Horrors! The Internet Is Too Full For eBay And Cats
BILLLIONS reel as it is revealed that the internet is actually full. It’s this that led to eBay falling over this week and it will in the future disrupt our vital supplies of funny cat photos. That, at least, is what the Mail is trying to peddle to us as the latest calamity to befall our race:
Major technical problems could become a regular occurrence for website users because the internet is running out of space, experts have warned.
An online breakdown caused chaos on Tuesday, costing the economy millions of pounds in lost trade and effectively closing access to a number of huge website.
Online auctioneer eBay was out of action for most of the day, with buyers and sellers inundating the site with complaints about lost business after being unable to log onto their accounts.
Well, no, not really. This problem has been foreseen, the solution to it has been designed and people are, gradually, upgrading their little part of that internet to solve it.
Stripped of all the jargon the “internet is full” thing comes from the way that addresses of stuff on the internet are handled. We have an old standard that meant that any one place could see maybe 512,000 routes to get to another piece of stuff on the internet. As said internet has grown there are many more such routes or paths and so those machines that can only see that half million become bottlenecks. It’s this bit that is “full”. Fortunately, a couple of years back everyone recognised this and now new bits of internet kit can recognise many more paths. And people are gradually installing that new kit and removing the bottlenecks.
The worry is a bit like insisting that the road system is overloaded even as you watch people widening the roads to remove that overload. Those cat pictures are safe.
Posted: 8th, September 2014 | In: Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
