09.28.22
Gemini version available ♊︎The Internet is Under Growing Threat of Being Cut Off (at Least Partially)
Video download link | md5sum c79e812751929dd567f0d89d7ad2d2cd
False Assumption Internet is Persistent
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: War and conflict being escalated means that cables which connect continents are at threat of being severed without anyone being detected as accountable for it (this is incredibly difficult when dealing with cables that long), knowing how disruptive such an action would be as we’ve come to assume that the Internet is just “always there”
THE “splinter-net” or “killswitch” for the Internet (the US has the “master key” and Microsoft puts killswitches in many products, e.g. [1, 2, 3]) is not the subject of today’s video. Sure, the root DNS system is vital, any government can take down the Net (many already do, at least temporarily), and Russia has been blocking many sites lately.
But what about technical sabotage/vandalism? How about an attack on infrastructure such as underwater cables. In Ukraine, Russia has already targeted communication facilities, but it’s almost unheard of for a nation state to cut an underwater cable to disconnect another country. The NSA cut off the Internet of Syria, but this was done by remote technical means and, according to Edward Snowden, by accident.
A very big news story today is yesterday’s “cutting of NS1 & 2″ (energy pipeline from Russia to EU). To borrow an associate’s framing of it…
We are assuming it is possible that some time in the future access to a lot of the Net, Techrights and Tux Machines included, will be cut.
“In case of major, worldwide disruptions to the Internet, IPFS is… becoming interesting.”As things escalate it becomes less far fetched or unthinkable.
We’ve been trying to “revisit bandwidth and Web page bloat” (this site too will change later this year), as “there are no small pages any more, nor much of any server-side activity, despite some countries still requiring small pages as part of defence readiness,” to quote the associate.
My own thoughts are in the video above. In case of major, worldwide disruptions to the Internet, IPFS is… becoming interesting. It’s a lot like P2P, which was in some sense the raison d’être of the Internet (during Cold War it needed to be made robust to strategic, “tactical” nuclear strikes). █
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