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LiveScience.com on Friday posted a report about two computer science researchers who discovered black holes on the Internet– spots where, for a period of time, messages just seem to disappear.

And, they said, it appears that transmissions around the world are constantly getting swallowed up by these cyber vacuums.

"We were astounded when we did an initial four-month study and we saw how many problems there were," Ethan Katz-Bassett, one of the researchers, told LiveScience.com. "It seemed infeasible that this could be happening so often. They’re definitely more common than we thought."

Katz-Bassett, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington, and his advisor, Arvind Krishnamurthy, designed a software program that sought out and found the Black Holes, according to LiveScience.com. Their work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

So far, they’ve found almost 900,000 “black holes and reachability problems.”

The researchers have posted a map that shows where on the Internet these mysterious spots have appeared.

Comments (1)

	1. 04-18-2008 02:43
	Interesting way to frame it but the problem may be simply that the Internet is overcrowded and often exceeds its capacity. I believe the Internet's store and forward communication protocol still permits a node to dump message packets if it reaches capacity and cannot send. This would explain message packets vanishing into "black holes" although the old "bit bucket" metaphor may be more descriptive. Registered

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