Sunday, March 24, 2013

Cities go dark for 'Earth Hour' – Net Affected

AP reported a voluntary rolling blackout: Communities around the globe are going dark for an hour on Saturday evening as part of an initiative called "Earth Hour," to raise awareness of climate change.  More than 7,000 cities and towns across the planet, millions of residents are turning off their lights for an hour from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. local time to show their environmental concern.

The effect was interesting... subtle … but interesting.  As the blackouts occurred, various nodes on the internet were affected.  The process of rerouting communications – which is basically integral to the automatic programming which defines internet communication  -- appears to have caused a disruption in certain areas.  Most notably was the video streaming elements of services like SKPYE, Netflix, and HULU.

Images were either not transmitted, or they were continually rebuffing as servers switch off and on in an effort to maintain communications.

Note that the disruption was subtle, and many people in major cities would not necessarily have noted it.  But more rural regions did note it as a major annoyance – which some assumed was a hardware problem … at least until they found that it was affecting multiple devices.

In reality, as a political statement,  the outages were, for the most part, meaningless.  Climate change means new sources of power – not a reduction in usage.

More important, unless we change everything that defines the global society, climate change will not be affected until humanity is reduces to a more reasonable, and more caring, level.   We don’t care about each other … if we did there would be no terrorism, and Palestinians (as an example) would focus on building a productive society where they are – rather than seek to destroy a productive neighboring one. 

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