The reason why you cannot reach a specific web site at any given time can be very simple. Server and hosting issues, maintenance or the plain fact that a site has been discontinued are the most likely explanations why a site just won’t load. But there is another, more mysterious possibility: Black holes. A team at the University of Washington (UW) has begun mapping scenarios where information packets on the Internet simply disappear.
"There's an assumption that if you have a working Internet connection then you have access to all of the Internet," said Ethan Katz-Bassett, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering. "We found that's not the case."
Katz-Bassett has been working on a project called Hubble, a system that apparently is able to track what he refers to as information black holes. These are situations where a path between two computers does exist, but messages - a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing e-mail - get lost along the way. Katz-Bassett has published a Hubble map that enables users to monitor such black holes worldwide or simply type in a network address to check its status.
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