Network World reports on a survey by security software vendor Symantec which talks about data center staffing. Specifically, half of the respondents said that their data centers were either extremely or somewhat understaffed.

And of course, there’s always the usual suspect to trot out – the economy – forcing IT workers to do more with less, with cutbacks and layoffs hitting IT hard. But there’s also another factor – that it’s not just that the IT staffing budgets are decreasing but also that the job of the network engineer is becoming complex, thus increasing the overall workload.

This is especially true in mid-sized enterprises where new technologies which can save money but which are extremely complex, like virtualization, WAN optimization, and cloud computing are being implemented at a faster rate than either smaller enterprises or larger ones.

Well, if you don’t have enough manpower in your data center, there are three solutions I can think of off the top of my head. The first is to hire more people. This may not be feasible given current budgets.

The second is to decrease workload. In short, taking the approach that instead of trying to do “more with less,” that it’s okay to do “less with less.” Five nines of uptime give way to three nines, and applications previously handled in-house are outsourced to a cloud services provider. There are some disadvantages to doing things this way, of course.

The third is to find a way to decrease the complexity of your network – perhaps by using management tools that provide a broad overview of the network and how the applications are performing. The only downside there is that if you don’t use these tools correctly, instead of making the job easier, an additional manager could just end up increasing the complexity of the network that much more.

All three of these solutions have the possibility of being disruptive – at least in the short term – and monitoring your network for those disruptions is the quickest way to get to the root cause of them.

Though CA and CA|NetQoS are vendors of aforementioned management and monitoring tools, I’m pretty comfortable suggesting that if you can hire more people, that it might be a good idea to do that first, if you’re making decisions about where to spend the budget money. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

First, no diagnostic, monitoring, or management tool can replace a network engineer with a good head on his or her shoulders. All a tool can show you is where the problem lies; the engineer has to come up with the solution.

Second, if you have engineers who know what they’re doing, they’ll be the ones to suggest the tools that they need, rather than buying tools first and then trying to train engineers on the proper use of the tools chosen on their behalf. A good engineer with a mediocre management tool is better than a mediocre engineer with the best stuff in the world, after all.

(Not that we don’t want you to buy the best stuff in the world - which, if you haven’t guessed our particular bias, is our stuff…)

Harwell Thrasher, author of “Boiling the IT Frog: How to make your business information technology wildly successful without having to learn anything technical,” has a blog post out talking about how, during the current economic situation, which has gone beyond “depression” and towards “the pit of despair,” companies are making dangerous cuts to IT staff.

He compares it to an ice hockey tactic called “pulling the goalie,” in which a team is down by a goal in an important game, and they will swap out the goalie for a sixth offensive player in a desperate effort to score.  Doing so is within the rules but leaves the goal undefended.  For example, an IT department that cancels offsite backup recovery solutions, stopped updating virus prevention software, and laid off the only guy in the company who really understands how to maintain and support custom systems all lead to the possibility of a grave disaster that threatens to seriously harm the company.

But the metaphor is flawed.  Pulling the goalie in hockey may reduce defenses but it gives hockey teams a better shot of playing on the offense.  A lot of IT cuts seem to be not pulling the goalie – most companies at least know to keep their anti-virus software up to date – but they might not take network performance as seriously as they once did, and make reductions in IT without realizing that it can be a false savings.

That is, it is difficult – but not impossible – to determine the costs of letting a particular application, like, say PeopleSoft, experience a “brownout” – still technically “up,” but performing poorly.  Losing money in lost productivity or sales or customer satisfaction.  At that point, it’s a simple equation: did the money saved from the IT cost cover the productivity, lost revenue, or irritated customer? If the answer is “no,” then it’s clearly a case of false economy.

This is especially important considering that companies are starting to reconsider the “do more with less” mentality and are now thinking about “doing less with less.”  And indeed, this can be a viable tactic – if you can save money by going for three nines of uptime instead of five nines of uptime, it can be worth it if you only need three nines of uptime. 

Network performance requirements can be cut in the same way, sort of.  I mean, while it actually hurts me, emotionally, to suggest this, “the best” network performance isn’t always the most cost effective network performance.  So, for example, if you can save money by allowing some periods of congestion on the WAN, so long as that congestion never gets over an acceptable amount, then it might work.

The problem is finding out what’s “acceptable.”  This means baselining performance and understanding what kind of performance your business applications need.  It’s for this reason that cuts in IT should not include the network engineers that make those determinations, nor the (self-interest alert!) network monitoring solutions they depend on.  IT without the former is “pulling the goalie,” while IT without the latter is putting the goalie out there without a stick, protective gear, or skates. 

For a couple of years now, lobbyists for large copyright-holding businesses, most notably the music industry, have lobbied in multiple countries and jurisdictions for what they call the “three strikes” rule. Under the “three strikes” rule, if you are accused of infringing someone’s copyrights online three times, the ISP will be mandated to cut you off from the Internet. If you only have one ISP to choose from, you are effectively prohibited from accessing the Internet.

Note that it only takes three accusations. That is, not only is there a presumption of “guilty until proven innocent,” but the accused have no opportunity to prove themselves innocent. There are a number of ways that this can be abused, of course, beginning with silencing political dissent, silencing parody, silencing critics of companies, corporations, or cults, and just plain old meanspiritedness. What better way to get back at someone than to ban him from the Internet?

The U.K.’s Lord Mandelson, Privy Council, announced that the U.K.’s Labour party policy would be to implement this three strikes-rule as soon as Summer 2011. Because of the nature of the U.K.’s parliamentary system, where the executive is drawn from the legislature and there is very little party dissention compared to the U.S., it is likely to pass.

It may just be me, but I don’t think this is a good idea.

Already, companies, politicians, and organizations make accusations that are more or less baseless to get videos taken down from YouTube. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that they might decide it might be easier to ban critics from the Internet altogether. Both sides of the same-sex marriage debate, for example, were hit by this – the anti-gay marriage Stand for Marriage Maine had a takedown issued by NPR, for example. A separate anti-gay marriage group called “The National Organization for Marriage,” that tried to silence pro-gay marriage critics who posted audition videos for their anti-gay marriage ad, which undermined their position. You also had Ralph Lauren trying to censor criticism that their models were extremely Photoshopped, a parody of diamond ads getting a takedown from DeBeers, and the Warner Music Group not only putting out claims against YouTube videos that not only featured their recorded music, but people singing acapella renditions (including that famed video of the music of John Williams sung a capella,) and teenagers singing “Winter Wonderland.” For this reason, various Internet civil liberties groups, such as the EFF, come out against such legislation.

What’s interesting is that law enforcement agencies, such as MI-5 and the Metropolitan (London) Police’s e-crime unit, have also come out against this legislation. The reason is because since file-sharing accusations would have such harsh penalties, people would take action to make sure that they are never accused of file-sharing. That would mean that encrypting Internet information would not only become a more popular behavior, it may even become a default behavior. That increased encryption will increase the costs and workload for law enforcement agencies with legitimate reason to snoop on communications. Right now, encryption is mostly done by two groups. The first group is those of us in the computer fields who know enough about computer communication to be paranoid.

The second group are those who actually have something to hide, like say, violent criminals (as opposed to copyright infringers) or child pornographers (as opposed to legal but socially embarrassing “adult entertainment”). By increasing the penalties to include Internet disconnection, suddenly the general file-sharing public, the non-violent criminals start encrypting traffic as well.

Right now, encrypting your data makes you stick out like a sore thumb to law enforcement agencies, who can then get a warrant to decrypt that data if they think you’re about to pull something really naughty. But an increase in demand for encryption will result in simple ways to enable it. (Already, encrypted traffic is built into several BitTorrent clients.) With everyone using encryption, encrypted communication no longer sticks out. Then you have to start decrypting everybody’s data to find the “bad guys.” Law enforcement with regards to the Internet is sufficiently Orwellian as it is. When even MI5 balks, you know it’s bad.

But beyond that, it holds bad news for enterprise network engineers as well. If you know how to encrypt Internet traffic from your home computer, you also know how to encrypt Internet traffic from your work computer – and many will. Some may even think that they’re doing the company a favor by doing so – after all, encrypting the traffic protects it from corporate sabotage. Encryption of IP addresses, source/destination ports and payload information renders traditional traffic shaping and QoS policy less effective for dealing with network congestion.

Whatever your views on copyright infringement, this is a solution that creates more problems – and bigger problems – than it is supposed to solve. The only people who win, in this scenario, are those businesses who would benefit from sabotaged network performance.

As Halloween approaches, I’ve got a bit of a horror story to keep you up at night. 

There’s an interesting quote that’s somewhat appropriate now.  Well – song lyrics anyway.  “Did you feel you were tricked / by the future you picked?” Which, I’m told, are part of a Peter Gabriel tune for a Pixar movie, but which I only came across when reading speculative fiction about quantum AI computers running 419 scams.

The thing about the future is that by the time it gets here, it’s already the present. Wait, I’m sounding like Criswell there… what I mean to say is that only a couple years ago, the big story in technology was how IT departments were becoming centralized due to advances in virtualization technology that cut down on hardware requirements and power consumption.  Now the next level is cloud computing; an idea, fundamentally, that you can centralize data centers even further by centralizing them with the data centers for other companies via a third-party provider. 

Taken to an extreme, it’s easy to think of a day when even these cloud computing centers become even further consolidated – perhaps one on each inhabited continent.  “A world market for maybe five computers” indeed…

Except, it’s not quite that easy.  The transition from in-house architecture to cloud computing resources is just about as difficult as the transition from real servers to consolidated virtual ones, and the big problem is ensuring network performance – that data gets where it needs to go quickly.  

Much as the server consolidation/virtualization problem was helped with better virtualization technologies and advances in WAN optimization, the current rush in IT tool development is in the cloud computing area (not that we still don’t have a-ways to go with virtualization and consolidation).  And some of these cloud-computing tools are starting to appear – for example, self-managing environments…

One of the newest approaches is the concept of the "dynamic infrastructure." Rather than a simple collection of humming boxes or cards designed to push data this way or that, the dynamic infrastructure brings together virtual networking, automation and resource management with tools like application management, security and policy management to create a self-managing environment that can react to changes in workloads and other needs with minimal human interference.

Lori MacVittie, technical marketing management for application services at F5 Networks is one of the prime movers of the concept, which she says will be the inevitable result of the transition to the cloud. 

"When the entire data center is founded on a dynamic infrastructure, the infrastructure can react itself to changing network and application conditions and needs," she says. "When the entire ecosystem is sharing status and information about performance, every component can adjust itself dynamically to what’s needed now to improve performance or maintain availability. And it happens automatically, based on the specific needs of the business and IT."

Virtualization has underscored the need for performance management; back when everything was run on actual servers, you could almost always fix a problem by finding out where the bottleneck lied and increasing the amount of stuff.  Not always, but almost always.  But with virtualization, you’re essentially managing an interconnected ecosystem of stuff and… well, stuff that’s not stuff.  “Unstuff,” to borrow a bit of NewSpeak. 

And this management is so complex that it has increased the demand for network engineers, yes, but it’s also increased the demand for software to come along and replace the more tedious tasks of network engineers, automating the processes where possible.

But what if there is no upper limit?  What if self-managed cloud computing software is exactly that – with computers calculating exactly what needs to be done to preserve performance and then automatically fix it? 

And that network monitoring software…. WAS ME THE WHOLE TIME!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!! 

by Ben Erwin

NetFlow or NetFlow-esque technology (Jflow, Cflowd, NetStream, IPFIX, etc.) has been around the network management world for quite some time.  Thousands of IT shops worldwide leverage its capabilities to analyze traffic flowing across the network. 

Recently, some vendors have recently made somewhat misleading statements about NetFlow’s capabilities.  There are very good reasons why NetFlow is a de facto standard (and through IPFIX, soon to be an IETF standard).  Here are some quick reminders on why NetFlow is still the king:

• 100% visibility across all network links.   A common misconception about NetFlow is that it samples traffic.  Netflow exports every transaction it sees, and provides a full picture of what traffic is flowing across the network.  Now, it is true that sFlow samples traffic for flow export, but NetFlow exports every transaction it sees.


• Enabling at network aggregation points.   Instead of enabling NetFlow on every router, most NetFlow aficionados are able to enable NetFlow only on those aggregation routers that see the majority of network traffic.  This way, network managers can visualize their network traffic while not having to go overboard with router configuration. 


• Granularity versus TCO.  It’s true that NetFlow does not provide Application Layer (Layer 7) information.  But even so, remains the best bang for the buck for network visibility – yes, you could deploy probes all over the network to gain Layer 7 visibility – but there’s a significant opportunity cost in time and manpower for deployment, configuration, and ongoing monitoring, and the total cost of ownership for a probe solution for Layer 7 visibility simply isn’t worth it.  Many IT shops have dumped probes altogether and gone with NetFlow despite this limitation. 


• Free (if you use Cisco).  NetFlow is free on all Cisco routers.  All you have to do is enable it.  This makes it a very cost-effective solution compared to alternatives. 

These are all reasons why NetFlow will continue to be top dog for network visibility.  And while there are improvements to be made, certainly (there is no such thing as a “perfect” machine,) right now some of the best solutions for network visibility take advantage of the capabilities that NetFlow provides. 

*delivered really slowly.

The Washington Post has an article on a phenomenon that we’re all familiar with – that advertised broadband speeds don’t always match up to the actual performance that the end-user actually receives. 

Actual broadband speeds lag advertised speeds by as much as 50% to 80%.

So more than half the time, and sometimes as much as eight out of ten times, consumers are paying for slower Internet access speed than they signed up for.

Now, with congestion, infrequent outages, problems on the other end of the connection, and other vagaries of Internet performance, the fact that a customer’s effective Internet speed varies widely isn’t a surprise. 

What is a surprise is that companies do not monitor the performance of their own networks – or that they do, but give consumers bad data – either promoting a peak speed as the “speed” of the network, or promoting an impossible speed. 

Really, though, do you think it would hurt sales that much to re-label a “15mbps” offering as “7-15mbps?”  (Hmm, maybe it would, if the ISP can’t consistently deliver 7mbps.) 

"This speaks to consumer empowerment. And if you are advertising one speed but delivering another, that takes power away," Kelsey said. "Consumers can't make accurate decisions based on quality of service from one provider off another."

Now, there’s the truth in advertising approach – add qualifications, like a speed range, or parenthetical like 15mbps (during off-peak times) – but I think the “up to” disclaimer is good if there’s someplace – say, the order form for the service, or the company Web site where you sign up for the service – that explains exactly what your real performance is after you sign up, as well as the performance of the average customer at each speed.  Heck, you could even have one of those LED billboards like they have for state lotteries that show you how much that day’s jackpot is worth. 

We’ve talked before about how we believe that broadband caps are not a solution to the problem and would greatly degrade the overall network performance of the Internet.  That’s still true.  We’re especially suspicious of any sort of “gas gauge” that would tell customers how much they’ve downloaded – and nothing else.  But a true network performance monitoring solution, giving ISP customers true information that is actually relevant to their performance would be very welcome. 

Imagine, if you will, if you could go to your ISP’s web page, log in, and get this information:

• Your average Internet Speed over the past two weeks is X/down, Y/up.


• Peak Congestion Times are X:00am to Y:00pm


• X% of your Internet usage occurs during peak times.


• Your average Internet Speed during peak times is X/down, Y/up.


• Your average Internet Speed during off-peak times is X/down, Y/up


• At that average speed, you can video at Xmbps.  This is (low/medium/high) quality for standard definition and (low/medium/high) quality for high definition video.


• Your latency is Xms round trip to our servers. You can expect (low/medium/high) quality for voice calls and video chat, and (low/medium/high) quality for computer gaming.


• Recommendations for improving your Internet Experience:




• Try to watch streaming video during off-peak times, or set your computer to download the video during off-peak times instead. 


• Set peer-to-peer programs to use less bandwidth during peak hours.


• Try to find gaming servers located closer to your geographic location to cut down on lag.


• We noticed a number of anomalous behaviors these past two weeks.  Please check your system for malware and viruses.

That’s not “techie” information – it’s all information the end-user can use, and it lets the user know exactly what they’re paying for. 

Virtualization is a good news/bad news technology. The good news is that you can consolidate your servers onto one piece of hardware, but the bad news is that you lose visibility into the overall network. Jim Metzler, of Ashton, Metzler & Associates, and Ben Erwin of NetQoS discuss how to preserve visibility into application delivery in this short Whiteboard Series Video

The FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski presented a speech to the Brookings Institution, the centrist think tank this morning, supporting FCC intervention to preserve Net Neutrality.

I’m going to quote a whole bunch from the speech, but you really should see it or read it yourself [PDF], as it’s interesting for those of us interested in the Net Neutrality issue. In fact, it’s a pretty decisive turning point.

“Notwithstanding its unparalleled record of success, today the free and open Internet faces emerging and substantial challenges. We’ve already seen some clear examples of deviations from the Internet’s historic openness. We have witnessed certain broadband providers unilaterally block access to VoIP applications (phone calls delivered over data networks) and implement technical measures that degrade the performance of peer-to-peer software distributing lawful content. We have even seen at least one service provider deny users access to political content.

This is particularly important to companies that have any sort of “work at home” or “work on the road” users using residential broadband connections in order to get their work done – telecommuters and “telepresencers” – to have video meetings with co-workers and clients.

This is also especially important for on the road workers, whose service providers change daily (or even more frequently.) It is bad enough for a salesperson to worry about whether hotel X’s broadband has enough “oomph” to be able to access Web-based applications without undue delay (and indeed, hotel reservations have been made or cancelled based on the availability of broadband.) It’s another thing entirely to be assured of broadband power but find that the hotel’s service provider has blocked or degraded that particular application – something one is not likely to find out until after you check in and try to log on.

And as many members of the Internet community and key Congressional leaders have noted, there are compelling reasons to be concerned about the future of openness.

One reason has to do with limited competition among service providers. As American consumers make the shift from dial-up to broadband, their choice of providers has narrowed substantially. I don’t intend that remark as a policy conclusion or criticism -- it is simply a fact about today’s marketplace that we must acknowledge and incorporate into our policymaking.

A second reason involves the economic incentives of broadband providers. The great majority of companies that operate our nation’s broadband pipes rely upon revenue from selling phone service, cable TV subscriptions, or both. These services increasingly compete with voice and video products provided over the Internet. The net result is that broadband providers’ rational bottom-line interests may diverge from the broad interests of consumers in competition and choice.

AT&T sells phone service and television and Internet, Time Warner sells television and phone service and Internet, Starbucks sells coffee and wireless Internet, which is important considering all those RFC 2324 (HTCPCP/IP) connections. The theory behind regulation is that it will prevent unavoidable conflicts of interest from affecting Internet service.

The third reason involves the explosion of traffic on the Internet. With the growing popularity of high-bandwidth applications, Internet traffic is roughly doubling every two years.

Indeed.

Technologies for managing broadband networks have become more sophisticated and widely deployed. But these technologies are just tools. They cannot by themselves determine the right answers to difficult policy questions -- and they raise their own set of new questions.

For example, deep packet inspection and traffic shaping are highly effective, very powerful tools that can manage broadband networks and preserve the performance of some applications while degrading others. The “difficult policy questions” Genachowski is probably referring to boils down to: “Which applications are preserved and which are degraded, and who gets to decide the answer to that question?” The answer to the latter half, apparently, is the FCC, which is the point of the speech:

In view of these challenges and opportunities, and because it is vital that the Internet continue to be an engine of innovation, economic growth, competition and democratic engagement, I believe the FCC must be a smart cop on the beat preserving a free and open Internet.

One of the other interesting things to take away from the speech is that the FCC is not opposed to specialized, non-neutral Internet service providers designed to cater specifically to individual market segments. If a company were to pop up promising optimization of business-critical cloud computing applications – that would be fine, according to Genachowski’s speech, but that this should only be a supplement, not a replacement, for general purpose broadband Internet.

I also recognize that there may be benefits to innovation and investment of broadband providers offering managed services in limited circumstances. These services are different than traditional broadband Internet access, and some have argued they should be analyzed under a different framework. I believe such services can supplement -- but must not supplant -- free and open Internet access…

The big thing, of course, to take away from the speech is what policy changes the FCC will bring forward. Essentially, Genachowski announced that the “Four Freedoms” articulated by former chairman Michael Powell in 2004 as principles he proposes as enforceable Commission rules, along with two other, additional principles. So the policy of the FCC towards Network Neutrality is:

• Network Operators cannot prevent users from accessing lawful Internet content, applications, and services of their choice.
• Network Operators cannot prohibit users from attaching non-harmful devices to the network.
• (New) - Broadband providers cannot degrade or discriminate lawful traffic over their networks, nor disfavor an Internet service just because it competes with a similar service offered by that provider.
• (New) - Broadband providers must be transparent about network management practices.

There are some caveats, and the FCC will make determinations on a case-by-case basis – in the speech, Genachowski mentioned that “during periods of network congestion, it may be appropriate for providers to ensure that very heavy users do not crowd out everyone else.”

Genachowski also mentioned the possibility of “supplemental” non-neutral managed Internet services (for example, an Internet provider which focuses on cloud computing applications, and degrades everything else to ensure good application performance,) but maintained that these should not be a replacement for general purpose Internet access.

As for the transparency policy, it makes sense. In addition to giving consumers the confidence of knowing that they’re getting the service levels that they paid for, it will allow companies that use cloud applications to gauge whether a particular Internet service is adequate for their needs, in markets with multiple services, it allows one to make informed choices when deciding which service to use, and will help cloud application developers determine whether there is enough broadband infrastructure to develop new features in their products.

(Ed. Note: Here, we have to make clear that NetQoS, and proposed acquiring company CA, makes network monitoring and management solutions that would likely be placed in higher demand if traffic reporting becomes required by the FCC.)

Finally, Genachowski made clear that the policies are designed to curb problems that they are already seeing, not to curb possible problems that non-neutral networks would pose.

“This is not about protecting the Internet against imaginary dangers. We’re seeing the breaks and cracks emerge, and they threaten to change the Internet’s fundamental architecture of openness. This would shrink opportunities for innovators, content creators, and small businesses around the country, and limit the full and free expression the Internet promises. This is about preserving and maintaining something profoundly successful and ensuring that it’s not distorted or undermined. If we wait too long to preserve a free and open Internet, it will be too late.”

WAN Optimization solutions – assuming that they work for the applications you need them to work for – are like magic. Consolidating data centers, from a relativistic standpoint, actually moves users further away, so to consolidate data centers, and lowering costs, WAN performance needs to be good enough for the remote users to do their jobs.

But the irony is that as data centers are becoming more consolidated, users are becoming less consolidated. More people are telecommuting than ever before. (Even if the number of full-time telecommuters has gone down, part-time telecommuters rise). It makes a certain amount of sense – an employee too sick to come into work (and infect others) but not too sick to actually work might file some work from home, or sales teams might file reports from the road.

This creates a problem for most WAN Optimization solutions because most solutions require appliances at both ends of the WAN link. Telecommuters are usually accessing the applications from the public Internet. Software-based WAN optimization controllers (“Soft WOCs”) can do some of the work, but telecommuting requires high-performing broadband as well as optimization solutions.

The way that Soft WOCs work, is essentially to recreate a lightweight version of the client that normally sits at the remote end of the optimized WAN link in the software on the mobile computer. The Soft WOC then optimizes the stream between the telecommuter’s computer and the data center.

The problem is that WAN optimization is less efficient when you have a single user than when you have multiple users on the same stream. First, having multiple users accessing the same data means you can take advantage of caching. Caching is only useful on a Soft WOC link if the same user accesses the same data twice.

Secondly, in a normal optimized WAN link, there is only one TCP stream to worry about – the optimized one, with individual streams recreated only at the two ends of the transaction. Each SoftWOC essentially creates its own stream. For that reason, telecommuting solutions simply aren’t going to give you the same dramatic increase in performance you’d get from more traditional WAN Optimization.

On the other hand, any improvement is still improvement. Just be sure to baseline your performance and see if the value is there before deploying Soft WOC solutions.

Monitoring your network is crucial to maintaining your network; but the two are obviously not the same. You can have all the data, have it presented in an easy to understand format, run report after report, and it won’t matter if, at the end of the day, the person whose job it is to interpret the data misinterprets it.

If you look for the wrong things – for example, if you’re still primarily concerned with availability rather than latency – you can miss the most important details and come to the wrong conclusions about your network.

It reminds me of this guy, who has analyzed the Mars Rover photos on the JPL Journal Web site, and believes that there is a vast conspiracy at NASA to trample tiny humans (about 5cm in height) under the wheels of the Mars Rover.

“Next three images shows [sic] typical areas on Mars where three sizes of humans and primates live a symbiotic lifestyle. Strangely, the primates appear to be sentient…”

“Next is the Tiny humans [sic] attempt to disable a Mars Rover. The reason; it is the machine that has cause numerous deaths among the smallest Humans who cannot detect or hear the Rover coming.”

“***Warning next 5 images show scenes of death by crushing.*** Americans have Constitutional rights to know this information I have discovered from public posted JPL images…. The second image is gruesome. It shows the Rover has driven through a thickly populated tiny human’s area, killing a great number of them…. We are not at war with them. Someone will answer for these deaths.”

The photos, obviously, contains blurry images of rock formations and dirt, the silhouettes of which may look vaguely human-like in a Rorschach-ian way. Personally, I don’t even think they look vaguely human.

I bring this up because it reminds me of the idea that network data can often be an ink blot test of sorts; if someone’s looking only for availability, they’re simply not going to see the problems that are caused by poorly performing (but still available) applications.