Subject: [ncrg] Fwd: Syrian Internet.. Fragility?

From: "Eggert, Lars" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 07:21:59 +0000

Since you guys have been discussing fragility in the past: http://www.renesys.com/blog/2013/05/syrian-internet-fragility.shtml

Lars

---

From: David Meyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 00:29:13 -0700

Interesting. See slide 9 in
https://ripe66.ripe.net/presentations/116-ripe66.pdf (the Syran
situation is clearly RYF in several dimensions, including being a
complex society that is interacting with an advanced technology....).
--dmm

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 12:21 AM, Eggert, Lars <[email-masked]> wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> ncrg mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/ncrg

---

From: David Meyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 01:12:56 -0700

> complex society that is interacting with an advanced technology....).

Would be nice if I could spell :-) s/Syran/Syrian/

--dmm

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2013 10:23:56 -0400

I think we're going to have to talk about timescales in measures of
fragility.  I got started on this thinking about bacteria, which led to
remembering spruce budworm outbreaks, and now Internet deployments.
There are particular strain of bacteria, or parasites or predators, that
explode into population growth when they can and destroy all the host
(prey) available in an area, then go into a population crash and then
recover over some long period of time.  Is this fragile?  It would seem
so since the system is destroyed in a particular area.  Is it robust?
These cycles have been going on for many many years, and other species
even depend on them.  In the case of the Internet in Syria, is it really
antifragile?  It certainly doesn't seem so if it can be broken so easily
... but over time it will "grow back", and probably be more robust from
the learning experience.  So, time scale matters in whether you view a
system as fragile, etc.  I believe that in the Internet we are concerned
with robustness at relatively short time scales, on the order of minutes
or seconds.  In that case the Syrian situation wasn't very robust.

Scott