarchies, the fastest, most expensive switches are at the top, and there is a single route through the network. In the old phone network, you had a single operator for a small enough town, and central offices in large cities had rooms with hundreds of operators in them. The pre-microprocessor automation of telephony (pulse and then touchtone dialing) put expensive automation at the top of the hierarchy, and, as costs fell, moved down from there. This fall in switching prices, exponential after the invention of the microprocessor, is important, and I'll talk about it more in a bit. Human switching hierarchies aren't so efficient, :-), but certainly the most important information summaries are presented *near* the top of a human-switched information hierarchy, and the most expensive switches were certainly at the top, and economic rent being what it is, people literally killed each other to be at the top of those hierarchies. Which brings us to two principal features of international relations through the industrial era: force monopoly, by which you literally define a state whether it involves a single national cultural entity or not, and information/social hierarchies, by which that state is controlled . First of all there's the emergence of geographic force monopoly, which is, more or less, a function of sedentarianism, and later agriculture. Nomads may fight over the immediate use of local resources, a watering-hole, say, but they don't set up principalities (Mancur Olsen says in Power and Prosperity that a prince is a bandit who doesn't move :-)). So, when you mix geographic force monopoly with social hierarchy you get first cities, then city-states, then empires, and then nation-states. The progression of which is driven directly by speed of information processing, the span of communication, and the speed of that communication over a specific distance. Oddly enough, it is the ability of communication to transmit emotional information (first word of mouth, then words, then pictures, then moving images and sound, all with ever increasing instantaneity) that allows the mobilization
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
At 03:29 PM 4/8/04 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote: At 11:28 AM -0700 4/8/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Geodesic means shortest path, and you'll note if you play with tracert that the shortest path (as seen on Earth's surface) is rarely taken. Measure the path in time? Yeah, some dead french dude IIRC pointed out that light takes the quickest route through a lens. Light and time being rather intimate if you believe your interferometer. OTOH a packet takes a route that depends on business practices, etc, and isn't generally optimal. In any case you're a lot more readable if one global replaces 'geodesic' with 'well-connected' or glibly 'wired'. Feel free to ignore any constructive hints of course :-) your prose is more identifying than your pk sig.
Re: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies
At 01:56 PM 4/8/04 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote: [Nanotechology at least holds out the possibility of making Von Neumann machines, that is, switches which make copies of themselves, You mean Johnny's *replicators*, a vN machine is just one with a changable program store. But you mentioned Jared Diamond (and used the phrase proto-cat) so you are forgiven. When a bunch of these networks are hooked together, you get a ubiquitous geodesic internetwork, the internet, Geodesic means shortest path, and you'll note if you play with tracert that the shortest path (as seen on Earth's surface) is rarely taken. What you really mean is highly cheaply connected, although your investment in the word geodesic is probably too far gone for you to change.
