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Burton Speaks

Irony: i·ro·ny n The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.

I'm Burton from Portland, Oregon, United States. I'm 33 and live in the Portland Metro Area. I work hard. I drive fast. I play often. I'm sarcastic, appreciate irony, and find humor in even the darkest of events. I'm non-traditional. I question authority. I'm a know-it-all and a planner. And most days, I wake up thinking the world is full of fundamentally good people... and have a lot of problems when I'm proven wrong. Any other questions?

Some of us have known this for years...

Thursday, January 19, 2006

It happens every year and some of us have learned to live with it. An annual event that internet cognoscenti refer to as "Attack of the Idaho Backhoes" is now receiving attention from the press because apparently fibre-optic lines that carry huge amounts of data are vulnerable to attack. Not that this ever happened before.

The whole idea of the internet is that it "routes around failure". Since the internet is a huge web - not just a single line or pipe - a failure at any given link means that traffice will start to flow around it. It may be slow, but it'll get there. There is an incredible amount of robustness in the design of the internet and while some may want us to be afraid of what might happen, I suspect any attack on our fibre-optic capabilities will really inconvenience us... for a short while.