STONE AGE INTERNET - DARKNESS

FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE
CONQUEST, WAR, FAMINE & DEATH - THE 5TH IS DARKNESS.

Wired Magazine reports that the aging internet infrastructure is at the limits of its capacity. Adding just 1,500 new routes shut down part of the net last week - and will again, until modern main-frames and old wires are updated to the modern age. The biblical Apocalypse did not prophesy this beginning of the end for homo-sapiens. The Four Horsemen - Conquest, War, Famine & Death, who will thunder forth from Hell to finish us off, have a  fifth companion to join their final, fatal charge. He is Darkness and his job is to plunge our electronic civilization back to the stone age. Ask yourself, ...How are your fire-lighting, flint knapping and archery skills, these days....? 

GET WIRED - BUY IT NOW TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT:
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/router_problem/  15 AUGUST 2014

Yesterday, the 20,000 customers who use a Lansing Michigan web hosting company called Liquid Web had some big internet problems. The reason: the internet grew too big for the memory chips in the company’s Cisco routers.

Think of it as the internet’s latest growing pain. It’s a problem that networking geeks have seen coming for awhile now, but yesterday it finally struck. And it’s likely to cause more problems in the next few weeks. The bug doesn’t seem to have affected core internet providers—companies like AT&T and Verizon, which haul vast quantities of data over the internet’s backbone, “but certainly there are a number of people that were caught by this,” says Craig Labovitz, founder of network analysis company Deepfield Networks.

The issue affects older, but widely used, routers such as the Cisco 7,600. These machines store routing tables in their memory—directions describing the best way for packets of data to move to their ultimate destination—but some routers max out when their list of routes hits 512,000. Different routers have different total routes in memory, but most of them have been closing in on the 500,000 level for a few months now. Yesterday Verizon published an extra 15,000, kicking many routers over the 512,000 crash-point.
Verizon quickly withdrew most of these routes, kicking things back to normal, but some routers had problems. Andree Toonk, a network engineer who runs a blog tracking networking issues says on a typical day there are about 1,500 network outages on the internet. Yesterday, that number spiked to 2,587. That’s not enough to quality as a major problem, but it’s noticeable.