Scientists Study Internet ‘Black Holes’

U.S. researchers says they are monitoring the Internet, providing a constantly changing map of the system’s weak points, including black holes.

The University of Washington scientists are studying Internet black holes — points where information disappears.

The researchers say at any given moment, a proportion of the world’s computer traffic ends up being routed into information black holes. The scientists say those occur when a path between two computers exists, but messages become lost along the way.

There’s an assumption that if you have a working Internet connection then you have access to the entire Internet, said Ethan Katz-Bassett, a UW doctoral student and member of the team. We found that’s not the case.

The work will be presented next week in San Francisco during the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.