Recent PhD graduate ASM Rizvi was featured in an ISI News story, sharing his thoughts about joining USC and ISI and what he plans to do after graduation.
Congratulations again, Rizvi!
Category: Uncategorized
Today around 3:30pm local time (around 2025-02-25 T18:30Z), Chile suffered a major power outage. News reports suggest 8 million or more are without power.
We can see the effects of this power outage on Internet access as measured by Trinocular, our internet outage detection system. Outages start around 18:30Z and increase steadily to 20:30Z, the most recent data we have.
We wish Chile the best at a rapid recovery!
Update on Wed 2025-02-26: Our observations show the Chilean Internet starting coming back online around 2025-02-26t02:00Z (which is 2025-02-25t23:00 Chilean time), with most if it back around t06:00Z (2025-02-26t03:00 Chilean time).
On a recent episode of the ISI/nsiders podcast, host Adam Russell interviewed ANT lab member Wes Hardaker about the creation of the DNS at ISI, his history in making software of the Internet interoperate better, research usability and his general desire to promote life long learning.
See https://www.isi.edu/isi-insiders-podcast/ for the series, and https://rss.com/podcasts/isi-nsiders/1904285/ for Season 1, Episode 7 (about 20 minutes) for the interview with Wes Hardaker.
As part of the ISI/nsiders podcast, Adam Russell, anthropologist and director of ISI’s AI division is interviewing a number of researchers at ISI.
He recently interviewed John Heidemann about John’s work in networking research about measuring the Internet.
See https://www.isi.edu/isi-insiders-podcast/ for the series, and https://rss.com/podcasts/isi-nsiders/1804707/ for Season 1, Episode 3 (about 20 minutes) for his interview of John Heidemann.
We have released a new technical report: “Auditing for Bias in Ad Delivery Using Inferred Demographic Attributes”, available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23394.
From the abstract:
![[Imana23c, figure 3]: Detecting racial skew with BISG-based inference is less sensitive (shown by the lower test statistic Z) than either knowing true-race, or using our improved version that reflects potential inference error. More samples and larger underlying skew make the range of confusion smaller, but do not eliminate it.](https://ant.isi.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Imana23c_icon.png){kind=icon}
Auditing social-media algorithms has become a focus of public-interest research and policymaking to ensure their fairness across demographic groups such as race, age, and gender in consequential domains such as the presentation of employment opportunities. However, such demographic attributes are often unavailable to auditors and platforms. When demographics data is unavailable, auditors commonly infer them from other available information. In this work, we study the effects of inference error on auditing for bias in one prominent application: black-box audit of ad delivery using paired ads. We show that inference error, if not accounted for, causes auditing to falsely miss skew that exists. We then propose a way to mitigate the inference error when evaluating skew in ad delivery algorithms. Our method works by adjusting for expected error due to demographic inference, and it makes skew detection more sensitive when attributes must be inferred. Because inference is increasingly used for auditing, our results provide an important addition to the auditing toolbox to promote correct audits of ad delivery algorithms for bias. While the impact of attribute inference on accuracy has been studied in other domains, our work is the first to consider it for black-box evaluation of ad delivery bias, when only aggregate data is available to the auditor.
This technical report is joint work of Basilial Imana and Aleksandra Korolova (both of Princeton) and John Heidemann (USC/ISI). This work was supported by the NSF via CNS-1956435, CNS-2344925, and CNS-2319409 (the InternetMap project).
Hurricane Helene made landfall in the U.S. at 11:10pm EDT Sept. 26 (2024-09-27t03:10Z) near Tallahassee, Florida, and we’ve been watching it in the Trinocular Internet Outage system.
Flordia Internet infrasructure appears to have done quite well, with relatively few Internet outages. Here is the view 4.5 hours after landfall, at 3:40am EDT Sept. 27 (2024-09-27t07:40Z), when the eye was already over southern Georgia:
However, storm damange resulted in many outages across Georgia at daybreak. Here is 11 hours after landfall, at 6am EDT Sept 27 (2024-09-27t10:00):
The Carolinas seem particularly strongly effected. Here is a zoom from Georgia to Kentucky as of 9am EDT Sat. Sept. 28 (2024-09-28t13:41Z):
Fortunately the Internet infrastructure in Georgia was quick to recover, suggesting most Internet outages were power loss. We wish the best for those in Kentucky, and for those with physical storm damage and coping with flooding.
The most recent outage data is always visible on our outage website.
Categories
brief Internet outage in Bangladesh
This morning, from about 2024-08-05t04:50Z (10:50am local time) to t07:40Z, Bangladesh had another very large Internet outage. Fortunately, unlike the outage that began on 2024-07-18, this one cleared up after about three hours. I presume this outage corresponds to the resignation of the prime minster.
We hope for calm for the people of Bangladesh.
There was a huge Internet outage on June 19, 2024. It affected millions of people, interfering with their ability to travel, interact with friends and family, and with businesses to communicate with their customers and place orders. It cost the global economy millions of dollars.
And it had nothing to do with CrowdStrike.
I’m talking about the the 5-day near-total shutdown of the Internet in Bangladesh, from 2024-07-18t15:00Z (9pm July 18 local time in Bangladesh) until about 2024-07-23t13:00Z (7pm July 23 local time). For most of that period, pretty much all Bangladeshi networks were down. People could not communicate with each other. Here are the start, middle, recovery pictures from our blog entry:
These figures show Bangladesh, with circles whose size indicates the number of networks that are out in each part of the country. Circle color indicates the percentage of networks that are out–red is near 100% networks unreachable. My research group measures Internet outages, and you can look at what happened in our website. Red basically never happens for big countries, at least since the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Bangladesh had civil unrest, protests, and riots due to an unpopular employment law (as reported by many organizations, including the New York Times). The government chose to shut down their Internet (as reported by AP, and others). They restored services on July 24, but I am told they are still blocking several social media services.
What does this have to do with CloudStrike?
Well, nothing. But you may have heard that CloudStrike had a software-update that went wrong, also on July 19. It also interfered with millions of people’s ability to travel, interact with friends and family, and with businesses to communicate with their customers and place orders, as it crashed millions of computers running Microsoft Windows and left them difficult to recover.
But the CloudStrike software glitch was not an Internet outage.
Yes, millions of computers failed. But the Internet was never affected by the failure of CloudStrike computers. Anyone could use the Internet just fine last week, provided they were using services that did not depend on Microsoft Windows. And lots of the computers that failed (like flight status kiosks in airports) were not on the public Internet.
CloudStrike was a massive software failure, but not an Internet outage.
I mention this because I heard multiple media sources discuss the CloudStrike-caused Internet outage. Most prominent was this article by Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier on Lawfare (and then reposted on Schneier’s blog), that starts “Friday’s massive internet outage, caused by a mid-sized tech company called CrowdStrike, disrupted major airlines, hospitals, and banks.” They point to “brittleness of infrastructure” as a risk. The article is true, except for the word “Internet”. The New York times called it a “tech outage“, and us in the field should be as careful about our terms.
By analogy, when two Boeing 373 MAX airliners crashed in 2019 and 2020, we did not call out the “massive air traffic control crash”, we correctly pointed at aircraft failures, and eventually at software and design problems in that specific aircraft.
We should not call all computer failures an Internet outage, when the problem is not about network communication. To improve our computing world, we must identify problems correctly.
Because when a nation of 170 million people goes offline, that’s a big deal, too. And that’s not fixable by rebooting.
We have released a new technical report: “Reasoning about Internet Connectivity”, available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14427.
From the abstract:
![Figure 1 from [Baltra24b], showing the connected core (A, B and C) with B and C peninsulas, D and E islands, and X an outage.](https://ant.isi.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Baltra24b_icon.png){kind=icon}
Innovation in the Internet requires a global Internet core to enable
communication between users in ISPs and services in the cloud. Today, this Internet core is challenged by partial reachability: political pressure
threatens fragmentation by nationality, architectural changes such as
carrier-grade NAT make connectivity conditional, and operational problems and commercial disputes make reachability incomplete for months. We assert that partial reachability is a fundamental part of the Internet core. While some systems paper over partial reachability, this paper is the first to provide a conceptual definition of the Internet core
so we can reason about reachability from first principles. Following
the Internet design, our definition is guided by reachability, not
authority. Its corollaries are peninsulas: persistent regions of
partial connectivity; and islands: when networks are partitioned
from the Internet core. We show that the concept of peninsulas and islands can improve existing measurement systems. In one example,
they show that RIPE’s DNSmon suffers misconfiguration and persistent
network problems that are important, but risk obscuring operationally
important connectivity changes because they are 5x to 9.7x larger. Our evaluation also informs policy questions, showing no single
country or organization can unilaterally control the Internet core.
This technical report is joint work of Guillermo Baltra, Tarang Saluja, Yuri Pradkin, John Heidemann done at USC/ISI. This work was supported by the NSF via the EIEIO and InternetMap projects.
Categories
major Internet outage in Bangladesh
Since around 2024-07-18t15:00Z (July 18,21:00 local time), Bangladesh has had a major,country-wide Internet outage. As of t17:30Z some regions see 97% unreachability. This country-wide outage seems to be in response to civil unrest and protests.
Here’s the view from Trinocular outage detection as of 17:30Z:
We wish the best for the people of Bangladesh during this unrest.
Update July 19 morning: A day after Bangladesh’s Internet connectivity first went down, it remains nearly completely stopped. Here is our view of Bangladeshi connectivity at 2024-07-19t14:40Z (20:40 local time there):
Update July 19 afternoon: USC/ISI posted an article about the Bangladeshi Internet outage and our work as ISI news, and an new NYT article about the protests.
The AP reports “A statement from the country’s Telecommunication Regulatory Commission said they were unable to ensure service after their data center was attacked Thursday by demonstrators, who set fire to some equipment. The Associated Press was not able to independently verify this.” However, the near-complete outage observed by Trinocular (as seen in the figures above) seems inconsistent with problems at a single datacenter.
Update July 19, 22:28Z: ISOC Pulse has a post about this outage, and reports that “In a press event on 18 July, Bangladesh minister for posts, telecommunications, and information technology, Zunaid Ahmed Palak confirmed that the government had ordered the shutdown. “
Update July 20: The country-wide outage continues.
Update July 21, 17:00Z: Although recent news reports suggest some government response to protests, the near-complete country-wide Internet outage continues.
Update July 22, 23:00Z: Another day with no externally visible change–all of Bangladesh remains inaccessible from outside.
Update July 23, 18:00Z: Beginning around 13:00Z (which 19:00 in Bangladesh), we see the first signs of Bangaldeshi networks coming back on-line! The figure below is as of 16:26Z and shows about half of the national networks reachable from outside the country.
To add about the root cause, the Deccan Herald published an article from Reuters quoting Zunaid Ahmed Palak, junior information technology minister, as saying to reporters: “Mobile internet has been temporarily suspended due to various rumors and the unstable situation created…. on social media” on July 18. Today, Reuters quoted Palak as saying that “broadband internet would be restored by Tuesday night but [he] did not comment on mobile internet”. This statement is consistent with the country-wide outage we observed, and the prior statement suggests the outage was a request of the government.
Update July 24, 13:00Z (19:00 in Bangladesh): It looks like nearly all Bangladeshi networks are now back online.
Update July 25: The July 25 episode of The Briefing, an Australian news podcast, discussed the Bangladeshi outage and its impact, interviewing us about what we saw.