alt Hacker NewsNever tapped a port, eh?
Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.
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the time it takes for light to travel from los angeles to virginia is 12 - 16 ms, round trip is 30ms lets say - that is a noticeable delay, and it could be easily disproven that 80% of traffic is literally routed through VA
now.. could they just copy the traffic and send it to VA on a side channel? probably?
The point they were making was that you could tell via ping times if the traffic was literally being routed through VA unnecessarily because the extra unavoidable light speed delay that extra distance would add between a user and the server if they weren't already very near to VA. Could be mirrored via the type of monitoring you're talking about but that'd only get you mostly encrypted traffic unless the 90s cypherpunk paranoia turns out to have been true.
But you are only tapping your own data that's already passing by you not? Not 80% of the internet that has nothing to do with you.
> Never tapped a port, eh?
I have. I have a background in high speed networking.
Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much infrastructure would be required to send 80% of data on the internet across the country and into a single datacenter in Virginia?
If you've worked in HFT, you can probably at least start to imagine the scale we're talking about.