Internet Black Holes

BoingBoing had this fascinating post about Internet Black Holes.

A UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering, Ethan Katz-Bassett, had been working on this project called Hubble - Aim? Guess to find if internet is really accessible as it is purported to be.

Are people really going where none of their forefathers went before? Perhaps not! Check it out.

Katz-Bassett has been working on a project called Hubble, a system that apparently is able to track what he refers to as information black holes. These are situations where a path between two computers does exist, but messages - a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing e-mail - get lost along the way. Katz-Bassett has published a Hubble map that enables users to monitor such black holes worldwide or simply type in a network address to check its status.

Source:
Link (via Boing Boing)