This weekend is the 10th Annual Harvard Business School Cyberposium–a conference focusing on business and technology. I figured if people read blogs from the DNC…
First, let me say that I’m really impressed with the size and scope. Kudos to the student organizers: i’ve been to professionally-run conferences that were less well-done. This conference has big name keynotes, sponsorship from major industry players, and attendees from many schools, press, and industry (I’m pretty sure that tickets were available to the public).
Last night’s Keynote was given by Tom Leighton, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Akamai. He discussed the inherent instability and insecurity on the Internet. Sadly, the keynote turned into a sales pitch for Akamai: first, he alarmed us with the threat of network traffic jams, DOS attacks, spoofing, IP hijacking, etc. and then explained how Akamai’s distributed architecture addresses these security threats and relieved network congestion inherent in the centralized webserver model.
It left me with two thoughts. First, it IS a bit alarming that there really is NO security built into this foundation that we’re all relying on. And, beyond the security, low level protocols like BGP are “dumb” (they ignore congestion). Beyond that, the business model of the backbone hasn’t been settled yet: that’s why there are thousands of miles of dark fiber–people who own backbone (and smaller) networks can’t figure out how to get paid for the data traveling over their pipes. This is a real problem that, in my opinion, might require government regulation. Or, maybe Demand will drive businesses agreements… (not to mention that the technology is subject to human error, which apparently caused the hour-long large-scale outage last year–in spite of the rumors that a tractor hit a pipe in chicago)
Secondly, I’m unclear about how Akamai’s technology works: they make websites faster by eliminating the single server: they replicate your site on their servers all over the world so the bits are closer to the user, wherever the user is. This avoids network delays and contains DOS attacks (since there’s no central point of failure). But I’m unclear how this works: as far as I know, DNS entries point to a single IP. So how does Akamai “distribute” this site to their server that is closest to you? I suppose that there is still a single server that the DNS points to that then refers you back to your closest server. Anyone know for sure?
Off to the next panel…
joel
