The Best Part Of A Network Is Also Its Biggest Problem
from the commonalities dept
The NY Times is trying to compare a variety of "networks" to show where the risks are. The main point of the article is to compare the problems that created last week's power outage to the MSBlaster/SoBig worm problems over the last week. However, they also compare both to the railroad network, and the airline route system. The analogy certainly isn't perfect, but it does make some interesting points, about how a single failure can cascade across many different areas - using the very connectedness of the network (what makes it useful) for its own downfall. As someone says in the article: "The plus of a network is that everything is connected. The minus of a network is that everything is connected."
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