Keeping Online Even During Wars
HAVING previously worked (for over a decade) on monitoring of undersea cables and having just mentioned the situation in the Baltic Sea (where patrols and surveillance of deepwater assets increased a lot lately), let's just revisit the key takeaways.
First, as we mentioned before, the Internet is still quite robust because even without cables on the seabed we have satellite communication, albeit it lacks bandwidth and reliability (high latency, small throughput, capacity limits and other limitations/constraints under particular conditions). The 'Net' - like an organism - will pursue alternative (contingent) routes for all packets; so a complete nationwide disconnection is unlikely unless the ISPs all work for some dictator or the Net infrastructure is poor (or controlled by some dictator in another country). Ask Georgia, Syria, and Egypt.
In Western countries, the main impact of cable cuts (vandalism, not accidents; we already see acts of war or vandalism verified) is slower connections.
What to do about this? Make your Web site lighter. A lot lighter. The lighter, the better.
Second, consider single point of failure-type perils. If the data centre got nuked, can (or would) you host from another place at short notice (backups aside)? By just swapping IP addresses or changing DNS records? Does that scale with a bloated CMS and databases at the back end? If a determined and well-funded APT targeted your site with cracking attempts or DDoS attacks, can you cope and withstand the attacks? If not, maybe the design was short-sighted or made a presumption of peaceful times. What if your article is seen about 100,000 times, so people start attacking you and your family? Are you ready to cope with "hybrid" war on your webhost, your finances, your technical stack and so on? Because yes, that can happen. And the better you do, the bigger a target you become.
As this new talk from CCC put it, "lawsuits are temporary, glory is forever, [so] go public."
Yes, we've always been transparent about what we do, it's just a matter of when, not if.
Running two sites for a total number of 40+ years (my personal site and this site combined or the sister site and this one combined) requires care and planning. Now that we see the Web being drowned/flooded by LLM slop and LLM harvesters - set aside attacks on crucial Net cables - we've adjusted accordingly. Bandwidth, CPU, and RAM usage are considerably lowered. Pages take like a tenth of a second to load: (from here)
From a legal perspective, we're well protected and shielded. From a social engineering perspective, we've engaged the police to take care of the culprits. We'll be fine even if many undersea cables get cut. █