The Nature of the Beast

Abstract

Professor Olav Lysne is on vacation – which means living without a computer network connection at his holiday cottage outside Fredrikstad in southeast Norway. Because a computer network is work. Not only in the shape of emails, online news sites and other digital temptations – we are talking about the network itself – the myriad of mainframes, masts, copper wires and routers. That is the area of expertise to which the professor is devoted. For what do we really know about the network’s architecture? A lot less than we think. We have created a beast, whose full extent we cannot see and which we have made ourselves dependent on. And this is precisely where Professor Lysne’s research project begins. How does this beast behave? And – not least – how can we make network access more robust, given the beast’s many unpredictable quirks and caprices? It is certainly no easy matter to obtain a complete overview of the beast’s internal organs, for they are governed in large measure by politics and trade secrets.