Diaries of an internet soldier of fortune

Once a year, when peeking at the user agents landing on it, you notice something like this:
It used to be all Linux, Macintosh with Firefox, Opera and Safari... :'(
Xtra Speshul str33T kredZ to the ZyBorg robot which makes its way to the browsers list, any luck finding porn in here ? :p

Since Web2.0 has been the new namedropping combo that made raising millions for selling available brain time a walk in the park, I've been trying to look out for what was not visible and practically making it possible. Beyond the obvious names that make their way to the headlines and get to be mentioned in the press as inspiring, mindblowing, groundbreaking (you name whatever superlative best suits you), I came to realize that there are some silent players that would rather spend time achieving, breaking new barriers in a quite yet very silent way.

The interesting thing about genius minds is that they don't do press releases. They let their achievements speak instead of their ego. For that they deserve street credit. Presumably way more than techie trolls between grease monkeys at the coffe maker in your average Web2.0 systems/dev/network engineering teams.

I've very often dreamed I was responsible for strategic acquisitions in an infinite cash giant company. Who hasn't. Starting from there, I wondered which where the companies I would like to purchase, that were silent but massive symbols of what makes web2.0 possible. For technically illiterate people, Web2.0 is just AJAX. It now goes far away beyond that. Web sites are no more. There are web applications, web platforms. A software interconnect mapping web's applications together through APIs, some sort of social and logical layer mapped over the internet.

As any concept of this magnitude, it all relies on technical bits and pieces. Here's my own private shopping list of companies and products which I think brought major products and concepts that truly symbolizes the essence of web2.0.

I must reckon that when I compare the very little profesional achievements I've had so far to what some of the brands and products listed below actually deliver, it surely makes me comfortable to see that the complex technical stuff is taken care of. All I'm saying here to the CTOs around the world is that you never spend enough time to try and see the hidden part of the iceberg if you don't deliberately try to raise above your daily technical issues. Please read the below, you might not agree with my side of the story, but at least it could be refreshing.

Oh and before I start, I just want to make it clear that I have no shares in any of the below listed Companies. Neither do I absolutely want to work for any of the below companies. I just found it could be interesting to share my view on a few selected names that I think lead the whole Internet 2.0 industry, directly or indirectly. Enjoy!

CDN is -teh- new trend in the internet industry. That is a fact. Here we go, Media meet Internet, Internet meet Media. What you never thought possible happened: the nerdy sysops met the broadcast men in black. Two worlds that everyone deeply thought would never collide. CDN ( Content Delivery Networking ) is todays latest toy for IT deciders and newly born startups, just as MPLS VPNs were a decade ago. When billion dollar CSI:Miami actor David Caruso founds a streaming media company, the uneducated masses start investigating on what CDN is...

I came across this link on a mailing list: Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2008
For once, this legal text is clear, and does take into account technical realities. It also succeeds to this one: Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008 . After several bad surprises in Europe, and having to admit that EU hasn't yet realized Net Neutrality is a key element in Internet's Future, it is really pleasant to read that at least one country has a decent vision of how things should still be done. Congrats, Mr. CONYERS and Ms. ZOE LOFGREN for such a brief and detailed Bill !

I've spent 2007 designing and implementing a content network for a company that dealt massive outbound bandwidth. I won't insist on the exact volumes, nor on the company's name, but the volumes I talk about were more than the smaller ISPs in France.
Back in end 2006, when we thought copious amounts of bandwidth was THE leverage for getting cheaper transit per meg costs, we soon noticed that it would get harder and harder to peer with such volumes.
In our very naive mind, we would have thought that us, content providers where the ones to make plain internet access interesting.

We obviously were wrong...

This is pretty new to me, but I've given my 1st engineering school course last Friday, at ESIGETEL, a French IT & Network engineering school, which I am proud to be a former student.
Anyways, the prezo can be found in here, careful though: it is in french. I'll certainly translate it sometimes.

This has been a truly interesting both human and professional experience, I'll certainly do it over with great pleasure if the opportunity comes up again.
enjoy!

[ edit 2008-04-15 ]
For those who are more into video presentations, I've had a shot at this course in the form of a video interview with my man Jean-Michel (Oleane, Witbe, does this remind you anything ? well, he's the man behind all that...): here is is, again, provided you can read french...

The events

On 24th Feb, 2008, the whole world became unable to reach YouTube (AS36561). What happened, is that Pakistan Telecom (AS17557), who had decided to blacklist YouTube, started announcing one of their prefixes, but in a more specific way (i.e. announcing a /24 within a /20). This would have ended-up armlessly if PCCW (AS3491), on of their upstreams, hadn't re-announced this prefix to all of their peers (PCCW is a pretty big carrier, with quite a few transit customers...). This /24 range contained YouTube's DNS, so that Pakistan Telecom have been blackholing YouTube for about one hour.

I'm a big NANOG reader - plus right now, I'm working on a project in Middle East and of course have witnessed many of the recent traffic changes towards those destinations.
The info has been relayed on many sites already, detailing four Mediterranean undersea fiber cable cuts, centered around the Persian Gulf.

I suck at scripting... man I really do. I was today looking for means to get all of the aut-num reccords (aut-num definition here) for a given country. in other terms I wanted to find a listing of all networks within a given country, for instance to evaluate the amount of potential networks to peer with.