Can Hulu, Twitter and porn destroy Wall Street?

P2P traffic uses the most bandwidth

Policing the internet

Shutting down websites

(NaturalNews) The US government has issued a new report that recommends blocking access to popular websites during a pandemic outbreak in order to preserve internet bandwidth for investors, day traders and securities clearing house operations. The concern is that a pandemic would cause too many people to stay at home and download YouTube videos and porn, hogging all the internet bandwidth and blocking throughput for investment activities, thereby causing a stock market meltdown.This isn't an April Fool's joke. It's all based on a public report issued by the Government Accounting Office (GAO), available from their website at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d108.pdf In this article, I'm going to explain how a pandemic outbreak could theoretically bring down Wall Street. But to get to that, you'll first need to find out what the GAO said in its curious report (see below). Parts of this article are presented as satire, but the underlying facts quoted here are all true and verifiable (links are provided to all sources).This report in question is entitled, "GAO, INFLUENZA PANDEMIC" and includes this subtitle:As the report explains:To translate this concern of the GAO, what they're saying is that if too many people stay home and use the internet, Wall Street might not be able to function smoothly. Therefore, in order to protect Wall Street (because as you know, our government does everything possible to bail out Wall Street), the feds might need to shut down some popular websites.But where, exactly, is all the bandwidth usage really coming from? Twitter uses virtually no bandwidth, given that it's a short, text-based messaging service. Text articles also don't use up much bandwidth. In terms of clogging the internet's "series of tubes" (to use a hilarious term coined by a U.S. Senator), the real culprits are. While a Twitter text message might be less than 1k in size, a typical video is 350MB, or roughlythan a Twitter message.So where, exactly, are people getting video downloads? The most popular non-porn video destinations today are MySpaceTV.com, YouTube.com, LiveLeak.com, Yahoo Video and Hulu.com. But as it turns out, even these highly popular websites may not account for most internet traffic.According to this TechRepublic post ( http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-news/... ), the majority of internet traffic is actually. Anywhere from 49 to 89 percent of all internet traffic reportedly falls into this category.P2P traffic means "peer to peer." It's file-sharing traffic happening between two "peered" computers rather than from one central server to many individual computers. YouTube, for example, is a centralized video site that serves videos directly to millions of computers. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand ( www.ThePirateBay.org ) is a site that lists links to peer-to-peer sharing files so that individual computer users can share files amongst each other, bypassing centralized websites or file servers.Peer-to-peer traffic carries the latest movies, music albums, television shows, ebooks, podcasts, graphic novels and even... yes... porn . A search on The Pirate Bay today shows downloads for(350MB), the new Bruce Willis movie(700MB) and even a bootleg version of the new Windows 7 operating system (3.5GB). These files are obviously not small. When peered computers share these files, it requires a tremendous amount of bandwidth.Porn represents a sizable percentage of all P2P traffic. Although "official" statistics were difficult to find, according to TopTenReviews.com ( http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.... ), internet pornography revenues in the U.S. were $2.8 billion (2006). There are 4.2 million porn websites on the 'net, and 25% of all search engine requests are porn-related. Importantly, this page claims thatWhere am I going with all this? Well, if you consider that roughly 50% of all internet traffic is P2P, and that roughly one-third of all P2P traffic is porn, then it quickly becomes obvious that if the GAO's pandemic clogging of the internet becomes a reality,What this also means, however, is that cutting off access to specific websites (like YouTube) will likely do very little to free up internet bandwidth. To have any real impact on reducing bandwidth usage, the U.S. government would need to run public service ads begging internet users toThe problem with that approach is that people who pirate porn are probably not the kind of people who obediently follow the advice of the feds.When it comes to saving Wall Street during a pandemic, the feds will stop at nothing. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) pulls out all the stops to make sure America's legalized financial gambling centers (Wall Street) keep on churning out the scams. This requires protecting the critical infrastructure of Wall Street.As the GAO report explains:The internet will be critical during a pandemic, the report goes on to say, because it will be an important vehicle for the government to distribute messages to the public (such as "Go get your vaccines..." or "Report to the nearest quarantine center"). It will also be important because millions of people might need to continue their work at home rather than showing up at the office and sneezing all over their coworkers.The solutions, says the GAO, is to tell companies to send workers home and hope they get something done there: "Furthermore, the government has recommended teleworking as an option for businesses to keep operations running during a pandemic."This part of the GAO report is particularly hilarious because, as every employer knows, when you give employees the ability to work from home, many of them spend the day at home goofing off andIt's true: Most internet porn surfing activity occurs(9 to 5), and all those corporate porn filters that people have at work don't exist on their home computers. By sending employees home, companies will only be adding to the congestion of the internet, creating an even larger problem for Wall Streeters who are trying to extort yet more taxpayer dollars from the federal government to cover their failed investment gambles.Now here's the kicker in all this: "According to a DHS study and Internet providers, this additional pandemic-related traffic is likely to exceed the capacity of Internet providers' network infrastructure in metropolitan residential Internet access networks. ...During a pandemic, congestion is most likely to occur in the traffic to or from the aggregation devices that serve residential neighborhoods, interfering with teleworkers' and others' ability to use the Internet."In other words, all that pandemic porn downloading will bring the internet to its knees. The internet really begins to get jammed up at the "40% absenteeism" level, according to a 2007 DHS study mentioned in this GAO report: "The study's model predicted that at the 40 percent absenteeism level -- the level that health organizations have indicated is likely under a relatively serious pandemic -- the highest point of congestion across the entire Internet infrastructure could occur within residential Internet access networks."Unfortunately for Wall Street, there is no way for anyone to tell the difference between the traffic of a porn downloader vs. the traffic of a Wall Street day trader. On the internet, all packets are (nearly) the same priority. So there's no simple way to prioritize traffic from some users ("important" Wall Street people) over other users. That means "porn packets" can't simply be rejected in favor of "Wall Street packets."Even the GAO concedes that shutting down specific websites is a strategy fraught with problems, including potential lawsuits, technology limitations and the fact that blocking a few websites probably wouldn't result in much of an overall reduction in traffic anyway:A better solution, it seems, would be to just urge people to stop using so much bandwidth. As this GAO report suggests, "...entities in these sectors consider advising employees to limit household use of streaming video or other bandwidth-intensive Internet activities."And that, of course, takes us back to those public service announcements: Please stop downloading porn, you people! You're sucking up all the bandwidth and interfering with the important business of Wall Street ripping off America!This brings me to the bizarre conclusion of this story: If a pandemic actually does result in a 40% absenteeism rate, and companies send people to work from home, and all public sporting events get cancelled, and people are sitting around on their home computers with nothing to do,by interfering with securities trades.More importantly,. "Porn terrorists" could leap on this pandemic-inspired internet vulnerability to cripple Wall Street by flooding the internet with pornographic digital bits that squeeze out all other traffic, causing financial trades to grind to a halt. And this, in turn, could conceivably wreck the entire U.S. economy because, as we already know, the whole thing is being held together by the most fragile accounting illusions. One big blip in the system, and the whole corrupt, dishonest Wall Street scam comes train-wrecking down.And that, my friends, is the bizarre truth of how pornography combined with a pandemic might bring down Wall Street.GAO report:Reuters: